Product reviews make the eCommerce world go round. Potential customers trust them and in the increasingly competitive eCommerce landscape, the surest/fastest way to increase sales is to get more product reviews for your Shopify store.
By 2040, 95% of purchases will be made online. This may sound like great news for Shopify store owners, but the sheer volume of transactions doesn’t mean there will be room for every eCommerce player out there.
Investing in PPC ads and PR campaigns are great ways to gain awareness for your online store. But nothing -- not even a huge advertising budget -- beats the power of a single happy customer who’s willing to leave a detailed review about their shopping experience.
There’s one problem, though: making customers happy doesn’t guarantee they’ll write those reviews. In fact, getting reviews for your Shopify store is often a strenuous, time-consuming activity.
How many review request emails can you write in a day?
How can you make sure that your product review requests are effective?
How can you create Shopify review requests that don’t annoy your customers?
Finally, how can you easily get more product reviews in Shopify?
This guide is designed to answer all these questions and more. By the end of it, you will be able to put your review requests on auto-pilot and use them to generate more sales for your Shopify store. But first, let’s start with the why:
Why Do You Need Reviews for Your Shopify Store?
Why should you bother to get more reviews in your Shopify store? Aren’t a great product and stellar customer service enough?
Glad you asked!
Great products and even greater customer service are crucial for the success of any online store. But Shopify reviews are the real differentiating factor and the catalyst to getting more sales with a minimal investment.
Here’s why:
- Nearly 9 out of 10 eCommerce consumers (89%) read reviews before they buy.
- 84% of buyers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations from friends or family members.
Image via WordStream
- Reviews alone can be responsible for an 18% uplift in sales.
- User-generated content (aka reviews in Shopify stores!) can lead to a 133% conversion rate increase.
Image via Website Builder
- Consumers trust reviews 12 times more than product descriptions written by the manufacturer or seller.
- Better yet, reviews have a long-term benefit: they increase SERP ranking by 10%. Yes, even search engines love user-generated content!
- Even negative reviews can have a positive impact, as they increase brand awareness.
Image via Website Builder
- 57% of consumers trust Google My Business reviews, followed by 40% of them who trust the reviews on a seller’s own website.
- While reviews matter in any industry and for any price point, the biggest conversion increase that’s due to reviews happens for the priciest of goods. A 380% increase is what eCommerce dreams are made of!
Image via Convince & Convert
- In fact, for American shoppers, eCommerce reviews matter the most, right after product pictures:
Image via Finances Online
This list of statistics could go on forever. In essence, they all tell us the same thing: get as many Shopify reviews as possible; they will help you generate more sales.
But have you ever wondered why? Why do shoppers trust online reviews so much that Shopify review requests have become a priority for any online store owner?
Psychology has a simple answer for us: the need for transparency. Until a few decades ago, we knew the baker, the butcher, and the seamstress personally. We trusted them inherently. Today, we almost never know the people who manufacture or sell the goods we use on a daily basis.
So we adapt.
We rely on our fellow shoppers to give us insights into the company’s reliableness, product quality, and customer service.
As a Shopify store owner, when you strive to get more online reviews, you’re essentially showing that your business is transparent and that you don’t want to hide your customers’ feedback -- quite the opposite.
However, the fact that reviews are popular with both shoppers and eCommerce store owners doesn’t mean that they are easy to get. Quite the opposite.
This brings us to our next point on the agenda:
Why Getting Reviews Isn’t as Easy as it Seems
Product reviews have their own quirky little paradox: everyone relies on them and loves to read them, but very few people actually take the time to leave a review.
47% of shoppers leave a review for a product or service at least once a month. But this encouraging nugget of information has to be viewed in context: most shoppers will use more than one online product or service each month. They just won’t take the time to review all of them.
To make matters worse, it’s precisely unhappy customers who are more likely to leave a review and complain about your products or services. Yikes!
You’ve got 21% more chances of seeing a review from an unhappy customer than you have of reading one from your happy customers. This is why most Shopify store owners make it a priority to get more reviews.
There is good news, though! When asked, shoppers are much more willing to leave a review. In fact, 70% of them said they answered positively to a review request.
Image via Search Engine Land
This is a whopping increase from the 47% mentioned above, right? It pretty much tells us that all you have to do is ask.
However, this is easier said than done. It might be quite easy for huge eCommerce stores, with large customer success departments and dozens of marketing automation sequences. But for smaller online shops, that have very few staff members and limited time, as well as limited technical capabilities, review requests can have a very low ROI if they are done manually.
Review request email templates only work to a certain extent and even setting up the sequence can be too time-consuming. Not to mention review responses: more than half of consumers expect companies to reply to their reviews. But very few of them get that reply for a very simple reason: this is yet another time-consuming task.
Should you abandon review requests altogether? Not at all! Review scores on your product pages are far too important.
You should, instead, find an easier way to get more reviews for your Shopify store.
Meet our low-maintenance, plug-and-play solution:
Automated Review Requests -- the Easiest Way to Get More Reviews to Your Shopify Store
Did you know review requests can be as easy as a single click? Picture this: you’ve got 100 orders in the last month but less than 20 reviews. Should you start emailing your customers one by one?
Of course not! You’ve got better things to do!
In fact, this type of question is what prompted us to create Wiremo, the all-in-one review automation platform for Shopify and other CMSs.
The flow is incredibly easy, even if you have zero technical skills:
Step 1: Install Wiremo in Your Shopify Store
Go to your Shopify admin panel and look for the Wiremo app. Click on install, then choose the manual or automatic installation type. We recommend the automatic installation option if you want a fast, no-code process.
Step 2: Customize Your Wiremo Account
Choose what features are important for your Shopify store and which can be ignored. We recommend testing all the features included in your price so you can make an informed decision about which of them have the best ROI.
You can read more about the Wiremo installation process here.
Step 3: Start Getting More Reviews Automatically
On your Wiremo dashboard, you can easily create an automated flow that asks your customers to leave a review after a certain period of time has passed since the order was processed.
Wiremo is 100% customizable to fit your needs: you know your products and your customers better than anyone, so it’s up to you to decide how many days should pass between order delivery and the automated review request.
Pro tip: we recommend testing various durations to see which of them works best for your customers.
Step 4: Go Beyond Review Requests and Automate Everything Related to Customer Feedback
Wiremo is more than an automated review request platform for Shopify. We bet you’ll love these cool features as well:
- Say thank you to your loyal customers: as soon as a customer has left a review, you can say thank you with a single click -- you don’t even have to leave your dashboard!
- Reward loyal customers: incentivize people to leave more reviews for your Shopify store with a promo code that you can send with a single click from your Wiremo dashboard.
- Publish reviews: don’t call your web developer any time you have a new review you want to highlight on your website. You can do it yourself from the Wiremo dashboard, with zero coding skills! All you have to do is choose which reviews you want to publish and they’ll be on your website in no time!
- Build trust with verified buyer badges: add a “verified buyer” badge to your reviews so that users know it comes from a real consumer.
- Get the reviews YOU want: don’t leave customers guessing what should be included in a review. Set your own questions that they can answer -- emphasize the things your store visitors would love to read about with the Wiremo Additional Questions feature.
- Boost credibility -- collect pictures from customers: yes, a picture is worth 1000 words, especially if it comes from a customer. With Wiremo for Shopify, your customers can now upload photos with their reviews to make them even more persuasive.
- Stellar customer support at your fingertips: use Wiremo to answer questions or sort various customer issues without leaving your dashboard. With Wiremo, you can answer any review or question in record time, from a mobile or fixed device.
- Go multi-platform: fear that people won’t trust the reviews on your website? With Wiremo you can request and publish reviews across a plethora of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, or Google.
- Enjoy AI-powered review analytics: Wiremo uses artificial intelligence to analyze all your reviews. You’ll be able to find the most frequently used keywords and allow your users to sort reviews based on certain topics/words.
- Get better SEO rankings: remember the stats above? Search engines love reviews just as much as you do. Wiremo can help you get an up to 10% ranking boost by adding user-generated content to your website. Yes, without expensive copywriters and SEO techies!
- Build a community around your shop: the Wiremo widget allows visitors to ask additional questions about a review. You can answer the questions yourself or allow the author of the review to do so.
- Measure, tweak, and improve: the Wiremo ARR platform offers you at-a-glance statistics. You can easily see what works and what doesn’t and how to get more conversions.
- We speak your language: Wiremo is available in more than 12 languages, with new ones added regularly. Check out the languages we support here and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a special language request.
Ready to put your review requests and management on auto-pilot? Check out all the cool features of Wiremo for Shopify.
Wrapping Things Up
You don’t have to be a mega-store to leverage the power of reviews. Nor do you need to spend ages trying to get more reviews or sending countless review request emails. It’s 2021 -- you can do all this automatically, with three clicks.
More importantly, powerful AI-backed automation is no longer just for eCommerce companies with huge budgets. Wiremo is an affordable review request and management solution for Shopify users, designed to help e-shops grow fast and seamlessly.
Better yet, you don’t need an IT department and coding wizards to install and use Wiremo every day. You can do all that on your own, with zero tech experience -- that’s how easy it is! And, if you happen to stumble, our friendly customer support department is always here for you.
Want to try it out? Sign up for our free trial! It’s 100% FREE, with no strings attached. We won’t even ask for your credit card number, so what have you got to lose?
