Month: June 2015

Do you have standards? If you’ve ever traveled to a foreign country, you’ve experienced a “standard” when you plugged anything requiring power into a wall socket. If there weren’t standards, you’d be traveling with two pieces of luggage….one for your clothes…and one for your 50 wall adapters!

With the Internet, there are MANY agreed upon standards you’ve probably heard of: HTML, JavaScript, USB…and maybe a few you haven’t…IEEE 802.11, SMTP,  and Schema.org.

What Is Schema Markup?

Schema.org is an agreed upon standard/specification for structuring data on websites. Google, Bing and Yahoo started the initiative back in June 2011, and has been working for years to improve the breadth and adoption of the standard.

In the last 12 months, Google has started to expand the technical options companies have for delivering the markup on their website, which is in turn driving adoption. From calendar information to people to reviews…web content can benefit from being structured in a way that provides search engines the ability to offer up more relevant, content rich results in their search experience.

Why Should We Care?

For reviews and SEO, search engines like Google take structured information they’ve crawled to another level by modifying the search engine results page (SERP) to include the star rating (also known as rich snippets) of the product/item in organic search.

This has shown to increase click-through rates up to 30%, and with an average site getting up to 60% of their traffic from organic search, every little bit helps.

How Do We Get It?
The good news is that if you’re a PowerReviews client and have Inline SEO enabled, you’re 95% of the way there. We can enable the feature for your account(s) so that the next time your periodic content delivery bundle is generated (usually nightly), Schema.org flows with it.

Then it’s as simple as unpacking the file like you normally do and publishing on your website. If you’re a current customer, contact the Client Success team and request this feature on your account.

That Easy

PowerReviews is continually adding capabilities to its products to help brands and retailers drive traffic, increase sales, and create actionable insights. We also work to make it easy for our customers to adopt new features that will help them meet their business goals. Schema.org is a great and easy way for clients to drive more organic traffic with just a little effort and no additional cost.

Announcing key client wins, PowerReviews carries out mission to deliver brands and retailers more product reviews and better insights alongside top-notch customer service.

JUNE 17, 2015 – CHICAGO – PowerReviews, a leading provider of ratings, reviews and question-and-answer technology to more than 1,000 brands and retailers, marks its 10th anniversary with continued momentum sparked by record growth and a continued commitment to bringing more reviews to shoppers online and in-store.

Since its relaunch in July 2014, PowerReviews has experienced explosive customer growth, signing more than 100 new enterprise customers, including some of world’s leading brands such as Avery, Crocs, The North Face, Tempur Sealy, Vans, Whirlpool and World Kitchen. Establishing PowerReviews as one of the largest providers of ratings and reviews technology, these companies join the ranks of PowerReviews’ current client base, which includes other influential brands and retailers such as Toys “R” US and Sports Authority.

“The most successful brands and retailers all have one thing in common – they recognize ratings and reviews as a vital component of their online strategies. Not only are ratings and reviews proven to drive traffic and increase sales, but they also allow brands and retailers to derive real value from actionable consumer insights about their products and services,” said Matt Moog, CEO of PowerReviews. “For today’s shoppers, ratings and reviews are an expectation; they drive more conversions than any other type of content, user-generated or professionally produced.”

Since PowerReviews’ founding 10 years ago, the retail landscape has evolved dramatically. The path to purchase is no longer linear as brands and retailers are engaging consumers across a variety of channels. In a recent study, PowerReviews analyzed the impact of mobile and wearable technology on consumer shopping behavior and found that consumers are interested in using new technologies to connect with brands and retailers. In fact, 82 percent of shoppers are interested in using wearable technology, such as smartwatches, to enhance the overall shopping experience.

Acknowledging the rise in mobile shopping and core importance of ratings and reviews, PowerReviews recently announced key updates to its software platform. These updates enable brands and retailers to more easily generate and display ratings and reviews, regardless of channel, providing mobile-optimized review forms and displays.

While consumer demands have shifted, PowerReviews’ mission has remained the same – to empower brands and retailers with the software and data to collect, display and syndicate content that drives traffic, increases sales and creates actionable insights. Built for innovation, scalability and flexibility, the PowerReviews platform includes three key technologies that help brands and retailers advance their digital strategies.

Unified Platform
PowerReviews’ unified software platform is enabling greater innovation. Built on a true multi-tenant SaaS platform, the PowerReviews platform enables all customers to use the same version of software. And with just one platform to support, PowerReviews invests more resources to deliver new capabilities for all customers. The unified platform also enables customers to easily implement new features, meaning PowerReviews customers can adopt new innovations more quickly.

Unified Product Catalog
With a single structured catalog for review and Q&A data, PowerReviews customers can more easily mine data for insights and syndicate review content faster than with competitors. The Unified Product Catalog, along with PowerReviews’ sophisticated product matching technology, empowers customers to syndicate content in one or two days, while other providers can take up to eight weeks.

Open Syndication Network
The PowerReviews Open Syndication Network syndicates content from 1,800 brands to 2,500 retailers, reaching 700 million in-market shoppers each month. With the PowerReviews Open Syndication Network, PowerReviews customers can get more reviews in front of more consumers, faster than with other providers.

To learn more about PowerReviews, visit www.powerreviews.com.

About PowerReviews
PowerReviews is the choice of 1,000 global brands and retailers to collect and display ratings and reviews on 5,000 websites. An essential resource for consumers as they search and shop online and in-store, ratings and reviews drive relevant traffic, increase sales, and create actionable insights to improve products and services. PowerReviews’ mobile-friendly rating and review and Q&A software is fast to implement and simple to customize, making it easy for brands and retailers to generate more authentic content that is seen by more consumers. The PowerReviews Open Syndication Network is the largest in the industry, reaching more than 1 billion in-market shoppers every month, giving retailers and brands the power to reach shoppers wherever they are.  For more information, visit www.powerreviews.com.

For additional information:
Meghan Spork
Walker Sands Communications
312-241-1474
Meghan.spork@walkersands.com

When we speak with our clients to assess goals, we hear the same thing over and over: more content. PowerReviews provides the engine to do so, but it’s important for you to provide some fuel — and with the benefit of our decade of experience in the user-generated content space, you can maximize content to drive more sales.

Send a Follow Up Email to Every. Single. Purchaser. (Including In-Store Purchasers!)
Your first and most important step in generating content is to send that follow up email. Getting the most out of the email requires the implementation of a few key best practices.

1. Personalize it. Use the customer’s name and thank them for their purchase.
2. Keep it simple. Remember that the purpose of this email is to solicit a review.
3. Keep it short. The subject line should be less than 55 characters.
4. Don’t distract from the write a review action. Try not to include any other calls-to-action or marketing language.
5. Include an image and link to the product. Let the customer see their purchase.

In-Store Purchasers Matter — Don’t Forget About Them
If you have a brick and mortar store, soliciting reviews from in-store purchasers can make a significant difference in the volume of review content you’re able to collect. In May of this year, The Sports Authority began soliciting reviews from their in-store purchasers by leveraging their already existing transactional loyalty program to link customer email addresses with in-store purchases. This push combined with the implementation of a simple, mobile optimized email template resulted in a 178% increase in month-over-month content.

Mobile Optimization is Key
Based on PowerReviews’ client data, more than 50% customers are opening their emails on mobile devices — which means that follow up email that you’re sending is likely to be opened on your customer’s phone. PowerReviews’ follow up email solution is completely mobile-optimized and allows for a simple and elegant user experience. With our mobile template, customers saw up to a 20% increase in mobile conversion rates.

Having a mobile-responsive email isn’t enough — you also need a mobile-optimized write a review experience. Customers want to easily be guided from one step to the next, with consideration of details like clicking with your finger rather than a mouse. Our responsive write a review form, available to all clients, saw a 40-85% increase in mobile completion rates during its pilot phase.

Choose the Right ‘Write a Review’ Template
The write a review form itself should be intuitive with prominent star buttons and customized questions for the product that’s being reviewed. If it’s a couch that your customer is reviewing — don’t ask if the fit was too big, too small or true to size. If it’s a pair of pants, don’t ask if they’re good for decorating. Customers count on you knowing your product, so give them options that matter to them and that will matter to other customers. PowerReviews’ Tag Based approach makes this easy, with forms specific to 3,000 product categories.

Use Best Practices from Start to Finish
Generating content isn’t an exact science, but it can be managed with careful consideration of best practices and the flow from the initial purchase to writing a review.

1. Sending a follow up email is essential, and will always be the first — and most important — way to solicit a review. Don’t forget offline shoppers when sending that email, in-store purchasers can be valuable content creators.
2. Make it mobile-friendly. Since you have a 50% chance that your customer will open your email on their phones, you need to play the odds.
3. Customize the write a review experience. PowerReviews offers more than 3,000 templates for a reason — so that you can ask the right questions. Customized templates take the guess work out of sharing an honest opinion of a purchase.

The value of reviews is no longer debatable: 96% of customers consult product reviews and more than 86% of consumers say reviews are an essential resource when making a purchasing decision. So, you have reviews, great. But there’s one important addition to reviews that perhaps has an even larger impact on engagement: images.

Visual Connection is Key
Images allow your customers to visually connect with the product. It’s hard to find a better way to know how a product will look than by seeing a picture of someone who owns the product wearing or using it. It helps customers visualize how the item will fit into their own life. It’s the same logic behind including images of meals on restaurant menu items, people connect to the visual representation. According to our partners at Olapic, 32% of customers would be more likely to buy clothing online if the site featured photos of real customers wearing the product.

Images Influence Purchase Decisions
Customer images in reviews can move the needle when it comes to conversion — Crowdtap found that 53% of millennials say user generated content influences their product purchases. People are more likely to order a meal in a restaurant when there is a photo beside it. The same logic applies to buying products online. People are more likely to purchase the product if there is a customer image associated with it. Sure, product images from the brand or retailer do some of the leg work for you here, but customers trust other customers. They identify with other customers more so than with an anonymous model or a shoe stand propping up the shoes in the image. They want to see the product in the wild. A picture is worth a thousand words, and even more dollars.

Make it Mobile and Make it Easy
The trend in image-driven media isn’t going anywhere — 60 million photos are shared on Instagram every day — and it’s important for brands and retailers to stay ahead and kick start their image acquisition strategies.

With most consumers posting photos from their smartphone and increasingly reading and writing reviews on mobile (up 237% from Holiday 2013 to 2014!), PowerReviews recently introduced product updates focused on mobile and ease of use. This release empowers consumers to upload unlimited photos with their reviews, both on desktop and on mobile, making  it easy for them to share photos as part of a review.

How Do You Encourage Visual Content?
With the value of images rapidly increasing, you need to consider how you can increase images and videos as part of your ratings and reviews:

1. People need motivation. According to a survey of consumers, more than 55% of shoppers need motivation to write a review.
2. Recognition is a motivator. Everyone likes when their pictures are liked and shared on social media. That “like” or positive comment is an emotional motivator.
3. PowerReviews’ Social Loyalty helps generate more content —  including images — by providing points and showing ranks on the leaderboard. Users who earn enough points can earn coupons, gift cards, samples, and other rewards. By awarding more points for images, you can help consumers earn rewards more quickly and help generate more images.

Ten years and one day after the founding of PowerReviews, we launch our new website, begin our first Customer Advisory Council, open IRCE as a Silver Sponsor, and– most importantly– release new capabilities to our platform.

Ten Years
A lot has changed in ten years. Shopping’s gone mobile, omnichannel’s become a reality, and after two long years as part of a competitor, PowerReviews is independent and thriving. In the last ten years, consumers have come to rely on ratings and reviews and questions and answers more than ever as they shop online, and increasingly in-store. Shoppers consider the authentic voice of consumers a required part of their shopping experience. They want ratings and reviews and Q&A easily accessible no matter where they are shopping.

The Power of Reviews
When we began work on our new website, we worked to distill our principles into a few words that would reflect the value we deliver to our customers in a way that’s easy to understand and remember. We considered carefully how we wanted to talk about our offerings. Do we try to create a new term that includes star ratings, customer reviews, Q&A, images, and video? Consumer generated content? Customer content management? We decided to keep it simple. Our CEO Matt Moog summarized it perfectly: “Ratings and reviews and questions and answers continue to drive more conversions than any other type of user-generated content and their importance is expanding as consumers expect reviews while shopping online and in-store.” On our new website and in all we do, we are reconfirming our belief in the Power of Reviews.

Drive traffic. Increase sales. Create actionable insights.
These are words that you will see throughout our new site and in our communications.  It’s widely proven that ratings and reviews drive traffic and increase sales. We also know that our most innovative customers are using rating and review and Q&A data to create actionable insights to improve their products and services. At IRCE 2015, Hammacher Schlemmer will talk about just that.

Why PowerReviews?

More reviews. Better insights. Easy.
Especially with the continued growth of mobile and the increasing desire of shoppers to access ratings and reviews in-store, PowerReviews is delivering new solutions to generate more reviews and get those reviews in front of more consumers online and in-store and our new release, focused on mobile shoppers, does just that.

We’ve all worked with difficult vendors; it’s not fun. At PowerReviews, we want to make things easy. From your first call with us, through implementation and optimization, our goal is to be easiest partner you work with.

Why PowerReviews?

Unified platform. Unified Product Catalog. Open Syndication Network.

Unified platform drives innovation. PowerReviews products are built on a single multi-tenant SaaS platform. What does that mean? Innovation. Because we have only one platform to support, we can focus on delivering new capabilities, rather than maintaining two platforms or helping customers migrate from old versions.  This same platform makes it easier for our customers to adopt innovation; when we release a new feature, it’s available to everyone simply by turning the new feature on.

Unified product catalog empowers better insights, faster syndication. “Unified product catalog” is not a sexy term and perhaps needs a more fashionable name. But what it does is amazing. Because we have a single and structured catalog for review and Q&A data, that data is easier for customers to mine for better insights. The same structured catalog also means that we can syndicate content faster than other providers, in one or two days, rather than six to eight weeks.

Open Network increases your reach, faster. The PowerReviews Open Network can reach more than 1 billion in-market shoppers every month, giving retailers and brands the power to reach shoppers wherever they are.

With brands launching new products and retailers adjusting their merchandise mix more quickly than ever, getting reviews in front of more consumers is time sensitive. Our Unified Product Catalog and Open Syndication Network gets more reviews in front of more consumers, faster than anyone else. The sooner the reviews are accessible, the sooner they can begin driving traffic and sales.

The Power of Reviews, Part Two
So here we are, back to driving traffic, increasing sales, and creating actionable insights.  We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished over the past ten years and especially over the last 11 months since our re-launch. We’re proud that more than 100 enterprise customers have switched to PowerReviews. But we also believe that in this evolving retail landscape, the real power of reviews is just beginning to show itself.  With a platform built for innovation, PowerReviews is committed to the future of ratings and reviews. We’re ready to bring more reviews to more consumers online and in-store–and wherever and however they may shop in the next ten years. Easy.

Platform enhancements help brands and retailers optimize engagement experiences for mobile devices, generate more reviews and produce better insights.

JUNE 2, 2015 – CHICAGO –PowerReviews, a leading provider of ratings, reviews and question and answer technology to more than 1,000 brands and retailers, announced today key platform updates which allow brands and retailers to create better mobile experiences, generate more reviews and deliver better insights. PowerReviews will showcase these updates and its full range of offerings at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE) in Chicago, June 2-5, 2015.

“We’re making it easier for our customers to generate more reviews that get seen by more shoppers regardless of channel,” said Matt Moog, CEO of PowerReviews. “Ratings and reviews and questions and answers continue to drive more conversions than any other type of user-generated content and their importance is expanding as consumers expect reviews while shopping online and in-store. With these updates we’re delivering on our promise to provide brands and retailers with the most innovative consumer engagement solutions across channels. ”

Mobile Optimization
Whether shopping online or in-store, more consumers are reading and writing product reviews on  their mobile devices than ever before. During the 2014 holiday season, PowerReviews saw a 237% increase in reviews generated on mobile devices as compared to the 2013 holiday season.

With this update, all PowerReviews forms and review displays are now fully responsive and mobile-optimized. With the lightest display code in the industry – 85 percent smaller than other providers – PowerReviews is optimized for speed. These mobile-friendly displays reduce page load time and page abandonment and in turn increase conversions.

More Reviews
More reviews drive more sales. To help brands and retailers generate more reviews, PowerReviews Review Acceleration program, which sends consumers post-purchase emails, is now optimized for mobile devices.  Emails now include larger calls-to-action including clickable stars, which encourage consumers to begin the process of leaving a review straight from their mobile device. This program has been shown to increase review generation by up to 40 percent.

“PowerReviews is innovating,” said Nathan Decker, Director of eCommerce for evo. “With over 60 percent of people reading emails on mobile, we need to make it easy to go from reading a post-purchase email to writing a review. With PowerReviews enhanced Review Acceleration, we have seen a 100 percent increase in reviews generated from post-purchase emails.”

To further help brands and retailers generate reviews from consumers, PowerReviews has created a mobile-friendly form for consumers leaving a review from brand and retailer sites.  This form features large targets created specifically for reviewers using touchscreen devices and enables consumers to upload an unlimited number of photos to accompany review content.

Better Insights
To enhance Social Measurement, PowerReviews has integrated its platform with leading tag management systems Ensighten, Signal, and Tealium. With this integration, PowerReviews customers have immediate access to Social Measurement, delivering better insights into the ways different content and engagements impact sales.

Built for Innovation
With a unified software platform, PowerReviews is enabling innovation for its customers. As a true multi-tenant SaaS platform, all customers use the same version of software and as PowerReviews continues to update its platform, customers can easily accept and implement new features.  Easy implementation results in higher adoption rates, meaning PowerReviews customers stay at the cutting edge of ratings and reviews technology. A feature that improved review completion rates by more than 20 percent was adopted by 98 percent of customers within two months.

Members of the PowerReviews team will showcase the benefits of its unified software platform at IRCE, booth #215. Additionally, CEO Matt Moog will be presenting “How to Mine Negative Reviews for Positive Results” on Thursday June 4 from 2:15 to 2:45 p.m.

To learn more about PowerReviews, visit www.powerreviews.com.

About PowerReviews
PowerReviews is the choice of 1,000 global brands and retailers to collect and display ratings and reviews on 5,000 websites. An essential resource for consumers as they search and shop online and in-store, ratings and reviews drive relevant traffic, increase sales, and create actionable insights to improve products and services. PowerReviews’ mobile-friendly rating and review and Q&A software is fast to implement and simple to customize, making it easy for brands and retailers to generate more authentic content that is seen by more consumers. The PowerReviews Open Syndication Network is the largest in the industry, reaching more than 1 billion in-market shoppers every month, giving retailers and brands the power to reach shoppers wherever they are.  For more information, visit www.powerreviews.com.

For additional information:
Meghan Spork
Walker Sands Communications
312-241-14474
Meghan.spork@walkersands.com