An article by Jeff Sexton in GrokDotCom indicates that customer reviews – even negative reviews – can increase conversion rates. This is basically because customer reviews give the sales copy more credibility and negative reviews, in particular, give credibility to the customer reviews themselves.

That’s easier said than done, though. Do you really see yourself placing a negative review of your product or service on your sales page?

Jeff Sexton suggests, however, that if people can find negative reviews of your product elsewhere – e.g. on other review sites, blogs, Twitter or other social media sites – then having a webpage full of glowing reviews and not one negative review will probably undermine your credibility and therefore conversions.

Moreover, Jeff makes the point that, nowadays, you don’t own the perception of your company, product or brand… if anyone owns it, it’s ‘Google’ i.e. the various means by which others find out about your goods and services. So if you eliminate negative reviews from your website… but they’re readily available elsewhere… you end up losing the trust of your prospects.

This may not be such an issue if there aren’t many negative reviews of your own business or products or services elsewhere, but imagine that you’re an affiliate who promotes lots of relatively well-known products.

As tempting as it may be to just post positive reviews on your site… you might find that posting the bad along with good actually enhances the value proposition you provide to your prospects in your guise as an affiliate. Indeed, you might find that people prefer buying through you rather than other affiliates simply because you appear to be more open and honest.

Source: Jeff Sexton, “You Can’t Edit Your Way Out of Negative Reviews,” GrokDotCom, May 6th, 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Conversion, Kikabink Lab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.