Consumer Packaged Goods
The fresh fruit and packaged foods producer uses reviews to showcase new products, improve existing ones, and increase engagement with recipes on its website.
At a Glance
Develop a user-generated content (UGC) program from scratch.
Use Bazaarvoice ReviewSource to boost reviews on retailer sites and run a managed sweepstakes campaign to drive traffic to Dole’s recipes.
The brand saw 2.3K new reviews with an average rating of 4.7 stars. They gained 200-400 new pieces of content each quarter and a 64% conversion rate lift among shoppers who engaged with content. 74% of Dole’s retail products only display syndicated content.
New reviews
With an average rating of 4.7 stars.
Dole Packaged Foods is a household name to fruit lovers around the world for its high-quality, fresh, and packaged fruit. Its most popular product is canned pineapple, but it also offers a whole range beyond that, like smoothie blends, juices, and more. The Dole team recently realized they needed a way to increase awareness for all the products they offer. Dole knew it needed to make a change with regards to its use of UGC online.
“People really use reviews when they shop, so our hope was that our products will end up on someone’s grocery list because of something another customer said online,” said Alex Concepcion, Global Senior Manager of Digital Communications at Dole.
Dole was looking for a way to give its customers the ability to leave feedback for the products they love through ratings and reviews, and show potential customers how their peers are using its products. That’s why Dole came to the experts. The company partnered with Bazaarvoice to ramp up UGC for its retail and ecommerce businesses.
Having a UGC platform was extremely valuable to the company during the COVID-19 pandemic when more and more people were ordering groceries to their homes.
“We definitely saw that people wanted products shipped to their homes, especially canned goods,” said Concepcion. “In order to ensure people were seeing our products on our ecommerce channels, we wanted to make sure we were sourcing and responding to reviews on big online grocers like Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart.”
Dole used Bazaarvoice to populate retail channels with ratings and reviews from customers. Leveraging Bazaarvoice’s “always-on” ReviewSource, it automatically sends reviews to retailer sites as soon as they’re written. This increases review recency, volume, and engagement.
The Dole team also used quotes from customer reviews to promote new products on its website, Dolesunshine.com.
“For our new Boosted Blends Frozen Smoothie line, we included a quote from a review on our homepage about how great the product is to entice shoppers,” said Concepcion.
Another key initiative for the brand is helping consumers understand the best ways to use its products in recipes.
“About 75-80% of the traffic that comes to our website is because of recipes, and so with reviews, we want to make sure people know how to use our products,” said Concepcion.
To increase engagement with recipes, the company partnered with Bazaarvoice to run a managed sweepstakes in an effort to drive recipe reviews.
ReviewSource changed the game for Dole almost overnight by adding thousands of new reviews with ease.
“We are very pleased with the efficiency of using ReviewSource. The program was straightforward and grew our review count by the thousands,” said Molly Garris, Senior Manager of E-commerce Marketing at Dole.
The program launched in February, and Dole collected 2.3K new reviews from Influenster—with an average rating of 4.7 stars—in a mere seven months. Dole also collects about 200 to 400 pieces of new content each quarter. By comparison, before ReviewSource, it gathered around 30 to 70 pieces.
Today, about 74% of Dole’s product pages only feature syndicated content. This means that if Dole hadn’t leveraged ReviewSource, three-quarters of its product pages would have no review content at all. Dole also sees a 64% conversion rate lift among shoppers who engaged with UGC content.
As for reviews on recipes, before launching the sweepstakes with Bazaarvoice, Dole’s recipe for Dole Whip didn’t appear on the first page of search results. By increasing reviews of the Dole Whip recipe, the page benefited from an SEO boost, pushing the branded recipe page to number three in search results.
The company aims to do more managed sweepstakes in the future and is hoping to use Bazaarvoice’s solutions globally.
“I’m already recommending Bazaarvoice to our offices in Canada, Latin America, and Asia,” said Concepcion. “We’d love to expand that relationship.”
Learn more about how ReviewSource can help you quickly and easily collect more reviews. Get started here.
New reviews
With an average rating of 4.7 stars.
About the company
Dole Sunshine was founded almost 170 years ago, and since then, the company has believed that good, healthy food should be more like sunshine — available for all. Dole champions an equitable world where everyone has access to healthy nutrition, but where this access does not come at the cost of the planet.
We are very pleased with the efficiency of using ReviewSource. The program was straightforward and grew our review count by the thousands.
Molly Garris
Senior Manager of E-commerce Marketing at Dole
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