by Claudia Bruemmer

Retailers, as well as wholesalers of general merchandise, can increase sales by exploiting the power of customer product reviews. Besides using positive reviews as online testimonials, customer-generated content can be included in email messages, videos, and can even be used for company-wide planning. Marketers can capitalize on upbeat reviews for influencing existing and potential customers on the web and through email marketing.

Word-of-mouth is golden and is a proven way to generate sales. When a buyer gives the thumbs-up for a product or service, that endorsement carries more credibility than anything merchants can conjure up themselves. It’s no wonder, then, that positive customer reviews are so valuable for creating buzz online and offline. Due to the Internet’s power of global distribution in real time, consumer-generated, online content is distributed more widely and rapidly than verbal word-of-mouth.

In addition to being an effective means of increasing conversions for favorably-reviewed products, customer reviews on ecommerce sites offer many benefits for retailers and other businesses. Web merchants can leverage consumer-generated content in email, catalogs, brochures and in-store signage. Large companies can even use customer reviews about their brand and/or products for company-wide planning in merchandising, marketing, inventory management and supply chain management.

Customer reviews have been proliferating in ecommerce for years. Amazon pioneered customer reviews when it first started selling books. Research shows that shoppers who navigate to pages with products highly-rated in customer reviews will convert at a 50 percent higher rate than shoppers on other pages without customer-review content.

Many large merchants use vendors such as Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews to support their online customer reviews. Ratings and reviews management solutions can be installed by merchants in-house or outsourced to a customer reviews management vendor. Retailers looking for an outsourced solution find that the investment can range from $2,000 a month to over $100,000 a year, depending on page views, expected review volume and whether the merchant buys optional add-on services such as photo or video review functionality.

The influence of online customer reviews is not limited to online sales from the website. When marketers include positive customer-generated content in email marketing, they usually get a click-through rate five times higher than usual. In fact, it is well-known that consumers value the opinion of fellow consumers far more than promotional material created by marketing professionals.

Website Sales Lift. Many retailers with a year or more of experience with ratings and reviews can point to a lift in sales of reviewed products as a result. Research on approximately 20,000 customer reviews (University of Nebraska, 2007) shows a strong correlation between consumers that read online reviews and consumers that subsequently made a purchase, as the reviewed products experienced a 26 percent lift in sales.

Email Marketing Sales Lift. Email was the first off-site area where marketers used online customer reviews to as part of the marketing message. The performance of email marketing campaigns containing customer ratings and reviews were compared against campaigns without reviews. Results showed that the messages containing reviews produced an average order value that was 10.4 percent higher than email messages without customer reviews. Consumers who opened email messages containing review content viewed 7.48 percent more pages on the landing page, and the average sale per visitor was 11.46 percent higher than those who opened messages without review content.

Conclusion. It is good marketing to harness the power of customer reviews on your website, whether you are a retailer or a wholesaler of general merchandise. You can increase sales by soliciting customer reviews on your website, using the consumer-generated content in online testimonials, email marketing campaigns and online videos.