A Beginners Guide to Generating Product Reviews
Why Should I Care About Reviews?
Anyone who really knows how to sell on Amazon knows the importance of reviews. What some sellers might not know is that it’s not just total reviews that matter, it’s the quality, quantity and velocity that all play a factor in determining success.
Quality of your reviews is based on the trustworthiness of the reviewer and the content within the review. Quantity is fairly self explanatory — the more reviews the better. Review velocity is the rate at which a product accumulates new reviews and, is a signal of customer interest for Amazon’s algorithms. Were you generating 200 reviews a week and are now down to 50? That’s a signal that customers aren’t as interesting in your listing, and that Amazon should promote something with better customer engagement. Wonder why some items are able to quickly float to the top of organic rankings and other stay on page 2? Review velocity is a big reason why. Generating reviews can be an intimidating task, but we have laid out a framework for you to get started generating reviews in a hurry.
The Chicken or the Egg
The classic paradox of what came first. In order to get a review, you first need someone to buy your item. At the same time, no one is going to buy an item without any reviews — how do we solve this problem? This is where Amazon Vine comes into help.
What is Vine? Vine is Amazon’s invite only review program where trusted reviewers are are able to provide feedback and a star ratings on (typically) newly released products. This give new items the customer credibility and social proof needed for customers to have enough confident to purchase the item. Why was Vine created? Let’s go to the source.
“The program was created to provide customers with more information including honest and unbiased feedback from some of Amazon's most trusted reviewers.” Amazon.com
Now the big question, does it work? In my experience yes, Vine is a great tool to get started, but it is not enough in isolation. And like the rest of Amazon, becoming pay-to-play1. While Vine is a solid program, there are some limitations — mainly that you can only give away 30 units to be reviewed. Once you are through your allotment you will need to find new ways to start driving reviews.
Going From a Few, to a Few Hundred. The Right Way.
Now that you have a few reviews and are generating sales you need to step on the gas and focus on review velocity. What we are going to cover next are ‘white hat tactics’, or 100% complaint methods of procuring reviews.
Want to know the easiest way to start generating reviews? Ask for them! Amazon provides sellers with the ability to view a customer’s order, and within the module is a link that queues an email request for the buyer to leave a review2.
While this seems like a simple solution, there is a problem - it isn’t scalable. There are a couple issues at play — 1: you can only request a single review at a time and 2: humans screw up manual tasks. Inevitably orders will get missed or someone will be out of the office, and the review request won’t be sent. The good news is that there are ways to scale up the process. There is a healthy ecosystem of Amazon Seller Tools, and Helium 10 and Jungle Scout3 are two of the best, especially with respect to reviews.
Helium 10 was the first tool that I used when I started selling on Amazon, and is something I still use today. Their “Seller Assistant” helps to expedite the review solicitation process through automation. Benefits of Helium10’s product are shown below.
Like Helium 10, Jungle Scout provides a similar service through their Reviews Automation product. Wonder what differentiates Jungle Scout?
Ability to Set it and Forget It - Jungle Scout helps to eliminate the tedious task of manually requesting reviews on Seller Central so you can invest time back into your business.
View Orders and Request Status - Stay on top of your business by monitoring the status of orders and review requests without the pain and monotony of clicking into each order.
However, the biggest benefit of both platforms is that it saves you time that can better spent on driving your business. I personally subscribe to both Helium10 and Jungle Scout for different reasons, but use Jungle Scout for the review automation. Would I use Helium 10’s product in the future - sure! The decision on this one isn down to personal preference.
Want another scalable solution? Use product inserts. You can print insert that can be placed into the product packaging or in a poly bag with your product. You simple add a note to the creative where you ask customers to review your product. It’s critical that you do not incentivize customers in any manner. Do not offer free product, a gift card or to be eligible for a reward as all of these tactics will be viewed as review manipulation.
These tactics will help to get you started with generating reviews, however not all sellers play by the rules and if you limit yourself to the strategies above, you will be at a significant competitive disadvantages. We’ll next walk you through some of the more aggressive ways of driving reviews.
Wearing the Gray Hat
All of the tactics outlined above are 100% within Amazon’s terms of service. These ‘white hat tactics’ cary no risk of an item being suppressed or an account shutdown. What we will be covering next are considered to be gray hat tactics which cary *some* risk. How much — probably not enough to have you account deactivated, but taking the risk is for to decide. Regardless of your risk tolerance, these tactics will undoubtedly help to accelerate your review velocity.
Calling all Friends & Family: Get your friends and family to buy your items and leave keyword rich, 5 star review. This is against Terms of Service, but happens all the time. Friends and family deals has been a staple of the retail industry for decades and this is a twist on that classic tactic. Here’s a tip, make sure that the people buying don’t have a trackable connection to you, the seller. If you share an email or have the same shipping address, you might want to find someone else to help with this process.
Building Custom Audiences: You might not be aware, but Amazon does provide you with some customer data, the challenge is knowing where it is, and how to to use it. Before April, you could pull all of the address data you would need (to say, send a direct mail piece) from the Amazon Fulfilled Shipments report, but that has gone away. There are some new places to find the data, but that’s for a paid post. You can take this data and load it into Facebook to create a custom audience. You can use this data to retarget recent customers with a message to go review your product, and while you won’t get a huge take rate on the ad unit, the spend and eventual reviews reviews will be worth it.
Facebook Messenger: Once your audience is built, you can now use that data to target customers through messenger. You can and ask them (cough*incentivize the*cough) for a review and acquire their email and sms accounts at the same time. Does that sound like a lot of work? It’s not - you can automate it with ManyChat.
Add QR Codes to Your Packaging: The beauty of a QR code is that you can change the landing experience for a user whenever you want. If the goal of the QR is to generate reviews, then you have two general options. The gray hat version of this is to develop a landing page that says “We Love To Hear From our Customers!” and ask for a review. The the black hat version is to take the customer to funnel and provide compensation for a review (a free sample, gift card, etc.) while capturing the customers’ data.
While not an exhaustive list by any measure, these tactics should help to accelerate your velocity of your review. Use this list as a starting to the generate new strategies and tactics to help support your listings.
Wearing the Black Hat
This is where where we pivot from plausible deniability about the regulations within Terms of Service to explicit rule breaking. If caught, you will most likely receive a suspension and a permanent account de-activation is not out of the question. The risk is huge, but the upside is even bigger which is why sellers continue to engage in these activities all the time.
The full breakdown of black-hat methods will be coming in a paid post, but here is a teaser example of a Facebook Messenger execution…
In Conclusion
The importance of reviews isn’t going away and it is up to you to find the right balance of risk versus reward. Regardless of your risk tolerance, you need to be aware that not only is the competition engaging in the strategies outline above, but they are finding new and increasingly aggressive way to generate reviews. Remember, when comes to getting reviews that Omar said it best, “all in the game yo, all in the game”.
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In the spirit of transparency I do want to say that these are affiliate links and if you buy something after using these, I will get a commission. I personally subscribe to both H10 and JS for different reasons, but use Jungle Scout for the review automation.