The four key eCommerce marketing trigger emails are; welcome, transaction confirmation, basket abandoned and ratings/review request. Of course there are other opportunities for trigger emails such as Birthday, back in stock emails, win-back and more, however those first four emails are the key emails to put in place before any others.
Here I’m looking at the ratings and review request email. Social proof ratings and reviews have become essential in eCommerce, Reevoo benchmark the average sales uplift due to reviews at 18%. The natural human instinct is to value the opinion of others. My six year old daughter demonstrated this to me. I’d pulled up a page of Nintendo games for her to look at. A few seconds later she exclaimed how one had four stars and another 284 comments. I hadn’t explained social proof or reviews to her and I’m sure its not something taught at school. She seemed to naturally ‘get it’.
A very effective way to build the necessary ratings and reviews is to send a post purchase request email. When Argos implemented such a practice they found 10% of their customers provided a review. If you consider how many purchases you have then 10% is quickly going to add up to a lot of reviews.
The following charts show two ratings examples are from Reevoo:
Which review would you find more persuasive? If you are like most people it will be the one on the right.
The most interesting point about these two bar charts is that they are for the same product. The only difference was reviews for the chart on the right were proactively requested by means of a post purchase email. By asking there is a difference in not only quantity of reviews but the number of positive reviews.
This difference is easily explained. If not asked for feedback, only the less satisfied customers are likely to make the effort to find out how to make a rating and provide it.
Here are some tips for a good review request email.
- The reivew request email should be sent a few days after the customer has experienced the product or service. This should be enough time that they have developed their opinion and not so long that the enjoyment of the new purchase has passed.
- The email subject line and body should reference the item purchased.
- The copy should be short and clear with a well positioned call to action button.
- The process to provide review should be quick and easy. A simple star rating could be collected right from within the email using images for each of one to five stars. That’s easy.
- Avoid clutter that could distract from the review request.
- Remind the customer of your normal support and service channels. If they are not happy, you will want to know directly rather than have a poor review.
ClickZ recently posted this model for ROI calculation of reviews and user generated content and in the last dotMailer ‘Hitting the Mark’ report only 48% of companies studied sent any sort of post purchase email. There is clearly opportunity for many to improve their bottom line.
Oh, and yes I did end up buying the Nintendo games for my daugther that she picked out from the ratings.
Tim Watson is Email Expert and Consultant at Zettasphere Ltd. View the full bio here.
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Sara Watts www.dmri.co.uk
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http://twitter.com/CaptainInbox Andy T
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http://b2b.reevoo.com Kat Matfield from Reevoo
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