Our French client roster has had some great additions and accomplishments in the past few weeks, and as the Community Manager for France, I am very proud to see us launch and sign so many of the top French brands.

One of the most recent accomplishments, and the one I am most proud off, is the success of Ratings & Reviews, and the launch of Ask & Answer, on our premier French site – Mistergooddeal.com. Mistergooddeal.com is one of the leading online sellers of home equipment and furniture, and was our very first retail client to launch in France with Ratings & Reviews. When Ask & Answer was launched, Mistergooddeal.com  took the opportunity to spread the word further on their pages, and created new social commerce features on their site.

For instance, Mistergooddeal.com revamped their informational splash page to include guidelines on both Ratings & Reviews and Ask & Answer, making it easier for their customers to contribute both types of content. In addition, the new splash page also promotes the current top rated products. This splash page receives visibility from some “customer reviews” links above the fold on the homepage and in the footer of all site pages.

Simultaneously, Mistergooddeal have also started promoting the top-rated products on their homepage with a banner that redirects to the splash page as well.

Showcasing products on the home page is a great way to call attention to your most successful items, usually driving additional sales. We always encourage retailers to highlight their Top Rated Products are research shows that customers buy more from Top Rated Categories than any other category, including Best Sellers.
Finally, and very successfully too, in the run-up to Christmas, Mistergooddeal.com sent regular email promotions to their users that included customer reviews alongside discounted products.

I am very proud of all these latest developments on Mistergooddeal.com’s side: the run up to Christmas has traditionally generated so much traffic on retailer’s sites, it was key to make as much use as possible of the UGC content to drive more sales and energize the community growth and voice.  With both Ratings and Reviews and Ask & Answer driving this sort of engagement, look to Mistergooddeal.com as the leader in the French market for innovative user generated ideas and experiences.

So why not take it a step further and utilize customer generated content in the form of product reviews in advertising?

Advertising has become so ubiquitous that it is mostly ignored and consumers don’t trust the messages that companies send them. But the customer’s voice is as powerful offline as it is online, so why not take advantage of it?

Best Buy recently featured their customers’ voices – actual snippets from online product reviews along with product ratings – in their nationwide Sunday newspaper circular. They utilized a clear call to action to drive consumers directly to their “Top Rated Cameras” page, giving shoppers quick and easy access to top rated cameras. This not only provides a great way for Best Buy to advertise their top cameras, but it allows them to easily measure the success of this advertisement by measuring traffic to this page and sales conversion of these products.

This is another example of a Bazaarvoice best practice developed by our team of Community Managers – use your customers’ words to fuel your entire marketing mix. We strongly encourage our clients to use their customer reviews (along with other valuable user generated content such as from our Ask & Answer, BrandVoice and Stories products) in all forms of advertising: email marketing, online ads, store signage, print ads, Facebook groups, etc.

There is no more effective way to get customers to listen than to let them hear from other customers just like them. This is the future of advertising or should I say “effective" advertising!