Customer reviews can have an outsized impact on the perception of your brand. Bad reviews, if steps aren’t taken to correct them, draw hundreds of eyes and make potential new customers uneasy about the customer experience you offer.
A good review, however, can be showcased, having the opposite effect of intriguing new users as well as increasing confidence and satisfaction amongst your existing base.
This guide to review excellence will outline 12 examples of how brands successfully upped their review-game, making sure that positive, accurate feedback is the most visible.
Let’s quickly touch on what great product review management can impact your brands success, then move on to our examples. Click through to the section you find most relevant.
- Product Reviews Importance
- Product Reviews Examples
- Takeaways
Product Reviews Importance
A customer review is a negative, positive, or neutral opinion that a customer leaves about a product or service. The best examples of customer reviews reveal the sentiment, aka feeling, the customer had about the totality of their interaction with your brand.
Now, exactly how important are customer reviews to success? Let’s throw a couple stats up on the board.
Right of the bat, it’s clear that viewing reviews before purchasing is a ubiquitous process – everyone’s doing it with 97% of consumers saying reviews influenced their buying process.
The next natural question is how badly ‘good’ reviews reflect on sales versus ‘bad’. Well, the same study that found the above stat dug up some interesting results to that end: 94% of customers said they would do business with a four-star reviewed brand, while only 57% said they would with a three-starred brand.
That’s a big drop off, and belies exactly how crucial maintaining a best-possible online review presence can be. But there’s no reason to fret – many brands have found ways to employ innovative techniques to ensure they are well reviewed. Let’s look at some examples of this kind of success.
Product Reviews Examples
1. Amazon: Star ratings and comments on product page
Amazon’s execution of becoming the one-stop-shop for all goods online has been multi-pronged. You could point to their two-day guaranteed shipping for members. But, reviews wise, they have adopted a novel modality – they openly display star ratings and comments on each product page.
Putting all that information right at the consumers’ fingertips might seem like it would deter some purchases due to low-star reviews. However, this isn’t the case.
Because Amazon is so large and can host so many competitors, all this information actually encourages greater purchase rates because consumers can make an educated purchase because they can compare star-average, price point, and reviews easily all on the same site.
If your product is listed on Amazon it is wise to keep this in mind and be responsive to feedback in order to maintain and grow your customer base.
2. Figma: Retweeting customer tips
Figma treats its customers like creators, and is rewarded with increased brand loyalty and a lack of customer churn.
By employing a proactive social media team that will retweet customer content, as you can see in the image above, they are able to increase customer satisfaction not just for the one customer retweeted, but by all customers (and potential customers) who see the post.
Developing a personal brand-to-customer relationship shows that you care and potential customers are going to look upon you more favorably. Clearly it pays to be nice in public, but make sure to apply the same principle with your service teams on private calls so you maintain a cohesive, caring brand voice.
3. Gong: ‘Golden Gong’ awards
The ‘Golden Gong’ awards are a number of awards, each under a different category, that they award to their clients.
For instance, Gong has an award called ‘The Strategist’, which they describe as the:
“Best Gong for Markets Story: Being able to hear the unfiltered voice of your market is one of the most powerful benefits of Gong. This award will go to the best story of how a team was able to guarantee success when rolling out a new initiative. Let us know how you did it.”
By creating their own awards that they fete on their own clients, Gong has cleverly created their own self-sustaining ecosystem for success. The clients that win can brag about it on their respective business website, as can Gong. By awarding them yearly, they ensure that this progress keeps on going and competition drives a wider field of satisfied clients.
4. HelloFresh: Customer quotes
As you can see in the above sample of Hellofresh’s landing page, they pick out positive customer reviews, ask the customers if they don’t mind being featured, then display them.
This is a basic technique that almost any brand with a web presence can utilize. The devil is in the details, though – make sure you ask permission, and maybe even incentivize the customers you ask. You don’t want to come across as too pushy or inconsiderate of their privacy – as you can see in the above sample, for instance, some customers may not want their last names mentioned
5. MonkeyLearn: Customer stories
At Monkeylearn, we have an entire page dedicated to showing off customers who have had success with our product. We call each different story a ‘case study’ and interview a company ambassador in depth so that we can explain the details.
We hope that with detailed customer stories, potential customers will be able to get concrete answers to how our products work and how it might apply to them. Click here to check out all our stories (also pictured below).
6. Louis Vuitton: Brand ambassadors
Like it or not, fame sells. That’s how the market works alongside models and instagram influencers – if you can get a name attached to your brand, it will catch eyes.
Whether it’s genuine celebrities or instagram personalities, having known persons with significant followings endorse your brand can make a big difference in customer sentiment.
Luckily, the same principle can be applied across the board – known and/or respected tech personalities can boost tech brands so on and so forth. It’s all about finding the right ambassador for you.
7. Harrys: Referral discounts
Referral discounts have been growing in popularity with the rise of made-to-order and food delivery apps, but Harry’s provides us an example in the body care space.
Harry’s not only provides an example, it opens the door for referral sales to span across industries. Even better, business to business companies can innovate and apply this to their products/services at scale – instead of a 5$ referral bonus they could offer a larger sum to bring another big brand on board.
8. Sephora: Customer community
Sephora, again and again, has proven its ability to generate positive sentiment by virtue of the intuitive and active customer communities it has created.
Sephora offers an overwhelming number of sub-communities all designed to encourage discourse amongst people with different skin types – from ‘K-Beauty’ to ‘Fragrance Fans’ to ‘Dry Skin’.
It feels good to be amongst company, and customers can then troubleshoot amongst themselves and recommend best practices to each other. Furthermore, the sense of community engenders loyalty – people like to belong and offering space for interaction within your brand allows this.
8. Keeps: Before-and-after images
Keeps is primarily a hair treatment brand for men. Baldness is unavoidable for a huge amount of adult males, and providing a safe option to combat baldness before it is too late is already an enticing offer.
Now, we have all seen before-and-after images on late night TV or in magazines that are hard to believe (or even worse, seem manipulated). This is the number one no go for leveraging these kind of images as positive reviews.
Keeps, on the other hand, much like HelloFresh and Monkeylearn, offers a page of honest testimonials, complete with before-and-after, written reviews, and in-depth videos made by their own customers to explain what the product has been able to do for them.
This is excellent in review form. They are offering the best-possible customer reviews in male cosmetics, which has become a crowded industry. This demonstrates great customer experience management aptly applied to drive loyalty and future growth.
9. Blue Bottle: Customer images in Instagram
It can, and should, be argued that endorsements from your own customers are more relatable than those from celebrities or influencers.
Blue Bottle achieves that by encouraging customers to post pictures with their recognizably branded coffee cups, and regularly features chosen customers on their instagram, like the one above.
This not only shows that Blue Bottle appreciates the love its most loyal customers have, but that they are willing to plug their individual pages, creating a win-win.
Consider featuring your customers across all your social media platforms for future-forward review success
10. Airtable: Display famous brands that are customers
Another classic, Airtable has had great success showcasing the brands that use its software on its customer stories page.
As you can see above, huge companies use their service, and they are wise to put this at the forefront – it doubles as great advertising and a kind of review-by-endorsement.
You’ll notice they focus on recognizable Fortune 100 brands – this doesn’t need to be so for your company. Whatever industry is your target demographic, mention the largest players that your software has hooked, and others will follow.
11. WordPress: User-generated content
The above thumbnail is a YouTube link from an independent channel demonstrating how new users can quickly acclimate to WordPress.
This is our final example of letting your best customers do your work for you. By promoting, rather than censoring their content in favor of your own, you encourage the building of a community.
A community of users that can help each other not only takes the pressure off of support teams as well as creating a sense of shared goals, which increases overall customer happiness. If your customers can help each other use your product better, they can also give you ideas for future features.
Takeaways
With all the aforementioned options for upping your review game, you can simply plug and play with each and see what sticks.
Remember, the road to having a loyal, satisfied fanbase is neverending. It requires constant maintenance.
So why not have industry leading, powerful artificial intelligence on your side to make sure you stay on top of it.
The Monkeylearn no-code-text analytics platform is designed to integrate with existing business software, and packs a machine learning punch to turn your collection of reviews into actionable insights.
Book a free demo with one of our data experts to design a custom software fit for your company, or jump right in and give it a shot yourself with a free trial.
