I’ve been a big fan of Crutchfield’s marketing for a long time - I consider them to be one of the top retailers in that regard. Here’s a perfect example of why: Crutchfield recently ran this email incorporating ratings and reviews (an effective and underused tactic for retail email), and includes content that speaks to various buying modes effectively.

If you’re not familiar with Future Now’s Persuasion Architecture, please catch up on the 4 personality types / buying modalities, and if you’re a new reader of Get Elastic, you may also want to check out Do Your Email Subject Lines Deliver?

Assuming you understand the 4 buying modalities, let’s break down how Crutchfield engages them:

Competitive Customers

• Like to be the first to own a product - respond to new items, featured or best-sellers
• Interested in facts and summaries - without clicking

Crutchfield explains why the items are featured, identifying which is the New Arrival, the Top Seller, the Featured markdown and the Customer Favorite. Great, that saves the competitive time.

However, I think it could be a bit more persuasive. New Arrival, so what? If I’m competitive, I want to know what about owning this model will make me the coolest kid on my block - I’d like to see a special feature about it that the older stock doesn’t have. I believe every pick could use a one or two bullet point summary to get more info before the click.

Spontaneous Customers

• Interested in what other people bought
• Respond to sales, discounts, limited stock and time-limited offers (like day-only sales)
• Respond to free overnight shipping (I can have it tomorrow!)
• Interested in “how many” reviews there are

This entire email is perfect for a spontaneous person who is more likely to make an impulse purchase than other types. To aid the decision making for the spontaneous shopper (if he or she is price sensitive or trusts top rated picks, for example) Crutchfield has made it easy to make a fast decision. Crutchfield creates excitement around the different picks, clearly showing the markdowns and star ratings.

Adding the number of reviews would help to instill trust for all buyer types (as Andy Beal reminds us in Radically Transparent, a 4.5 star rating for 300 reviews is more positive and trustworthy than a 5 star average with 2 reviews).

If Crutchfield upped the ante here and offer free overnight shipping, that would make it extra persuasive to the spontaneous.

Methodical Customers

• Like product details, very thorough in researching a purchase
• Like side-by-side product comparison to make a rational decision
• Trust expert reviews - videos are especially helpful
• May be skeptical of contests, free shipping and returns - what’s the catch? Will read the fine print every time.

The links to the buyer guides and other learning materials on the side are great for methodicals, who want to educate themselves before purchasing anything. The quick links to read reviews are great, because methodicals like me often read the majority of them.

For the product picks, classifying why a model was picked is brilliant. Methodicals lean towards skepticism, so clarifying that one was picked because of a sale vs. a new arrival vs. a customer favorite helps them trust your offers. Methodicals can also see the sale price, original price and dollar savings clearly.

Crutchfield could do even better by replacing the “Featured Product” with “Expert Pick” or “Staff Pick.” “Featured” is a vague adjective. It’s better to be specific about why something is featured, and there are no expert picks in this email, which methodicals would like to see.

Humansitic Customers

• Cares what others have to say
• Appreciates live chat support (or telephone service)

Humanistic shoppers will appreciate the star ratings, Customer Favorite and the “Call us for One on One Advice” messaging with shiny, happy people.

All-in-all, Crutchfield’s is an excellent example of selling to different types of shoppers in one email, without cluttering the creative. Hat tip to Chad White from the Retail Email Blog where I discovered this email.

And don’t forget, persuasion applies to your customer review pages also. Are you optimizing your review content for different buying modalities?

We’ve talked often about the buying modalities made famous by the Eisenberg brothers and Future Now. We did a Webinar about it and a couple blog posts about how different personality types respond to email subject lines and email creative.

Did you know you can also optimize customer reviews for different buyer types? I don’t mean editing customer reviews — rather the way you implement reviews.

Read on for examples on how you can capture the attention, interest and desire of different customer personalities with customer reviews so they’re more likely to take action and buy from your site.

First, I’ll recap the characteristics of each buying mode, and then offer some suggestions and examples.

Competitive Shoppers

• Likes to be the first to own a product - responds to new items, featured or best-sellers
• Interested in facts and summaries - without clicking
• Doesn’t want to dig for information
• More likely to use search box than browse
• Interested in cross-sells and up-sells, but doesn’t want to click through to learn more

Optimizing for Competitive Shoppers:

• Incorporate your best selling products with their ratings and reviews into email creative, home page features, category pages and even product filter and search results.
• Show the most helpful positive review and the most helpful negative review like Amazon.
• Offer a search box for reviews (for example, I want to know if anyone has problems with this on their Mac, so I’d search reviews using “Mac” or “Mac OSX”). Again, Amazon does this.
• Break down star rating by attributes like Delightful Deliveries does.
• Any type of AJAX hover for review detail would help, though I haven’t seen anyone doing this yet.
• Develop a Pluribo-type function that summarizes all the reviews into a few sentences.

Spontaneous Shoppers

• Responds to sales, discounts, limited stock and time-limited offers (like day-only sales)
• Responds to free overnight shipping (I can have it tomorrow!)
• Scans and clicks with less reflection than other types
• Prefers to see product in action (what does this look like on a person?)
• Interested in “how many” reviews there are
• Interested in what other people bought, may respond more to this type of cross-sell

Optimizing for Spontaneous Shoppers:

• Ask for video reviews and customer photos (to show the product in action).
• Break down star rating by attributes, just like for competitives.
• Allow users to sort category page and search results by number of reviews like Buzzillions.

Methodical Shoppers

• Likes product details, very thorough in researching a purchase
• Likes side-by-side product comparison to make a rational decision
• Trusts expert reviews - videos are especially helpful
• May be skeptical of contests, free shipping and returns - what’s the catch? Will read the fine print every time.

Optimizing for Methodical Shoppers:

• Break down star rating by attributes (yes, again!)

• Allow methodicals to hone in on the negative reviews first (remember, we methodicals are skeptical!)
• Provide badges (verified buyer) or community feedback (was this helpful?)
• Start a conversation - like with Bazaarvoice’s Ask and Answer product. Methodicals make slow buying decisions and may be willing to wait.
• Show videos by experts. This would supplement your user reviews. You can find Cnet reviews for free on YouTube (example).
• Rate attributes - more detail

Humanistic Shoppers

• Cares what others have to say
• Appreciates live chat support (or telephone service)
• Will forward to friend, share product experience and experience on your website with friends
• More likely to contribute customer review content
• Looks for the perfect gift, use gift finders and wishlists

Optimizing for Humanistic Shoppers:

• Allow to sort by top rated in category and search result pages.
• Let customers vote for reviews as helpful or not helpful (encourage participation).
• Incorporate user photos and videos.
• Include option for reviewers to add their own headshots to their reviews (haven’t seen this done, see “concept” below).
• Facilitate product discussions (Amazon).
• Include a Pluribo-like visual representation of overall positive or negative sentiment.

My concept, below:

I’m really impressed with Pluribo, a Firefox plug-in that summarizes Amazon reviews (currently only for select categories).

How Pluribo Works

In a nutshell, Pluribo collects millions of reviews from Amazon and other review sources, scanning the text and pulling out phrases that express consumer opinions like “easy to install,” or “I was disappointed by the battery life” using natural language data mining. Pluribo calls this “sentiment analysis” and even assigns a numerical score to various features about a product, so long as there are enough reviews on each feature to be statistically significant. Not only that, the algorithm favors reviews that have been voted more “helpful” by other customers and filters poorly voted and redundant reviews.

Here’s an example of a Pluribo summary on Amazon:

Despite reservations with the low battery life and size, reviewers enjoy the video mode, sharp zoom, and large display. If you don’t care about the battery life and size, it’s a decent option.

Pluribo compares extracted feature scores for a product against others in its category and presents them in a visual way:

And hovering over the underlined features in the summary produces something like this:

Here’s a bit more about Pluribo, the company. If you have the budget, you might want to contact them about developing similar technology for your site’s reviews or product descriptions? Hopefully they will release an API - I’d love to see what kind of tools can be built from natural language data mining and summarization technologies!

Patent-pending summary technology

Pluribo faces the challenge of continuously aggregating a massive quantity of opinions, mining their textual content, extracting key statistical trends, and summarizing the results in natural language. What’s more, we are committed to doing this in a fully automated way, which reduces human bias and allows for greater speed and scale.

To meet this end-to-end challenge, we developed a novel suite of natural language data mining and summarization techniques. These techniques are encapsulated in our summary engine, and are covered under a U.S. patent application. Given the right data, the summary engine can rapidly summarize opinions on nearly any topic. At present, we are applying the summary engine mainly to product review data from Amazon.com. If there is demand, we may soon open our API to developers working in other topic areas.

Make sure to check into Get Elastic on Monday, I’ll be posting more about customer reviews and how to optimize them for usability and conversion. Don’t miss it!

A while back I blogged about a Webinar I attended presented by Lauren Freedman of The Etailing Group and Power Reviews in which Power Reviews’ Jay Schaffer provided some tips and examples from retailers on how to ask for customer reviews post-purchase.

I was recently forwarded this email from Amazon calling for customer reviews - not just textual, but customer photo and video reviews.

Dear {customer},
Thank you for your recent purchase from Amazon.com.

We invite you to submit a review for the product you purchased or share an image that would benefit other customers. Your input will help customers choose the best products on Amazon.com.

It’s easy to submit a review–just click the Review this product button next to the product.

Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, 60-Minutes (Black) (Purchased on 06/03/2008)
by Pure Digital

…or share an image.

New on Amazon! Grab your video camera or webcam and add video to your customer review. Click on ‘Review this product’ above to upload a video or find a different product to review.

Need help?

If clicking the button above doesn’t work, you can review your product by following these simple steps:

Go to Amazon.com and navigate to the product.
In the “Customer Reviews” section, click the “Create your own review” button.

We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you’d rather not receive future e-mails of this sort from Amazon.com, please opt-out here.

Please note that product prices and availability are limited time offers and are subject to change. Prices and availability were accurate at the time this newsletter was sent; however, they may differ from those you see when you visit Amazon.com.

(c) 2008 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Amazon, Amazon.com and the Amazon.com logo and 1-Click are registered trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

Amazon.com, 1200 12th Ave. S., Suite 1200, Seattle, WA 98144-2734.

Reference 9702130

Please note that this message was sent to the following e-mail address: emailaddress@emailservice.com

Here’s what Amazon does right:

• Thank customer for the purchase.

• Mention submitting a review benefits fellow customers.
• Give clear directions how to participate.
• Give options - text, images or video.
• Show an image of the product to jog the memory.
• Offer a plan B if the link malfunctions for whatever reason.
• Offer an opt-out of future review requests.
• Remind customers that prices are subject to change, so they don’t feel jilted when the item is $5 cheaper than when they bought it.

Earlier this week we discussed why enlarged images, alternate product views and showing products in context can help conversion.

But what about “user generated images” (or the friendlier term “customer submitted photos”)? Are they just social media / Web 2.0 hype or do they really improve customer experience?

Customer images may be used to help sell product (like customer reviews complement product descriptions) or just build community (if the retailer has a community section). Either way, customer submitted photos have their challenges:

• Image quality can vary from submission to submission. Dark or fuzzy images really don’t add value and can hurt the consistency and professionalism of your site.

• Attracting images can be a challenge - only a small percentage of customers will take the time to create a picture and send it to you.
• Moderating images for appropriateness and relevance takes extra time.

Let’s look at some examples of how online retailers are using customer submitted photos:

Product Pages

You may have noticed that Amazon shows customer images along with its own product images:

You can roll over the thumbnails to view larger versions and even read notes that users have left on them:

This is helpful as a customer review - the color on the web is not the color in the box.

Customer Reviews

Power Reviews allows photo attachments to reviews, as spotted on Uncommon Goods:

(Sometimes customers pick useless tags…)

What I like about this approach is it’s seamless. Good review content is not separated into text vs. image reviews. On Amazon, a very helpful tip like the color is actually more mint than neon green could be missed unless you read reviews AND view pictures. Plus, it’s less programming work when your reviews product has image upload already available.

Customer Testimonials

Modern Line Furniture has a testimonials page with customer images linked to from the home page (though the call-to-action gets a bit lost in the home page clutter).

The testimonials page links through to the product pages for items featured in the room. Yay! There’s hope for a transaction!

Community / Resource Section

Some retailers actually have a community component to their e-stores, like David’s Bridal. Customers can upload pictures from their weddings, and brides-to-be can surf them to get inspiration for dress styles and color schemes.

While this is a good idea, the community section is kind of a dead end — there is no link back to products or tools that facilitate a purchase decision like shop-by-color.

Alternative Energy Store has a similar community gallery, but without links to products or buying guides, it’s not very helpful.

With links to products, the gallery could be a social tool for product discovery. I just haven’t come across a retailer who’s doing that well (community gallery that aids shopping). Have you? Please share your find in the comments.

Interview on ratings and reviews / social commerce with Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice from the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

See More IRCE 2008 Interviews…

We conducted 16 interviews with various ecommerce vendors at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

1. How to choose ecommerce software and technology - Bernardine Wu, CEO, FitForCommerce
2. How retailers can sell more online with social commerce - Jay Shaffer, VP Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Powerreviews
3. Hackersafe is now McAfee Secure - Rich Murphy, McAfee
4. The benefits of RIA’s for ecommerce stores - Graeme Grant, COO, Allurent
5. Why online retailers should be blogging - Darren Tomey, VP Sales, Compendium
6. How do ratings and reviews help online retailers? - Sam Decker, Chief Marketing Officer, Bazaarvoice
7. When bad people ruin good online marketing - Ryan Douglas, PlumberSurplus.com
8. Direct international shoppers to local sites automatically - Justin Skogen, Director, Enterprise Sales, DigitalElement
9. The state of affiliate marketing in online retail - Larry Joseloff, VP Content, Shop.org
10. Multi-store retailing - Roy Rubin, CEO, Varien
11. How online stores use images to improve customer experience - Stephen Kristy, CEO, LiquidPixels
12. Comparison Shopping Engine Tips for Online Retailers - Michael Lambert, CEO, MerchantAdvantage
13. Link building strategies for Internet retail SEO - Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
14. Direct to consumer manufacturers can reduce channel conflict - Ed Stevens, CEO, Shopatron
15. New eCommerce service lets you shop online with a friend - John Jackson, CEO, DecisionStep
16. Product recommendation engines improve customer experience - Scott Doan, VP Sales, Strands

Subscribe to the Get Elastic RSS feed or by email at the top of the page to be alerted when the remaining interviews become available.

Interview on how ecommerce sites should be selling based on use, not just features with the hilarious Jay Shaffer of Powerreviews at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

See More IRCE 2008 Interviews…

We conducted 16 interviews with various ecommerce vendors at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

1. How to choose ecommerce software and technology - Bernardine Wu, CEO, FitForCommerce
2. How retailers can sell more online with social commerce - Jay Shaffer, VP Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Powerreviews
3. Hackersafe is now McAfee Secure - Rich Murphy, McAfee
4. The benefits of RIA’s for ecommerce stores - Graeme Grant, COO, Allurent
5. Why online retailers should be blogging - Darren Tomey, VP Sales, Compendium
6. How do ratings and reviews help online retailers? - Sam Decker, Chief Marketing Officer, Bazaarvoice
7. When bad people ruin good online marketing - Ryan Douglas, PlumberSurplus.com
8. Direct international shoppers to local sites automatically - Justin Skogen, Director, Enterprise Sales, DigitalElement
9. The state of affiliate marketing in online retail - Larry Joseloff, VP Content, Shop.org
10. Multi-store retailing - Roy Rubin, CEO, Varien
11. How online stores use images to improve customer experience - Stephen Kristy, CEO, LiquidPixels
12. Comparison Shopping Engine Tips for Online Retailers - Michael Lambert, CEO, MerchantAdvantage
13. Link building strategies for Internet retail SEO - Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
14. Direct to consumer manufacturers can reduce channel conflict - Ed Stevens, CEO, Shopatron
15. New eCommerce service lets you shop online with a friend - John Jackson, CEO, DecisionStep
16. Product recommendation engines improve customer experience - Scott Doan, VP Sales, Strands

Subscribe to the Get Elastic RSS feed or by email at the top of the page to be alerted when the remaining interviews become available.

To follow up on yesterday’s post on using customer reviews to improve product descriptions, which recommends you use Buzzillions‘ Review Snapshot feature to scan the pros, cons and best uses of products as reported by customers…

Buzzillions has another cool feature you can use to brainstorm customer personas.

Simply navigate to a product category that you carry, and check out the “See Reviews From These Types of Users” box.

Examples:

Golf

Retail Store Supplies

GPS Devices

To get inside your persona’s head, you can scan reviews and pick out the ones written by type of customer (unfortunately you can’t just view reviews by customer type once you click through, rather you see all the reviews):

You can then apply your customer insight to product pages, email campaigns, buyer guides and other marketing activities.

*Want more information on personas? Check out FutureNow’s GrokDotCom and the Invesp blog, or check out our webinars 7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Holiday Conversion Rate and Jon Stewart or Oprah: What’s Your Website Personality?

Customer reviews certainly help shoppers, but they are not substitutes for weak or generic product descriptions. Unique product descriptions help your search engine optimization, help overcome your customer FUDDs and ultimately sell more product!

I want to share a few tips for creating unique, compelling product page copy using customer review content - even when your site has few or no reviews.

Death to Stock Manufacturer Product Descriptions

SEO and Duplicate Content

Our example is the “LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set.” This product is carried by most toy retailers, and many are just using the stock product description from the manufacturer:

Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading. Nobody goes hungry for learning with this set of 26 colorful easy-grip magnetic letters and magnetic letter reader that attaches securely to your fridge. Each letter talks, sings and teaches letter names, letter sounds and learning songs. Put a letter into the reader to hear its name, its sound or a fun phonics song. Your kids might not eat their vegetables, but with the Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set they can learn to spell them. What it Teaches: * Letter names * Letter sounds * Learning songs

Nothing wrong with the description itself, it’s actually very clever. But typing “Your fridge door is the perfect place to develop a taste for reading” into Google delivers 1,520 results, which tells us Google has indexed that many pages using this phrase. The danger to sites using stock descriptions is they may not appear in search results due to the duplicate content filter.

Writing a unique description, or at least modifying it so it’s not word-for-word is a better approach, especially to capture long-tail search traffic.

Address Fears, Uncertainties, Doubts and Deal-breakers

Manufacturer’s descriptions are typically written before the product is sold to the general public. Copywriters don’t necessarily have enough customer research to answer these questions:

• Who buys this item and why?

• Did the product live up to expectations?
• How long did the product last?
• What unexpected uses do customers discover for the product?
• What’s the worse thing about this product?
• Would the customer recommend it to people like themselves?

But you have access to free market research that addresses these concerns - customer reviews. Plus, you can identify common FUDDs - fears, uncertainties, doubts and dealbreakers that can help you write more persuasive copy, establish trust with customers and convert comparison shoppers - even if yours is not the lowest price.

How to Use Customer Reviews to Improve Product Copy

Start with your featured products, best sellers, highest margin or seasonal products.

Custom copywriting does take time, especially when you’re performing thorough customer research by reading a number of reviews. Choose items you expect will get most mileage for your time investment.

Tip: Check out Amazon’s Bestseller lists by navigating to any category and clicking the Bestsellers link!

Tap into the largest customer review bases for each product.

This could be Amazon, Epinions, Rate-it-All or any other review community. You might want to Google the product itself “{product} + reviews” and start with the first result.

I like using Amazon because I’ve found it not only has a large number of reviews, but the review quality is usually very good. There are great sort tools to help you hone in by star-rating, rank by most-helpful or even search within reviews for keywords. I do find the search feature’s precision to be lacking. If you want to find reviews with the phrase “would not recommend this for” it will match single words, and plurals / alternate endings for the word “recommend.”

Example: Using our LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Set as our case, here’s how you can leverage Amazon…

From the product page, scroll, scroll and scroll some more until you find the “See All Product Description” link.

Hello! This product has won some awards.

• Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, Gold Seal and Snap Award, 2003

• Parenting 2003 Toys of the Year Award
• Toy Wishes All Star, Preschool Category, 2003
• Toy of the Year, Nick Jr.com, 2003

These are strong value propositions. Use this to your advantage in home page merchandising zones, PPC copy, email marketing as well as product page copy.

You won’t necessarily find awards for every product, but who knows what gems you’ll find.

Read reviews.

You don’t have to read ALL the reviews, just a handful of reviews voted most helpful buy the community and a few of the lowest rated. As you scan, clip quotes that stand out to you. Look for:

• Product strengths: “What I love most about this is that because it is magnetic, we do not seem to lose them unlike the wooden puzzle ones my 8 year old used when he was younger.”

• Benefits to the owner, gift giver or secondary users: “It’s great that it’s in the kitchen too so I can cook or clean while she plays.”
• Unexpected uses: “…you can use your washer and/or dryer. We do a lot of learning while I do laundry.”
• Natural cross-sell or upsell opportunities: “Since any magnet can damage your TV, VCR, and other electronic devices, we purchased a large magnetic board for her room, and that helps us encourage her to keep her magnetic items in there.”
• Cautions: “WARNING about the magnet. Keep at least 6″ away from pacemakers, and avoid contact with magnetic computer media, including floppy disks, Zip disks, removable Hard Disk Drives, Televisions, and Computer Video Monitors, other magnetic media including credit cards, ID badges…”

Pay closest attention to negative reviews.

Should you discover (as in this example) that the product is often defective, you need to address this both in your copy and in your selling policies.

Are you willing and able to offer the assurance of free return shipping on defective products? It could be the deciding factor on whether a comparison shopper chooses you or your competition. You could add copy like:

“Though most customers are extremely satisfied with this item, a small percentage of customers report the product does not play the correct letter sounds for some letters. In the event that your product does not work as expected, we will gladly offer free return shipping and send you a new set.”

Use Buzzillions.com

Buzzillions is a popular customer reviews aggregator from the folks at Power Reviews. One feature it has that I haven’t found elsewhere is a “Review Snapshot” that gives you a list of Pros, Cons and Best Uses as mentioned by customers.

Under the pros tab you’ll find fantastic adjectives to use in your copy.
The cons tab lists fears you must address in your copy, or gives you ideas for cross-sells. Hard to clean? Suggest a cleaner. No storage container? Suggest a suitable container.
Best uses helps you develop “Recommended For” copy. You can also add these products to the appropriate gift finder tools, or add product tags if your site uses them.

You may discover different ways of gleaning from customer reviews than the ones mentioned here. The takeaway here is that you tap into the consumer conversation that’s freely available to you, and consider how you can leverage it to improve your product copy. If you want to take this to the next level and use customer reviews to market to the sexes, check out Holly Buchanan’s post Using Customer Reviews to Pick Up Men, Women.

Facebook recenly released a guidebook for businesses titled: Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing. Don’t get too excited about the title, just because you set up a Fan Page for your business and buy a few social ads does not mean you’ll unleash a profit-virus, or even make a ripple in the pond. But the guide does help you understand what Facebook has made available for you and how to get a Page all set up.

Considering the price (free) it certainly isn’t a bad idea to put one up. Especially since any of your fans can set up a page on your behalf without anyone knowing it wasn’t you, so it’s a good idea to be the first out of the gate so there’s no confusion and you can control your introductory message and the way your Page functions yourself. Other users of Facebook could still set up unauthorized Pages, but at least the early fans won’t be usurped by the unofficial Page.

Get Reviewed on Facebook

Unlike Facebook Groups and Sponsored Groups, Facebook Pages are like people — they can add applications. One application that is useful for online retailers and other businesses is Reviews. Reviews can only be added to Pages, not individual profiles, so you won’t find it in your regular applications search, but you can view the application page through the link.

Continue Reading:
Get Your E-Store Reviewed on Facebook »