Everyone reads the reviews and the star-ratings when deciding whether to buy one product over another, despite what they might tell you to the contrary. Yet we know many are suspect. We note the average ratings and then wander through the two- and one-star reports to see the reasons for the low scores. Should we publish them in our marketing emails?
There’s an illogical dichotomy in the action. Why do we take note of something untrustworthy? You can’t open a consumer magazine without being told it’s a scandal that the big online sales companies, making a killing during lockdown, know that many of the reviews they publish are fake, yet do little to combat them. If you’ve any sense, your marketing emails will, no doubt, mention the high scores and many positive reviews. But we must earn our subscribers’ trust.
Just accepting what customers say is not enough if you want people to believe them. Some online sales companies frequently include ‘verified purchase’ in the review in the hope that this will generate belief in them, but they also include those where there is no evidence of purchase, and, one assumes, included their star rating. More to the point, what do you do?
There’s a lot online on how an intending purchaser can check a review, and particularly reviewer, to verify them as far as possible. This takes time, and we deal with email marketing where time is at a premium. We can’t expect our subscribers to check through each individual review for correct spelling and grammar, one of the pointers to a false reviewer we are told, when we are keeping words, and therefore reading time, to a minimum. And in any case, how many genuine reviewers reread their post to check everything’s correct?
After a lot of research, I have decided on a particular MO when researching a big purchase. I will check the reviewer’s history. If they regularly give five stars to similar products – once the reviewer supposedly bought two other products from the same company that provided an all but identical function – I will discount their comments. It’s a lot to ask for customers to do for a marketing email.
The way to ensure your subscribers’ trust is maintained is to do the work yourself. You know about fake reviews, as does everyone in the business, and you know ways to tell the fakes from the genuine. So do so.
The important aspect of this, some might say vital, is to tell your customers what you are doing, why you are doing it, and your reasons for doing so. Initially, some will be sceptical, so be upfront about it. Refer to reports on how trustworthy reviews are and ensure that whatever you are doing can be justified by the conclusions.
Highlight the reviews of your customers on a landing page, under the title of ‘feedback given to us by our customers’. Try one nice move I’ve seen. Highlight a four-star review. Oddly, it seemed to be so trustworthy that it would have been impolite not to believe it.
