Amazon Product Reviews: Why They Matter & How To Get Them

Global Amazon marketing expert, Zach Tibbs, reveals the top 5 things companies need to be doing to maximise their product reviews on Amazon.

Why are product reviews important?

With the rise of the share economy and peer-to-peer based services, consumers are increasingly trusting rewarding encounters with technology and establishing a firm belief in the wisdom of crowds.

 Take Uber, for example. When faced with the prospect of being driven home by a perfect stranger, the traditional response would be a firm no, but through Uber’s technology we have been taught to trust implicitly in the 4.9-star average rating of all the people who have been in the car before us.

 This creation of trust between individuals and a crowd has disrupted the entire commercial landscape–where personal recommendations from friends or family once reigned supreme, almost 90% of shoppers now trust online product reviews over all else when researching and making purchase decisions.

 Hence, it’s no accident that online retail giant Amazon places a huge amount of importance and weight on product reviews when determining search results. Similar to Google, Amazon is always seeking to provide the most relevant, trusted and valuable results for users, and as Google uses things such as views, backlinks and shares to determine what sites rank, Amazon uses product reviews as a significant indicator when determining which products people will be most likely to purchase, and hence which products rank first.

 Since its inception, Amazon has also maintained a strict policy towards safeguarding the trustworthiness of its reviews, recently stating that if a seller is detected steering fake reviews and ratings, they will be banned from Amazon.

 So, like SEO and Google, optimising your Amazon product reviews can significantly help you increase your Amazon sales, not only by improving your product rankings, but also improving customer perception and conversion rates, as well as providing invaluable data to help steer your Amazon strategy.

The top 5 ways to optimise your Amazon product reviews

 Zach Tibbs is an Amazon Optimization specialist, having helped hundreds of businesses build and increase Amazon sales by over 500% year over year, and these are his top 5 ways to optimise your Amazon product reviews.

1. Be proactive and ASK for reviews

 Given the importance of reviews, you need to be proactive in seeking them out from every single customer after any product purchase is made. Using an automated messaging system or auto response emails can be an efficient and effective way to do so.

2. Include marketing material in the box itself asking for reviews and feedback

No one wants to be the first to try anything, so getting good initial reviews are essential to gaining traction and momentum, particularly given reviews are based off a percentage of sales. Hence if you get bad reviews when sale volumes are low, it’s twice as hard to get back to where you started.

 Including creative, unique, and ‘above and beyond’ marketing materials alongside your product deliveries that go to form a stronger relationship with your customers can provide the extra push they need to leave you a positive review.

3. Set up your product pages right

How you set up your product pages also determines how quickly and exponentially you will recieve reviews. In order to not dilute the impact of reviews you should set up your products with a ‘Parent Product’, i.e. one product with multiple variations (e.g. different colours, sizes, flavours, etc), rather than an individual product per each.

This enables you to maximize the impact each review gets across as much of your product line as possible, rather than struggling to reach critical mass with individual reviews.

 Pages with in-depth information that help the customer immediately understand your products, how they can purchase, and your fulfillment terms, will also better compel customers to provide you with a review.

VERSUS

4. Be obsessed with your customers.

Like any B2C business, you need to be constantly monitoring, analysing, and learning about your customer in order to gain a deep understanding of what is working, and what is not.

You should be constantly reading your customer feedback, and making changes to things like your product pages, images, and packaging to improve the things they do not like, and focus more on what they do like.

Analysing product reviews can also gives you a direct insight into the type of products consumers are more likely to purchase, hence can help you craft a business strategy that is more likely to succeed.

 Given the fiercely competitive nature of Amazon (your product will absolutely not be the only one of its kind available on Amazon), ensuring your customers have exceptional and ‘next level’ experiences and interactions with your brand 100% of the time will help set you up for success.

5. Increase page-views & sessions with marketing both on and off Amazon

Whilst it may go without saying that well planned and exceptionally executed marketing initiatives are crucial to success on Amazon, many businesses make the mistake of thinking simply being on Amazon they will sell product. You need to having both online and offline tactics that aim to drive people to your Amazon page.

Running campaigns to previous customers that have purchased your products through other channels, driving them to your Amazon account, can be an effective place to start.