December 19th, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Nielsen recently reported the results of a study that found 81% of online holiday shoppers are using reviews. This is higher than Jupiter/Forrester had found over a year ago, where over 70% of online shoppers sought out reviews. We also know from Jupiter that over 60% of offline purchases (some studies suggest more) are affected by online research. So, it’s quite possible that two-thirds of total retail sales are affected by reviews. We served 1.2B impressions of UGC on Cybermonday, and now serving 2 billion impressions of UGC per month on average.
Of course, if you aren’t leveraging the power of customer contributiosn right now, this news comes a little too late for this holiday season. However, it’s never too late. The impact of user generated content is the gift that keeps on giving throughout the entire year! Get started just after the holidays.
September 12th, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Internet Retailer and Vovici recently released a study to find out the top emerging technology priorities for online retailers. As retailers are feeling the heat (or lack thereof!) of a slow economy, Ratings and Reviews rose to the top of their priority list. Emarketer reports:
Letting customers rate products on e-commerce sites is the top Web 2.0 spending priority, according to online retailers in the US surveyed in August 2008 by Vovici for Internet Retailer. Well over one-half (57%) of online pure plays said customer ratings and reviews were a priority for them.
Internet Retailer said online merchants wanted these features because they drove sales. It also noted that PetsUnited, which operates 10 e-commerce sites, reported a 50% jump in average sales when shoppers ordered right after viewing a video, compared with after viewing just text and pictures.
“Shoppers that view videos and read customer ratings and reviews spend more,” said Corbin de Rubertis, president of retail widget developer Qponix, in the Internet Retailer article. “Even in a weaker economy, retailers are going to spend money on better technology if it drives traffic and converts sales.”
Emarketer also recites a study we launched with Vizu highlighting the importance of reviews to retailers:
Last year I wrote this article highlighting why ratings and reviews are the highest NPV marketing investment, and why they should get launched before the holidays. Coincidentally I wrote it one year ago yesterday, and it’s still as relevant. You’ve got a few months left. Now is the time to move!
July 9th, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Opinion Research Corporation released the results from a new study that (again) supports the fact consumer reviews play a major role in the decision to purchase products and services.
In their own words, “A whopping eighty-three percent of respondents polled indicated that online product evaluations and reviews had at least some level of influence on purchasing decisions.”
They also found…
- 70% of respondents seek out information for a particular brand of goods and services.
- 32% reported posting their own online feedback on product or service experiences.
See more of the study here.
Now I say this study “again” supports the demand for reviews because we have been tracking and fielding studies for three years on this topic. See our comprehensive overview of over 100 statistics and case study results here.
April 10th, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Ad Age reported resutls from a study by ZenithOptimedia…
- Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touchpoints when it comes to influencing purchases, according to new data from Publicis media network ZenithOptimedia. The data comes from ZenithOptimedia's Touchpoints ROI Tracker, a comprehensive project comprising over 300,000 interviews across 34 countries and covering more than 4,000 brands in 126 product and service categories.
- Consumer touchpoints were each given a "contact clout factor," a number on a scale of 1 to 100 that indicates the relative influence of the touchpoint on purchasing.
- Recommendations from family and friends led the pack with an average score of 84. TV ads and Internet search were next, with an average score of 69 and 67, followed by magazine ads at 60, newspaper ads at 55, outdoor ads at 45, radio ads at 42, and Internet banner ads at 41.
Here's an interesting quote:
- Though word-of-mouth may be one of the greatest influences on brand choice, marketers still face a great challenge is making it scalable, said Bruce Goerlich, ZenithOptimedia's president of strategic resources, North America. "Word of mouth is incredibly powerful, but we as an industry are not doing as good a job as we could do in generating it," he said.
Maybe he hasn't heard of Bazaarvoice 
October 2nd, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
Deloitte’s consumer group completed a study last month and found almost two-thirds (62%) of the respondents to an online poll said they now read online product reviews written by other consumers. More than eight in 10 (82%) of those who read reviews said that their purchasing decisions have been directly influenced by those reviews. People have used the reviews both to confirm initial buying decisions and to change them, the study found.
Let's do the math: .62 X .82 = 50% of all consumers will make a purchase based on reviews!
That means, for a retailer or manufacturer not to have re reviews on their product means that they are turning away 50% of the prospects looking at their products!
This matches the study by eVoc insights done a couple years ago that found 50% of consumers needed reviews when purchasing consumer electronics before purchasing.
In addition, 69% of the respondents said they have shared online reviews with friends, family or colleagues, the report said. So, there’s a viral, word of mouth effect on the word of mouth itself!
See other stats and studies related to reviews and social commerce here.
August 11th, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
We recently published a joint study with Vizu Research on reviews.
The key finding is that US and UK shoppers have more trust and respect for Brands that enable product reviews. In fact, 8 out of 10 shoppers trust and respect brands more if they have authentic, user generated reviews on their site. So, not only do reviews help improve conversion, average order value, returns, satisfaction, natural search traffic, RSS feed click through, email revenue, and offline impact (ask us for any of these case studies)…they also improve brand perception!
Another finding: US shoppers consider ratings and reviews to be the most useful eCommerce site feature (44 percent). Product comparison (15 percent), product navigation (12 percent), and privacy information (11 percent) followed in the distance. We knew this already from site surveys with PETCO and CompUSA, but it's always helpful to get another data point! We're sort of maniacal about data
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…
(more…)
January 12th, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
This week ForeSee Results, a firm that specializes in online satisfaction measurement, released findings from its Online Retail Satisfaction Index study.
Key findings of the study show that consumers desire and remember product reviews, and appreciate having them handy;
- Nearly half (49 percent) of online holiday gift purchasers recall seeing online customer product reviews.
- 39 percent of those who bought from sites with reviews cite the reviews as the primary factor influencing the purchase decision.
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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!
May 15th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer
The Keller Fay Group (www.kellerfay.com) today released results from a survey of American consumers indicating that brands are a critical part of daily conversation.
The study was done using TalkTrack™, the first continuous monitoring system of all marketing-relevant conversations, providing nationally representative measures on word of mouth for every major consumer category and thousands of individual brands.
Here are some key findings:
- The average American discusses specific brands in ordinary discussion 56 times per week.
- 41% of conversations about brands involve a reference to advertising or something seen or heard in the media.
- Contrary to conventional opinion, nearly two-thirds (62%) of brand-related talk feature products in a positive light, while less than 1 in 10 conversations features products negatively.
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