When potential buyers are directed to your product page, one of the first things they look at is your reviews. The more reviews, the better. When customers see a lot of reviews, right off the bat that’s a sign the product is popular. And buyers tend to want to go with popular choices.
Except, of course, if too many of those reviews are only middling 3 star reviews, with a few one or two stars accounting for much of your popularity in terms of just numbers. At a glance, those orange bars showing the percentage of starred reviews can make or break whether potential customers stick. This is why 5 star reviews will matter all the more in 2020…to offset the one, two and 3 star reviews you are bound to get and keep your overall Amazon rating high.
No matter how good your product, no matter how good an Amazon seller you are, you can’t satisfy everyone all the time. People will nitpick. And, actually, you don’t even want all 5 star reviews. As Henson Wu of FeedbackWhiz points out, “If all your reviews are getting five stars, people tend to get suspicious that the reviews are fake.” This is particularly true if the product isn’t a brand name and the seller has less than 100 reviews.
Wu says the ideal average customer rating of 4.5 stars with at least a hundred or more reviews in many cases is enough to trigger a buying decision. “People won’t even bother reading the individual reviews, because, hey, the 4.5 stars and the number of reviews show this is a quality product. They won’t even bother looking at the price.”
There are two related issues here.
1. How do you offset the mediocre and negative reviews you’re bound to receive?
2. How do you generate as many high-rated positive reviews as possible?
Turn the Negative Into a Positive
There’s a positive side to negative reviews. Even if, and particularly, you are getting a lot of them related to the same issue. This could indicate a recurring problem that you really do need to fix. If a product broke or there was some defect and you offer to replace the product quickly and without charge, that provides them with some confidence that you are a reputable seller.
The faster you communicate with the dissatisfied customer and the faster you fix it (and, most importantly, ensure the mistake or error isn’t repeated with other customers), the more likely you’ll turn a one or 2 star rating into a three or four. Acknowledge there has been a fault, don’t fight with them (even if there may be a cause to fight them) and seek to resolve their issue. Because the customer is always right (even if they really aren’t). For further reference, see “Amazon Survival Guide for Negative Feedback.”
The reality is, though, that you’re bound to get someone or 2 star reviews that for whatever reasons you can’t make the customer satisfied or, in some cases, get removed. Some reviews may be just cranky, and there’s not a lot you can do about them. If your customer review average drops down to three stars because of these types of negative reviews, that can kill your listing.
To counterbalance that inevitability, you want to get as many five star reviews as you can. How do you do that?
Tips to Generate 5 Star Reviews
You might think that just because you have a quality product that you fulfill quickly, customers will leave you good reviews. Some may, but most won’t. It’s just human nature. They’ve got what they want, why would they feel the need to put any work into leaving a review.
It’s important to keep in mind that it is against Amazon’s terms of service to outright ask for positive reviews. There are a number of ways you can get reviews, however, which is particularly important to get a new product listing off the ground. These include:
- Amazon has an Early Review program. You do have to pay Amazon for the first five reviews, but it may be worth it for a new listing to generate reviews.
- You can ask friends and family to post reviews, which is only technically against the terms of service if they have a financial interest in your products. Still, there are only so many friends and family you can have.
- You can buy Facebook Ads to request reviews and offer rebates for buying your product. This is a kind of grey area whether this complies with Amazon’s terms of service, but it does take place outside of Amazon’s ecosystem and a lot of sellers do this.
- Manage your reviews using a premium automated feedback management tool.
If you want reviews 5 star reviews that really stick over the long term, fully comply with Amazon guidelines, and, most importantly, result in genuine high-rated reviews, consider FeedbackWhiz. It provides email templates to send follow-up messages to customer orders. It also allows you to get instant notification when negative reviews are posted and manage positive responses. You can also create customized email campaigns to maximize positive feedback. And that just begins to describe the powerful tools at your disposal to generate more five star reviews in 2020.
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