Customer Review Study from Unbounce

[Dino]

Though the study was conducted with Amazon, there is some good advice here that is applicable to our clients in places like Google, Yelp and others.

The article talks about linguistic style and emotional tone, which is good for us as marketers. We understand it and can develop strategies and suggestions for our campaigns, but for our clients, it may be over their head in most cases.

The best advice I?ve found is to have clients ask their customers to be as specific as possible about the service they received. This also helps to get keywords in the review without stuffing or writing fake content, which is always a bad idea.

Are Excessively Positive Customer Reviews Hurting Your Conversion Rates? [Study] | Unbounce

 

[Jon Hall]

This is great, I had missed this one. It's a constant struggle convincing business owners that review content matters more than star ratings and that savvy consumers don't trust glowing, 5-star reviews anyway. Fake and fraudulent reviews are everywhere, and consumers know it. Also, extreme opinions are rarely the most persuasive.

This is not the first research study to show this, but I like the actionable insights teased out by the Unbounce article. Another recent study found that readers of mixed reviews actually formed more positive judgments of a business than those exposed to positive reviews alone: Coker, B., ?Seeking the Opinions of Others Online: Evidence of Evaluation Overshoot.? Advances in Consumer Research, 2011. 39: p. 347-353.

 

[Greg Schueler]

That is a great read.
(I missed it too the 1st time around).

I find myself,as a consumer, doing the same thing it mentions;
Reading the actual content of a review, regardless of the star rating.

I see many business owners only focusing on their star rating, regardless what the review says or how deep the review goes.

(Kind of like, 'where do I rank?', as opposed to 'how many deals did I close?' mentality)