Reviews

Perhaps you’d expect it, but this is the biggest time of the year for product reviews.

Reviews, it seems, are falling out of favor a bit. There’s been some talk on LinkedIn about their value and how, since everything has a rating of something not-quite 5, but close enough, that consumers are waking up to the fact that reviews are heavily curated by brands to put their best foot forward.

What’s interesting about that perspective, though, is that it only highlights one use case for product reviews: living on a PDP to help a customer validate a potential purchase.

If you’ve been following this newsletter, you know we’re spending a lot of time at Stamped talking about the value of bringing traditional on-site programs, like Loyalty and Reviews, into owned channels, like email. And so perhaps it’s worth reframing reviews from “reviews” to UGC, since everyone seems to understand the value of that content for a variety of purposes.

UGC is usually accepted as powerful, because it allows brands to better represent a multitude of customers in an authentic way—and without having to multiply their creative budgets.

Reviews data is the same.

Consider these two reviews, found recently among some of our customers:

I love them and I was worried about my calves not fitting but they did and they are great and very styling!

I am 5’1 and 128 lbs for reference!

And:

I have been buying your products for years and will continue to do so. I am 55 years old and this product makes my skin look like it is in it's 30s. Especially my neck area.

What makes these reviews so powerful is the fact that they fall into thematic buckets that most consumers don’t get to see: objection handling (the first one introduces a concern about the product) and demographic focus (they both narrow their focus to a subset of customers).

From our perspective, this fits with previous studies we’ve seen that show that purchase likelihood increases 15% when consumers see verified reviews versus anonymous reviews, because the additional context in the types of reviews we’re talking about increase the authenticity and credibility of the reviews.

If I were a marketer at either of these brands, I’d be using these reviews in a variety of different ways. There are ad angles to explore, there are cart abandonment emails to explore, there are new demographics to go after. The list goes on.

The challenge here is that these types of reviews are pretty rare. In fact, of reviews analyzed since the beginning of November, less than 1% could be classified as objection handling. So, even if you have them, you have to find them.

That makes these types of reviews more valuable—because your competitors likely aren’t taking the time to find them. And, even if they are, they’re underutilizing them.

Your opportunity, then, is to use more authentic reviews in more ways than the widget on your PDP. Yes, reviews might be losing impact—but only because we’re allowing them to.