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If your customers are anything like the nearly 70% of shoppers interviewed by Statista for one study, they may read at least one review before deciding whether to buy a product. Some of these shoppers even read up to six reviews first!
So what if your Shopify store features no product reviews at all?
In this case, your customers might find buying your products too risky as they can’t be sure your products are right for them. They may then leave your store empty-handed! Noooooo.
But if you’ve dug around the Shopify platform, you may have realized it doesn’t have built-in features for collecting and displaying reviews. So you’ll need to use a separate app to add product reviews to your Shopify store.
There are various options in the market, but we think our Sendlane platform’s Reviews feature is a top Shopify product review app worth checking out.
Here’s how you can use it to get more product reviews and evaluate their effectiveness in bringing in sales after that.
How do Shopify reviews work?
Shopify reviews (especially positive ones) provide social proof of a product’s value and help persuade shoppers to buy it.
That’s because if a customer sees that many people have said good things about a product, they’re more likely to believe they’ll benefit from using it too—then buy it for themselves!
As a Shopify store owner, you may have seen the separate Product Reviews app on the Shopify App Store for inserting a “Customer Reviews” section into your product pages. Customers add their reviews to this section, and you can publish these automatically or manually vet them first.
And with the Product Reviews Shopify app being free, it can be a tempting option for collecting and featuring reviews on your store. But it does have some downsides.
For one, you’re relying on customers to think of writing a review after receiving their order. Some of them may remember to leave one, but we bet the majority won’t—leading to a low review collection rate.
The Product Reviews app also has rather limited functionality. For example, customers can’t submit photo reviews to show others how your products look in real life.
We know, you’ve spent a lot of money hiring professional photographers for your product photos. But customers sometimes just want to see your products in a less staged setting!
//[inject:ad-reviews]
Sendlane: The best app for Shopify product reviews
If you find that Shopify’s Product Reviews app isn’t for you, we’d highly recommend trying our Sendlane email platform’s built-in customer review feature, called Reviews!
Here’s what you can expect from it:
Request reviews within your post-purchase emails
In Sendlane, you can set up post-purchase emails to not just thank your customer for their purchase, but to also ask them to submit a review.
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The text of these post-purchase emails is fully customizable, so you can fill out a message that’s in line with your brand voice.
You can also use language that emphasizes how easy it is to submit a review so customers will be more likely to do so. For instance, you could say:
“Could you leave us a review? It will take just a minute.”
You can also set a timeframe as to when Sendlane should send customers your review requests.
Our usual recommendation is seven to 12 days after customers have received their order. This duration will give them sufficient time to use your product before sharing their thoughts on it.
Otherwise, if you ask for a review too soon after delivery (say, immediately after delivery) your customers’ reviews may just talk about their experience with the delivery.
Such as: “Received item in good condition.” or “Punctual delivery!”
These are still good reviews for sure, but they don’t shed much light on whether customers found the product itself useful.
Monitor, manage, and leverage reviews within one platform
Your Sendlane dashboard will act as a one-stop shop for collecting and managing reviews as they start to trickle in.
From a dedicated Reviews interface, you can view all the reviews you’ve gotten so far and moderate them. This is helpful for approving and publishing only those that speak well of your product.
(Take that, fake negative reviews!)
You can also embed your reviews into your Shopify store pages and emails so they can do their job of incentivizing purchases!
If you’re writing a new email in Sendlane, just drag in the Reviews block and we’ll automatically populate it with your reviews.
As for featuring reviews in your Shopify store pages, you’ll embed a Product Detail Page Reviews widget that detects your products and displays their corresponding reviews.
Alternatively, use the Full Page Widget to create a standalone reviews page that showcases reviews for all your products!
Send your emails at the right time for the highest open rates
Once you’ve embedded some rave reviews into your emails, make sure your contacts actually read them!
Send your emails at a time when no one is checking their inbox, and your emails could just become buried and go unopened. But people open their inboxes at different times! How can you:
- Find out what these times are, and then
- Send your emails during that period?
The answer is to tap into artificial intelligence (AI), which can track when your contacts opened your previous emails. It then sends subsequent emails at these times for you. No guesswork needed.
In Sendlane, our AI-powered send optimization feature is called machine learning open predictability. It may sound like a mouthful, but using it is as easy as turning it on.
When you’ve done so, we’ll send your emails over a 24-hour period, with each contact receiving your email based on the time they’re most likely to open it.
For example, if one contact usually reads their emails while having breakfast at 8 a.m., it will use that prediction to have your email to land in your inbox at that time. Then as they’re sipping their morning espresso, they’ll open your email and be wowed by the glowing product reviews in it!
Unify your email and SMS marketing
Apart from engaging your customers with marketing emails, are you planning to send them marketing SMSes as well? Using two separate platforms for both marketing channels can be a hassle, so use Sendlane to unify your email and SMS marketing!
Sendlane isn’t just an email platform—it also comes packed with features for marketing to customers via SMS, such as:
- Contextual data for SMS which allows you to tag links in your SMS campaigns so you can track engagement and customer intent
- Automated multi-channel funnels that help you send timely SMSes along with emails in response to customers making a purchase, abandoning their cart, and more. (You can also add emails to your SMS funnels to create multi-channel marketing funnels!)
- Two-way reply functionality to engage customers who have asked questions or shared feedback in response to your SMSes
To make the deal sweeter, store owners who switched from using separate email and SMS platforms to Sendlane’s all-in-one platform have saved as much as 40% on their marketing bill. *chef’s kiss*
Get fast, world-class, 24/7/365 customer support
Our customer support team is always online. Seriously! Day or night, weekends AND holidays. On average, you need to wait only 30 seconds before we get a team member on your case.
Think of our support team as your trusted email and SMS marketing assistants—we want you to have a superb experience on our platform, so we don’t leave you to flail on your own if you run into trouble.
Whether you need help with the platform during regular office hours, in the middle of the night, or the weekend before a big launch, rest assured we’re on standby and ready to sort things out for you!
Benefits of Sendlane’s Reviews feature
Automatically collect product reviews via email
Put your review collection on autopilot so you don’t have to manually chase customers for their thoughts!
Just set up your review request emails within your post-purchase funnel and it’ll do so like clockwork. As mentioned above, seven to 12 days after the customer receives their order is a good time frame for receiving the highest-quality reviews.
Embed your reviews within your emails and website seamlessly
With our Reviews feature being baked directly into our platform, compatibility issues are a non-issue!
After creating an email in Sendlane like how you normally would, drag in the Reviews block to have your reviews show up in the email. You can embed reviews in all types of emails, including product announcement and abandoned cart ones.
You can also customize the information displayed in the reviews, such as featuring your products’ star ratings and your reviewers’ names. Plus, use the display widget to automatically display your best reviews or all of your reviews in chronological order on your site.
Personalize the post-review process
Last but not least, you can set up an automated funnel to personalize the follow-up process after customers have submitted their review.
For example, if a customer left you a four-star review or higher, you could email them to thank them for their fantastic review.
But if a customer left a not-so-great review—such as if they had rated your product lower than four stars—your negative review response within the automated email could instead apologize for their experience and seek more feedback for your internal review.
What are the top product review metrics?
Number of collected reviews
When you collect many reviews (say hundreds or even thousands of them!) on your products, you signal that a lot of people have been buying them—and that they’re popular.
After all, you can’t have received 200 genuine reviews of your product if you haven’t had at least 200 people buying it, right?
And if the majority of the reviews are positive, this also indicates your products really are just that good and worth buying. The wisdom of the crowd can’t be wrong here!
Conversion rate
If you notice improved conversion rates after featuring positive reviews of your products on your online store pages and emails, this is a sign your reviews are helping to encourage sales! 📈
Average review rating
The higher the average rating for your product, the more appealing your product will look, which may also lead to more conversions.
//[inject:ad-demo]
Tips to get more product reviews on Shopify with Sendlane
If you’re excited to try our Reviews feature on your Shopify store, here are some last tips to milk more product reviews from it!
- Don’t wait until you’ve launched your product to start collecting reviews. If you’ve released your product to beta testers, you could ask them for a customer review as well. Adding these reviews to your product launch emails may just help boost sales when your products officially become available! This tactic is definitely something to think about as you plan how to implement a product launch strategy.
- Ask for reviews often. Request a review seven to 12 days after order delivery and after every customer support interaction. Asking just once isn’t enough as customers may be too busy to submit a review the first time and then forget to do so later. Be persistent in asking for reviews and you’re more likely to get them (and more of them to boot)!
- Offer an incentive for customers who submit a review. A small discount or free shipping on their next order usually does wonders! Just take a look at how Soodox offers customers a generous 20% discount on their next order if they review their latest purchase:
Sendlane Reviews comes FREE with every Sendlane plan
You read that right. When you sign up for any Sendlane plan, you can start collecting and displaying reviews on your Shopify store at no extra cost. 🤩
You’ll also get access to other powerful email marketing features such as:
- A deep-data integration with Shopify for automatic and fuss-free syncing of your online store data to Sendlane
- Automated email and SMS marketing funnels for rescuing abandoned carts, following up with customers after their purchase (including asking for reviews!), and promoting upcoming sales
- Machine learning open predictability to optimize your emails’ send times and boost their open rates
- Dynamic content to personalize your emails with the products that contacts have viewed and continue the sales conversation in their inbox
