Hairhouse sees a 35% lift in conversion rates with a new ratings and reviews strategy

Hairhouse Australia sells hair and beauty products and tools at retail stores across Australia and online. It stocks over 4,500 products from over 90 different brands. The company is currently undergoing a brand revamp across its digital and retail platforms. The goals of this rebrand were to modernize the company’s web presence, create a digital experience that younger consumers expect today, and increase conversions.

Hairhouse store

Another one of the goals post-rebrand, was to increase the number of ratings and reviews on product pages to help shoppers make more confident purchasing decisions.

“Customers are more informed these days,” said Ash Mehta, Head of Digital & Technology at Hairhouse. “They like to make informed decisions based on their own research.”

Before the rebrand, Hairhouse was using a popular review provider but wasn’t seeing the number of reviews it was hoping for, and found it difficult to increase coverage across its products, hair tools, and services. The company knew something needed to change, so it enlisted Bazaarvoice to increase review coverage across its digital platforms.

“Bazaarvoice allows us to collect customer feedback and also helps other customers who actually read reviews to make their buying decisions,” said Mehta.

Following up post-purchase leads to an increase in reviews

Hairhouse added Bazaarvoice’s ratings and reviews solution to its e-commerce store. To increase review volume, the company worked with Bazaarvoice to create review request emails to send to customers a few weeks after they make a purchase.

The company also started soliciting reviews from in-store customers by sending a review request email after a customer made a purchase. For this initiative, Hairhouse focused on customers who were already part of its loyalty program because their contact information was readily available.

“Most of the reviews that we’ve gotten are quite positive, and we’ve found that customers do actually read those reviews before they make their purchase,” said Mehta.

These review generation efforts were extremely successful. In fact, Hairhouse received so much content that it now needed a way to make it easier for online shoppers to quickly understand review sentiment, so Hairhouse implemented Review Highlights.

“If you’re collecting reviews, you’d like to show them off. On pages where we have lots of reviews, review highlights make it easier for customers to see that this is a trusted product,” said Mehta.

The Review Highlights help the Hairhouse team understand product sentiment so it can make changes to particular products or forward the information to the product’s supplier.

Hairhouse also uses stand-out reviews on other pages across its e-commerce store. The company has certain category pages on its site where it highlights a specific brand or product category. Hairhouse has started displaying quote snippets from reviews on relevant category pages to provide social proof to new shoppers.

A 35% increase in conversion rates on pages with reviews

Working with Bazaarvoice has helped the Hairhouse team save time and increase review volume and conversions. In fact, Hairhouse has seen a 35% increase in conversion rate on pages with reviews and highlights, versus product pages with no reviews or highlights. It’s also seen a 15% lift in average order volume on pages with reviews and review highlights.

“The key thing that we really like is that the reviews are moderated by Bazaarvoice, so we don’t have to moderate them,” said Mehta. “I think that’s a big time saver.”

source: hairhouse.com.au

Hairhouse is currently working with its Bazaarvoice team to optimize its review request email strategy for the future.

“We’re looking at how that can be timed better or trigger based on the actual delivery of the product, instead of randomly sending the email after 6 weeks,” said Mehta.

The optimization Hairhouse has done so far has helped generate a significant amount of new reviews. Hairhouse also taps into the larger Bazaarvoice network and leverages syndication. About 54% of the company’s review volume comes from syndicated reviews from 29 suppliers. Hairhouse is hoping to work with Bazaarvoice more in the future to get a large volume of reviews for newer products.

“Bazaarvoice helps us utilize review content on product pages, and customers are able to make decisions based on that,” said Mehta. “But we are always thinking about what else we can do. Going forward, we’re going to try to increase the number of reviews that we get and figure out how to use them on other channels as well.”

Learn more about how ratings and reviews can help your brand increase conversion and revenue. Or request a demo here.