After reading the litany of articles, indicating 2009 is finally the year to add product reviews and you’re rightfully feeling proud of yourself that you already have a review system. But you have the sneaking suspicion that you could be doing more to increase your review volume. Well, if you haven’t already deployed a post-purchase review solicitation email in place, you’re only one trigger email away from increasing your review volume ten-fold or more – the case study below saw a 1,600% lift in review volume. And if you don’t have a review system, read up on our “make versus buy” review on, well, reviews, next week.

So the question is, how do we improve this great feature that we all use to provide an even more valuable contribution? The answer is easy enough: deploy an automated post-purchase trigger email campaign.

What is a post-purchase trigger email?

Simply this means, firing out a trigger-based email to every customer several days or weeks after they’ve ordered from you. For most markets, you should be able to manage with sending one email for every order, soliciting a review for every product purchased.

When do I send my post-purchase trigger email?

When to send it is a matter of determining how quickly a consumer can get your product out and use it. And because, meaningful reviews are prized over raw quantity it’s also an important question. For consumer electronics you can safely assume your product will be opened immediately and can schedule the email to send 3-4 days after arriving. If for example, you sell mountain bikes, it may be worthwhile to schedule the email to run 2-3 weeks after purchase to allow your consumer to the trails. This needn’t require a complex analysis, guestimate a good delay – you can always test and refine the send. Whatever you do though, do not send it before your customer has received the product.

Building a post-purchase email

Your interactive department can stew for days on what the creative should look for review solicitation, but frankly, you can start with your order confirmation page and just change the copy and add a big button to “Review this Product” next to each product. Next, you coordinate with your IT team to schedule a new email job based around your delay rules.

Case Study

The retailer in this case study had a review program that was operating with a monthly average of a 150 reviews per month through all of 2008. In realizing, that they had a double that figure in orders per day it was readily evident that an update to the review marketing plan was needed. The plan for 2009 boiled down to three key initiatives:

1. Overhaul the technical review system to be nicer for customers (Executed in January of 2009)
2. Announce the new review system to customers via a one-time email (Deployed February)
3. Deploy a post-purchase email program (Deployed March)

Referencing the graph below, February saw a nice 317% lift compared to the 2008 average as a result of a customer-wide email announcement asking customers to review their recently purchased products. However, that figure receded fairly heavily in March without a supporting email campaign. Then with the launch of the post-purchase trigger email in April, we have to completely recalibrate the graph to account for the 1,600% increase in review volume (which is more than all of 2008 added up). The lesson here: a one-time announcement will produce a small burst of activity, but creating a sustainable boom in review volume requires a post-purchase trigger campaign.

So the first thing that stood out is of course the skyrocketing review count, but the interesting byproduct with the trigger campaign is that the proportion of 5-star reviews is now higher than when reviews were passively submitted.

Recognizing that there is some seasonality to the business in this case study, let’s compare April 2008 against April 2009, the latter of which enjoyed the benefit of the automatic review solicitation email program.

In soliciting reviews, we’ve seen a decent increase in both 5-star reviews and 4- and 5-star review combinations with a sizable reduction in 1- and 2-star ratings. Without having causal data to support a position, I think a reasonable theory is that in a passive review model, the people that tend to write a review are pretty disgruntled, while happy customers think nothing beyond the purchase.

All of the other methods to drive review volume (contests, notoriety, etc) simply cannot compete with the mass of reviews this simple trigger campaign drives. The old marketing adage, “you can’t sell what you don’t show” can be retooled here, “you can’t get reviews if you don’t ask for them”. Go get asking.

Tags: Bazaarvoice, Post-purchase Email, PowerReviews, Reviews, Social Listening, User-Generated Content

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Exposé. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.