How to Increase Conversion Rates and ROI by Maximizing Your Reviews Displays

Ecommerce business owners and marketers know how crucial customer reviews are for driving conversions, higher AOV, and more revenue. Consumers today are faced with an overwhelming number of shopping options and reviews help them cut through the noise and provide the social proof needed to help them make more informed and confident purchases. 

In fact, studies show that 99.9% of customers read reviews before making a purchase, and they are willing to spend up to 31% more on a business with excellent reviews. As such, authentic, detailed reviews that provide a realistic representation of the product are more valuable than even the best ad copy. 

As Yusuf Shurbaji, Co-Founder of Prismfly states, “Reviews are a major component in the purchase decision, particularly for first-time buyers. Reviews are key to maximize this real estate to increase purchase conversion rate.”

However, while you are probably aware of the power of reviews, the truth is you’ve probably found yourself wondering whether or not you’re getting your money’s worth when it comes to your review program.  

With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to maximize your review displays to drive higher conversions, more revenue and increase your ROI on reviews.

Okendo’s Magic Formula to Drive Better ROI

Okendo’s team of experts have developed and refined a successful and repeatable formula for maximizing ROI. Here’s what it looks like: 

Revenue = Interactions x Conversion Rate (CVR) x Average Order Value (AOV)

Many marketers use a similar formula to measure their revenue per customer. But what their formula fails to account for are the vital stages of the buyer’s journey that lead up to a purchase. These are the interactions that increase customers’ familiarity with your brand, grow their comfortability, and ultimately increase their intent to buy. 

It’s through our understanding of just how important these interactions are — and how much effort marketers put into designing them — that we developed our formula. In practice, the formula encourages brands to focus on marketing and optimization efforts that maximize interactions. In turn, these interactions directly nurture leads and consistently convert them into successful sales. 

Enhancing Your Review Widgets to Increase Conversion Rates

There are several ways that merchants can increase interactions with their reviews. The first is to design a review widget that captures and holds customer attention on the page that matters the most, the product details page.

With a review platform like Okendo that offers highly customizable widgets, you have more opportunities to create on-brand experiences that maximize the power of reviews. Here are some of the ways you can optimize your reviews widget to increase conversions:

• Incorporate more user-generated content with photos & videos. When you make it easier for customers to connect your product with real customers, you build trust. Showcasing photos and videos of your customers actually using your product is worth its weight in gold, especially as authenticity becomes more important in marketing and commerce.

• Add customer attribute filters. Displaying customer attribute filters lets shoppers quickly find relevant reviews from real customers who share similar qualities and needs. Customers can filter these reviews by a range of customizable factors, such as user demographics, interests, preferences, or behaviors such as age, hair color, skin concerns, etc.

• Display product attributes: Product attributes allow potential customers to get a sense of important features such as fit, quality, color, and many other features that enable them to see how a product met customer expectations. This provides an extra layer of confidence that makes customers more likely to convert.

• Utilize an aggregate display module. An aggregate display module picks out all of the most important product information and displays it at the top of the review widget so that customers can find what they need at a glance. The information can include everything from average star ratings to customer recommendation percentages and rating distributions. 

• Make high-impact reviews sortable. Okendo review widgets not only make it easy for brands to display high-impact reviews, but they also give customers the ability to sort through these reviews to find exactly what they need. Whether it’s sorting by UGC (photos, videos, etc), star rating, or other features, Okendo widgets make it effortless for customers to find reviews that have the information they need to make a purchase. This extracts friction from the customer experience and increases conversions. 

• Turn on Q&A. The right review widgets will even help you secure sales that might otherwise slip through the cracks due to customer uncertainty or hesitancy. A handy Q&A section with your reviews widget can provide direct, personalized answers to customer questions that a generalized product review might not cover, giving prospective buyers the confidence to add the product to their cart. 

• Group your reviews. Group reviews to display reviews from multiple products on a single product page. This will increase credibility and buyer confidence for product variations that may not have as many reviews, such as an existing product that you’ve recently started offering in a new color or with an updated feature. Grouping can also be leveraged to subtly upsell a product by allowing customers to compare related bundles directly on the product page.

Driving Interactions with Review Displays Across Your Website 

Another way brands can increase interactions is by making reviews more visible. This includes placing reviews in prominent locations on home, category, and product pages and using unique features like animated review carousels or a media grid to draw attention to customer feedback.

It’s also recommended that merchants have a dedicated reviews page that serves as a central hub for customer feedback, making it easier for potential customers to find and read reviews. Incorporating a text search feature here will make it effortless for users to find specific reviews that cover the areas that they care about the most. 

And as always, User Generated Content (UGC), which can be as simple as customers including photos of themselves using the product, can be enormously beneficial. Not only are these types of dynamic reviews more likely to drive conversions, but with Okendo’s review widget capabilities you can display the best UGC from these reviews across your website.

In addition, don’t be afraid to continuously test and optimize your displays to maximize your reviews conversion. Shurbaji states as an example,  “We’ve found in many split tests that moving review stars closer to the add to cart button will increase its clicks.”

How Real Brands Have Maximized Their Reviews to Increase Conversions

Crunchyroll, an anime and manga streaming service with a vast consumer product range that they sell through their ecommerce store, is a great example of how merchants can drive interactions and increase conversions.

Despite the benefits of being the go-to apparel and accessories store for anime lovers, the amount of traffic to their storefront created significant challenges for Crunchyroll. For one, they found it difficult to keep up with customer feedback. But they also had to deal with a high volume of “troll” reviews and shoppers leaving questions in the review section because the brand’s previous review widget didn’t offer a separate section for questions.

These made product pages’ reviews section unhelpful and less likely to convert since shoppers looking for information regarding quality and customer experiences were instead met with arguments and spam. 

But once they deployed Okendo, Crunchyroll saw a significant difference. Okendo’s review widget capabilities allow the team to collect and display the most relevant customer feedback in a way that gives potential customers the exact information they need to make a more informed purchase.

Born Primitive, the popular DTC brand that sells workout apparel for athletes of all sizes and skill levels, is another great example of how brands have used Okendo widgets to power up their reviews strategy and drive more conversions.

Before Okendo, the brand wasn’t getting as many reviews as they’d like, and was not able to display the reviews they did have in a way that enabled them to harness their impact throughout the sales funnel. This meant that potential customers were unable to see how items on everyday people looked and fit. And that’s a major issue when it comes to selling fitness apparel to people of all sizes.

Recognizing that their review program was underperforming, the company took the leap to Okendo, and immediately saw results. Not only was Born Primitive able to increase the amount of reviews and UGC they got, but Okendo’s widgets allowed them to easily display the personality-filled customer photos across key moments in the buying cycle. 

As a result, the team saw an impressive 3.3x increase in their product detail page conversion rate. 

The Okendo Difference

Like Crunchyroll and Born Primitive, any merchant can improve the value and impact of their reviews using Okendo’s highly customizable review widgets. 

Leveraging reviews can be a highly effective way to increase your business’s ROI and optimize your CVR.  When done right, reviews can make it easy for merchants to take advantage of the benefits of social proof to drive sales and establish trust with potential customers. 

Okendo understands the importance of quality reviews for both customers and businesses. That’s why our intuitive review widgets and displays have been designed from the ground up with flexibility and customization in mind, along with a suite of key features like product and customer attributes, automated sequences with UGC reminders, email and SMS integrations, incentive offerings, and more to maximize your sales and ROI. 

Okendo is built to help brands convert. No matter the size or goals of your business, we can help take your review strategy to the next level.