How To Get Customers To Contribute Reviews
By Anna Johnson on April 18th, 2009Should you offer incentives to encourage customers to provide product and service reviews on your website?
An example of a company that has successfully used incentives to generate customer reviews is ValuePetSupplies.com. In just 10 days it got 1,000 reviews on its site by emailing previous customers and asking them to contribute reviews.
The incentive? A prize draw for a Visa gift card and a discount voucher for the customer’s next purchase.
Apart from offering incentives, BizReport’s Helen Leggatt recommends keeping review pages full of fresh content and continuing to encourage customers to voluntarily provide reviews. Some ways to do this may be via the various ‘touch points’ at your disposal, such as your order confirmation emails, in a periodic newsletter, or in packaging.
Despite the power of incentives, BizReport’s Helen Leggatt says that, based on a recent study by BazaarVoice, over 90 percent of people generally contribute reviews to help others rather than to obtain some kind of reward.
If you consider the site that, if not pioneered, certainly demonstrated the power of customer reviews – Amazon.com – its ability to generate reviews all began on the strength of encouraging customers to have their say and to help others.
So while offering incentives might be a good way to entice customers to provide reviews at first, getting them to come back and do so again may rely more on how you emphasize the intrinsic rewards of doing so.
Source: Helen Leggatt, “Encourage customers to contribute reviews,” BizReport, April 15, 2009
