February 2nd, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
Browsing Yahoo! Movies this morning, I noticed that the most helpful review on the new 'Rambo' movie is a rant on critics. This review currently appears at the top, as 'most helpful' is the default sort for Yahoo!'s customer reviews. When you read this review, you will notice that it is virtually "content free", telling you almost nothing about the movie itself. It is just a rant.
I single it out not because I hate critics but because it was voted 'helpful' by 205 out of 236 people. In other words, this reviewer is speaking for a population of customers who simply ignore critics and trust each other instead.
Consider this ground-zero proof on a trend that continues to take hold. We have briefed you on research about trust many times, and here are five of the 'most helpful' Bazaarblog posts on this topic:
- Customer Recommendations Are Most Trust Forms of Advertising
- 80% of Online Customers Trust Brands More with Reviews
- 84% Trust User Reviews Over a Critic (MarketingSherpa)
- 78% of Online Consumers Have More Trust for Brands with Reviews
- Can Customers Trust Online Reviews?
Regardless of whether you trust them or not, critics do make us laugh with their witty writing style. I got a chuckle out of Chris Farnsworth's quote on the movie, "Stallone looks like an overcooked Ball Park frank". The lay customer may not be as witty, but they may be more trusted and therefore more influential at driving box office sales – and that's what really counts.
December 1st, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
This has been a busy week for Bazaarvoice Research. At 9:25pm EST on Thanksgiving Day, we witnessed a new traffic peak across our client base. As consumers read retailer circulars to prep for a busy "Black Friday", they also read reviews online. At that time (9:25pm EST), we peaked at 1,400 reviews read per second across our client base of over one hundred retailers. On Cyber Monday (November 26), we served 71 million reviews to holiday shoppers, up over 370% over last year's Cyber Monday figure. In the last 30 days, our systems have seen 7.4 billion hits and delivered 40 terabytes of traffic.
There have been many exciting research moments for our industry in the past two years:
And this new holiday tradition is another major finding. It shows just how much influence reviews online are having on offline shopping behavior. This especially hits home for me because when Brant and I started this company in May of 2005 only around 10 retailers in the U.S. (including online-only, like Amazon.com) had reviews. Now MarketingSherpa reported that 43% of retailers do (as of Feb-07). That is having a broad impact on consumer expectations – reviews are quickly become a must-have for retailers and a norm for online shopping.
Most of these are intuitive findings and could be easily dismissed as "obvious". But data informs strategy, as I learned so many times while working with clients as the founder of Coremetrics.
So, what do you do with this new data? Here are a few ideas:
- Promote reviews for the same products featured in your Thanksgiving circular on your home page the week of Thanksgiving – this will make it easy for the 70 to 77% that are seeking reviews (and the 82% that are influenced when they read them) to realize that you have them
- Send an email about reviews on Thanksgiving morning with a subject line like, "Read Thousands of Customers' Reviews Before You Go Shopping on Friday". In that email, feature the same products or categories of products that you have in your Thanksgiving circular
- Create distinct shopping paths linked for your home page such as "Our Best Friday Deals on Customer Top-Rated Holiday Gifts" and so on for all of your major categories featured in your in-store (and online) sale
- Push reviews again on Cyber Monday – both in email and on your home page – but with a distinct focus on online shopping
- Put top-rated circulars in your stores for greeters and category managers (like HD TV) to hand out to help in-store shoppers
- Feature reviews in your print circulars so that readers know that your site has reviews before they go online to research them
Want more? Watch the holiday webinar that our Community Management team recorded. And please don't forget to tell us your ideas as well!
And, finally, please support the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund this holiday season by shopping at Shop.org's Cyber Monday portal. All proceeds go to honor a great man that I had the pleasure of working with. He helped grow Shop.org into the great organization that it is today. And you will be helping to fund the future visionaries of the eCommerce industry.
July 3rd, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Sorry Ebert and Roeper, CNET, Consumer Reports, and Wine Spectator.
Customers trust each other more than they trust you.
Last year Edelman told us that “trust in someone like me” tripled in two years, from 20% to 68%. Jupiter found that 77% of customers seek product reviews. And eMarketer found that 91% seek word of mouth.
Today, MarketingSherpa reports 84% of online customer trust reviews from another customer over a critic. So…I guess Time Magazine got it right. The Person of the Year is “You”.
Some other interesting findings…
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May 24th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO
Aloha from beautiful Maui! Debra and I are on vacation with our daughter, Rachel, celebrating our 11-year wedding anniversary.
During a little downtime this week, I have seen three profound examples of user-generated content in action:
1. Today, MarketingSherpa released a new case study on how President's Choice (large Canadian grocer) is leveraging online customer reviews of their private-label products in their stores, circulars, loyalty program, and product lab. It is well worth the read; it is one of the most powerful multichannel examples that we have worked on with any client to date. I also encourage you to look at the creative samples they provided. Note that free access is only available for seven days from the publish date.
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April 9th, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
A new report from MarketingSherpa was released that featured a section on the effectiveness of ratings and reviews.
You can read the summary here. In short the study found that 58% of online shoppers prefer sites that feature ratings and reviews…
This is one more data point to support others (see our stats page):
- 71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)
- 77% of online shoppers read consumer product reviews and ratings (Jupiter)
- Ratings and Reviews is the second most important site feature behind search and online buyers who site ratings and reviews most useful site feature has more than doubled from ’05 to ’06. (Jupiter)
- 92% deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful and ~ 71% used keyword searches to find products. (eTailing Group)
- After their order, PETCO asked customers, "What online tool most influenced your purchase decision?" The #1 answer was Product Ratings & Reviews, with site search coming in a distant second. (PETCO)
- CompUSA exit survey: 81% consider the availability of customer reviews to be Very important (33%) / Somewhat important (48%) (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
- 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
- 39 percent of those who bought from sites with reviews cite the reviews as the primary factor influencing the purchase decision. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)
- 48% of online shoppers seek reviews before purchasing (eVoc Insights)
This is third party research. We also have about 20 case studies demonstrating different ways clients are using reviews to make impact in conversion, AOV, margin, loyalty and lower returns.
Is there enough support that ratings and reviews are effective. Um, yeah. But we are always looking for more!
June 9th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Statistics are helpful to make decisions. We have referenced several statistics to help retailers decide whether or not to put ratings and reviews on their site:
- 63% of users prefer sites with ratings and reviews (eVoc Insights)
- 48% of shoppers seek reviews before making a purchase decision (eVoc Insights)
- Conversion of customers buying a single product nearly doubled after the product received a five-star review, going from .44% to 1.04%. (Marketing Experiments / Shopping.com experiment)
- 59% of users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. (BizRate)
- Users who contribute product reviews visit a site 9 times more often than average users, and they remain twice as loyal and buy twice as often. (McKinsey)
These are great stats about customer impact, coming from multiple sources, all which seem to concur that ratings and reviews are effective. But for skeptics, it would be helpful if several different sources survey the same question and come up with the same answer.
That just happened.
After a presentation from Lauren Freedman of e-Tailing Group at this week's Internet Retailer show, we know that Shop.org, MarketingSherpa and the eTailing Group have all surveyed retailers and come out with essentially the same result — Ratings and Reviews are the most effective merchandising strategy:
96% of retailers rate customer ratings and reviews very or somewhat effective
Shop.org 2005 Annual Study
94% of retailers rate customer ratings and reviews very or somewhat effective
MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark study, March, 2006
92% of retailers rate customer ratings and reviews very or somewhat effective
JC Williams/e-tailing group Survey; 2006
Of course we like the fact that retailers are rating ratings and reviews with 5 stars!
