How to Leverage Stunning Customer Reviews to Increase Revenue
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Customer reviews can be your most valuable asset, but only if you leverage them correctly.
Most businesses simply add the option to leave a review on their product page in hopes satisfied customers will provide a five-star rating and be on their way.
Even worse, other companies merely trigger a post-checkout email requesting a review, but don't do anything with it.
Customer reviews are the most sought-after form of user generated content.
With one, you can create new marketing assets that will easily convert more customers. Don't let your positive customer reviews go to waste.
In this post, we'll examine four ways you can leverage customer reviews to increase revenue.
Customer Review Strategy #1: Social Media Content
I'll let you in on a secret: you don't always have to be the one selling your products.
Customers that share their positive experiences with your company can be a more compelling marketing message than the stuffy, corporate voice on your social account.
For many customers, a purchasing decision is based on the business profile, seller rating, online reputation and most importantly—positive customer reviews.
Prospective customers want to see dozens of happy customers already using the product paired with glowing business reviews.
They might browse a customer review site to assess a business' online reputation. That's why you should get in front of it and share customer testimonials on your social media accounts.
Success stories, reviews and first-hand experiences make excellent social media content. The positive experiences you deliver for customers deserve to be amplified. Customer reviews provide social proof—a validation that your product has been tested and recommended.
In fact, customer reviews and other customer-generated content can serve as the foundation for an engaging social media strategy. Why? Well, prospective customers are actively searching for these reviews. Why not publish them where they are spending their time?
In the past year, search inquiries for "reviews"" have increased by 35%, while inquiries that include the word "best"" have increased by 80%. Your buyers want to know which products work and how they can purchase the one that is best.
Customer reviews are powerful, so brands shouldn't limit reviews to just their website.
In order to expand their reach, companies should package customer reviews into bite-size social media assets. But how?
Social Selling with Customer Reviews
The best way to get customer reviews is simply by asking for them.
Whether you collect them on your website or a third-party review site like Google, G2 or Trustpilot, your customers' words can be repackaged into social media assets and used in a campaign.
This will extend the brand's reach, raising awareness on the various social channels.
If you're repackaging the review, consider tagging the person featured in hopes they will share it with their feeds. If they do, this will expose the brand to an entirely new audience by someone in their network that they trust.
Buffer, a social media scheduling platform, actively shares positive reviews in their social media feed. Look at this tweet from Nicola Le Roux:
Nicolas shares his enthusiasm for purchasing Buffer and the usability of its API. Buffer could have advertised their new improvements, but would it have been as meaningful as this compelling review? Likely not.
Buffer also showcases their social reviews on their website, aggregating content that was posted on social media sites featuring with the hashtag #bufferlove.
This is a unique way to unify rich user generated content that is produced in real-time and share it with your audience on your website.
Often, companies will repurpose reviews from their site and share them on social media. This is the inverse of that, and it is a compelling way to connect your social content with your site.
By publishing customer reviews on your social media feed, you'll share social proof for why potential customers should trust your brand.
Customer Review Strategy #2: Video Testimonials
One of the challenges businesses have with customer reviews is simply bringing them to life.
Not everyone wants to merely read what one customer thought about the company's product or service. Sometimes it's beneficial to hear or see why a customer loves a product.
That's why video testimonials are another mechanism to get the point across about the value that the company provides.
Research shows that visual and audio content like video testimonials can have lasting impact on brand recall as well.
With just audio content, a consumer will remember 10% of that information three days later. However, if you pair that content with a meaningful visual, they're likely to remember 65% of the information three days later.
A prospective customer will arrive at their purchase decision after digesting information from a variety of sources. These may include consumer reviews, personal recommendations, and general feedback.
Businesses should never doubt the impact that a good review or a negative online review will have on their business. Instead, they should be proactively sharing positive video testimonials about their brand.
Video testimonials are more in-depth than traditional reviews and focus on specific use cases. In addition, they can be more credible when you see who is giving the review.
By filming someone, you can pick up on their authentic reaction to the product and learn from their enthusiasm and non verbal expressions. You can assess the person who is using the product and decide if they are credible or not.
But how can you make a compelling video testimonial?
Crafting Your Video Testimonial Narrative
Every good video testimonial tells a succinct story.
It starts with the main character who is the person giving the review. From there, it expands to the major plot action—the problem that the main character used your product to solve. Finally, it ends with a resolution and a happy ending with a satisfied customer.
It is best to get as detailed as you can with your testimonial. Work with an existing customer that has a very specific example to share about why your product helped their company so much.
Take a look at this video testimonial example for Explainify. John Lite, Director of Performance Marketing of Plated, shares why Explainify made such a positive impact on their business.
He shares how Explainify's illustrators and designers helped bring Plated's mission, product and brand to life.
Pairing his words with examples of Explainify's work helps display just how impactful Explainify was as a partner. It wouldn't have been enough to say, "Explainify made great videos for Plated."
You need a short video to share why and showcase their work. This accomplishes that.
Customer Review Strategy #3: Webinars
Written reviews hosted on your website are compelling.
But imagine if the customer who left the review shared it directly with your prospects in real-time?
There is simply no escaping it. There's something magical about a customer that turns into an advocate for your brand.
With an advocate, you have the power of an additional salesperson on your team who will share their fandom for your product with their own social circles and anyone who will listen. This is a powerful marketing asset for your team that you must leverage.
You need to harness the power of their words and let them share their thoughts with your potential customers. One easy way to do this is by hosting a webinar featuring them.
With a webinar featuring your brand advocate, you are essentially giving them a megaphone and platform to share their positive experience and overall endorsement of your company with interested, prospective buyers.
They get a chance to share their business' success, while you get the chance to deploy one of your strongest marketing assets in the form of authentic social proof.
Webinars are effective lead generation assets that can connect businesses, customers and prospects more closely together.
By including a current customer (who has already left a glowing review) on your webinar, they can share their experience with your company in a compelling way.
Webinars can be intimate and personal. Customers can share their successful campaigns and showcase how your product helped impact their business.
This can be even more impactful than a simple text-only review on your website. They're impactful, too. The average webinar has 260 attendees, and most convert between 5-20%.
But what are the ingredients of a good webinar?
Making Your Customer the Star
There are a countless number of ways to put on a webinar. However, some of the most successful ones include three specific things.
In order to produce a quality webinar, we'd recommend you focus on these three aspects:
- Customer - someone to join you in your webinar and share their expertise
- Insights - valuable, prescriptive steps, data and examples
- Production-value - clear sound, strong wifi connection and crisp visuals
The webinar is built around the customer and the insights. For example, Hootsuite did an entire webinar called "Transforming Social: How Ericcsson got it right."
Of course, this focused on Ericcsson and their social strategies.
Anita Veszeli, Global Head of Social Engagement and Advocacy at Ericcsson led the webinar with a Hootsuite representative, sharing her strategies and insights with listeners.
With this combination, viewers learn from someone who is actively in the trenches deploying a social media strategy, and Hootsuite benefits from her endorsement of their product.
Customer Review Strategy #4: Landing Pages
No ice cream sundae is complete without a cherry on top, and no landing page is complete without a customer review included.
Reviews on landing pages will act as a form of social proof, nudging prospects towards conversion.
You can use both text reviews and video testimonials on your landing pages to help convert potential customers.
Including a review at the bottom of the landing page near the call-to-action can be the accelerant that the prospect needs to sign up for more information.
Consumers are looking for views—especially on a landing page. It adds a bit more trust and credibility to your offering, especially for someone who just found out about your business.
More than 83% of consumers trust a business with a user-generated review prominently featured on their landing page.
Taking things one step further, approximately 74% of people would contact a business after seeing a review on a landing page.
But where exactly on the landing page should they live? How should they be formatted?
Let's dive in.
Increasing Your Landing Page Conversions
When adding your review to your landing page, it should complement the current content.
In other words, you don't want it to distract you from your main call-to-action.
Traditionally, consumer reviews find themselves a home on a landing page towards the bottom. It's the last nudge that a consumer gets, pushing them towards conversion.
Take a look at Shopify's landing page:
Their customer review is featured right above their "Start a Free Trial"" button. It is succinct and paves the way towards a quick conversion for the shopper that is viewing the page.
By leveraging customer reviews on landing pages, businesses can increase their conversion rates and improve the success of their digital marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Make engaging social media assets highlighting your value.
Publish video testimonials to engage prospects further and delight them with multimedia.
Include customers who have previously left reviews in an upcoming webinar, so they can tell their store in real-time.
Add a boost of social proof with a review on your landing page.
By deploying these tactics, you’ll stretch the value of a standard text-only review and amplify its reach and overall effectiveness.
Start repurposing your current reviews and sourcing new video testimonial content today! Reach out to Testimonial Hero to ramp up your video content.
Need a bit more information before you reach out? Listen to our customers. Check out our reviews on G2 to see what some of our customers are saying about our work.
Dan shares on:
Brokers no longer need to spend hours each week tagging conversations manually and adding notes after each call—ZRA does all that for them.
During customer calls, brokers, salespeople, and customer success agents can easily see AI-generated notes from previous interactions and continue the conversation, whether it involves offering the customer more information about a particular token or solving a simple troubleshooting issue like two-factor authentication.
Using ZRA has streamlined customer processes, from sales to customer service calls to onboarding. “When we go through a customer onboarding process, we need a lot of information from the customer to remain compliant,” Dan explains. “With Zoom Revenue Accelerator, our onboarding team can easily see what’s been collected and what’s missing.”
After each call, ZRA will automatically create a summary and generate a list of the next steps to complete the onboarding. “Our onboarding team can now save time. When engaging with a customer, they can focus and prioritize that customer conversation.”
With automatic, AI-enabled insights into customer calls, Caleb & Brown now uses the intelligence gathered from conversations to guide business decisions. “When we want to start a new customer acquisition campaign or explore a new business line, we have insights into what matters most to our customers,” Dan says. “We can adjust our acquisition strategy and the key messages we use in our comms to match what we see.”
ZRA makes data sharing between teams easier, so brokers can share customer feedback with product and engineering teams—something they couldn’t do easily before. “In the past, it was quite clunky to pull a clip or audio file to share with other teams. Now, they can easily search through transcripts and provide those snippets as text snippets. It’s been a huge improvement to our workflow,” Dan says.
The enhanced collaboration—furthered by the adoption of Zoom Chat and Zoom Meetings—has also improved security. Teams can communicate faster and use ZRA to share data and call recordings to identify bad actors and confirm client identities quickly.
"Our teams can look at the data and make sure the voice and conversation style matches previous conversations. The auto-generated transcript that ZRA provides makes it much easier to search previous conversations." — Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
In addition to tightening security, ZRA has made it easier for Caleb & Brown to track potential compliance issues and conduct quality assurance.
Along with ZRA, Caleb & Brown adopted Zoom Phone.
As a distributed company with global teams, it was important to ensure that distance didn’t impact customer experience. According to Dan, their previous provider “had significant latency issues and delays in the conversation. It made conversations quite disjointed and felt very unnatural.”
Switching to Zoom Phone solved those issues, and with the seamless integration of ZRA, they’ve gained data analysis capabilities they didn’t have before.
Since they’ve started working with Zoom Phone and ZRA, Caleb & Brown has gathered valuable data from every single customer call. “Previously, only a fraction of those calls were analyzed and reviewed. Now it’s 100%, and our team doesn’t have to do anything—the software does it for us. It’s quite magical,” Dan says.
This analysis has led to significant time savings and given the team a deeper understanding of their customers.
“Understanding those conversations and what topics matter most to our customers at scale has been absolutely phenomenal. We can’t put an exact number on it, but days, months, years of work have been saved.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
Caleb & Brown have gotten so much value from Zoom Phone and ZRA that they’ve expanded their Zoom ecosystem.
One such integration involves Salesforce. ZRA integrates directly with Salesforce, which means agents no longer have to spend time searching for the information they need. When a customer calls, their profile pops on the screen, allowing agents and brokers to swiftly navigate through that customer's data for additional context for a particular request. “If a customer wants to update their address, for example, the agent can click see and change that information directly in Salesforce. The useability is phenomenal,” Dan says.
Another addition is Zoom Contact Center, which provides a better way for the global support team to service customers. Rather than having support team members to have unique phone numbers, they leverage intelligent routing to streamline call volume through a single phone number. This capability makes reporting much clearer, as it's easier for leadership to understand the types of conversations being had and who is having those conversations.
With so many solutions to offer, Zoom enables Caleb & Brown to improve productivity, know their customers better, and get deeper deal insights to drive more revenue.
“One of the biggest benefits of working with Zoom is their complete product line. Having one provider that you can go to for many solutions makes things quite easy.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
