How to Use Reviews in Your Marketing Strategies
Make no mistake, customer reviews can do wonders for your marketing campaigns.
When properly used, you can solidify your brand image as an authority in your industry, generate more website traffic, and even improve your conversions drastically.
The best part is, integrating customer reviews in your marketing campaigns isn’t even rocket science. Using a free project management platform alone can give you the level of organization you need to collaborate with your marketing team efficiently to ensure you’re using the right customer reviews on the right marketing channel.
To give you more ideas on how to integrate customer reviews into your marketing strategies, we shared several tips below.
Table of Contents
1. Place customer reviews on marketing emails.
Marketers regard email as among the best channels to gain high returns — yielding $44 for every dollar spent. Given that favorable ROI, these statistics show that placing customer reviews in your emails is one of the best email marketing practices around. Doing this supercharges your click-through and conversion rates, not to mention build your authority.
So it’s an awesome idea to highlight what your shoppers have experienced with your store. Doing that tells your subscribers what they can expect should they buy from you, too.
Here’s how Esqido Lashes displayed customer reviews in their promotional email:
Image Source: Esqido Lashes.
Esqido Lashes added their buyers’ five-star ratings with concise, compelling titles and descriptions. This gives subscribers a quick but impressive read of their customer-certified premium product quality, convincing them to buy.
If you want to explore more ways to insert positive customer reviews into your promotional emails, check out
2. Leverage positive reviews for your search ads.
Search engines do not only rank you according to how excellently you’ve optimized your pages, but they also track what others say about your business.
Reviews show your potential customers how you’ve matched your buyers’ expectations. Gathering new, authentic content regularly even helps you get Rich Snippets and Google seller ratings, enhancing your exposure on search results.
For example, I Googled “finding nemo plush toys” and got these results:
Image Source: Google.com.
The stars, rating, and number of reviews provides practical information to searching customers. They make your store stick out compared with your competitors and develop trust early on (even before the visitors navigate through your site).
To enable rich snippets and highlight customer reviews of your store on search results, you can use our plugin. It lets you add product reviews to rich snippets in just a few clicks.
Painless, right?
Just go to your Judge.me admin dashboard, click Settings > Advanced > Rich Snippets, and toggle on the two options: Aggregate Rating Microdata snippets and Aggregate Rating JSON-LD snippets.
Immediately, the plug-in includes SEO Rich Snippets in your Judge.me widget. If you want to preview your snippet, click Verify found in that same section.
What’s more, if you have another existing SEO app integrated with your Judge.me plug-in, your rich snippets are updated instantly.
3. Display testimonials on your social media channels.
You have a limitless number of options when displaying your buyers’ testimonials on social media channels.
For example, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are top social media platforms where shoppers can share their experiences with your products and services.
Gather these positive reviews and post them on your store’s social media accounts to influence other social users and followers.
For instance, you could use a customer service chat software that lets you configure it to ask for product reviews or feedback automatically after chat conversations. This streamlines collecting testimonials.
Retweet, share them on Facebook, or repost your customers’ Instagram stories, for instance. Reposting these pieces of user-generated content (UGC), especially if they attach photos and videos, increases your reliability and authenticity in why customers love your store.
4. Share users’ stories on your videos.
Statistics by video marketing platform Wyzowl show that 2 out of 3 people are more likely to buy after watching a testimonial video explaining how a business helped a customer like them.
This evidence tells us how people strongly consider videos of real shared stories and use them to define their purchasing decisions.
Take a look at how MailChimp leveraged their user’s life-changing stories on their videos:
Image Source: Youtube.com.
Natural beauty line Seaweed Bath Co. shares that they didn’t have much digital marketing experience when they started out. But thanks to MailChimp’s custom email template features, they said they can send engaging emails with news, promotions, and feedback surveys. This resulted in increased sales, more solid customer relationships, and a thriving community.
By sharing this real-life testimonial of MailChimp’s concrete impact to their clients, the platform can inspire their viewers to sign up and experience the same life-changing effect on their businesses.
Also, ensure you don’t miss opportunities to include your customer reviews on your videos to support your marketing initiatives by organizing your workflows and tasks.
Use a project management software to streamline creating your marketing videos and other projects.
With a project management software, you bolster your team’s ability to work together with your customers in sharing their videos with your community.
5. Showcase customer experiences on high-traffic pages.
A 2017 Brightlocal survey reveals that almost 85% of shoppers believe reviews as much as personal recommendations. This same study discovered that consumers explore up to 10 reviews before finalizing their buying decision.
This means: buyers want to learn from other people’s stories about the quality of products and services before jumping into that tempting purchase.
So, how do you leverage social proof to advertise your online store and create memorable shopping experiences?
Here’s the answer: build trust by displaying your existing customers’ positive experience with your store on frequently visited pages.
Use data from marketing analytics software programs to determine those pages and optimize the on-site publication of your reviews.
These places can be your homepage, product pages, landing pages, checkout, pricing pages, and other high-traffic places on your website.
Posting reviews here exhibits your transparency and provides buyers the needed motivation for completing their purchase.
Take this example by Makeup for Melanin Girls of posting reviews on their homepage:
Image Source: MFMG Cosmetics.
The shop publishes ratings on categorical product pages, such as for Eyes, Lips, and Face:
Image Source: MFMG Cosmetics.
When you click on a specific item, you will also see product ratings and customer feedback that you can share and like or dislike.
Image Source: MFMG Cosmetics.
It even invites you to write a review!
Image Source: MFMG Cosmetics
Doing all these amplifies your customer engagement and enables you to capture feedback for every item.
Additional tip: Make it easy for customers to leave reviews and for you and your team to include the testimonials in your marketing content.
For instance, you could create an app that lets customers leave reviews regardless of which channels they’re interacting with, such as your social media pages, website, or email.
The app will then gather all these reviews in a central hub and recommend where to best display these testimonials to support your marketing efforts.
If you’re using Azure DevOps, use Backrightup to automate running data, codes, and repository backups. This streamlines keeping critical business codes secure and adding a layer of protection to prevent data loss in case of malware, server crashes, and other issues.
Creating your very own app works because you can tailor-fit the app’s features to your business needs.
6. Present shoppers’ good feedback on third-party review sites.
Imagine your target consumers typing in your business name on Google or Bing.
If they’re seeking reviews, it’s likely they’ll find well-known third-party sites such as Yelp, Google My Business, amazon, and G2 Crowd appear among the top results.
You’d ideally want to remain active on those websites to increase your customer trust and engagement. Do that by thanking your customers for their feedback and responding to complaints, and resolving issues as much as you can.
Keep tabs also on these sites since some of your best reviews can appear there. If you frequently check them out, you will get fresh material you can incorporate with your other marketing strategies.
Start using reviews to boost your marketing strategies.
These are some of the most successful methods to capitalize on your customer reviews to promote your brand. Using reviews in almost any marketing strategy turbo-boosts your campaigns’ performance.
Keep in mind that telling people yourself how great your brand is won’t always propel them to say “yes” to your offers — but other customers and their personal connections can convince them. Use that to your advantage with testimonials, ratings, and reviews.
Your store’s bottom line will surely thank you one day. *wink*