Month: July 2016

Ratings and reviews technology company recognized for dynamic, high performance culture and collaborative work environment for second year in a row

July 21, 2016 – CHICAGO –  PowerReviews, a leading provider of ratings, reviews and question-and-answer technology to more than 1,000 global brands and retailers, has been named one of Chicago’s Best and Brightest Companies to Work For® by the National Association for Business Resources.

Recognized for the second consecutive year, this honor proves PowerReviews’ continued commitment to cultivating a positive and fulfilling environment for its employees. The company attributes its success in attracting and retaining top talent to its high-performance culture centered around the values of transparency and accountability.

“Reviews create transparency between consumers and the companies they do business with, and transparency drives accountability,” said Matt Moog, CEO of PowerReviews. “We put the same principles of transparency and accountability to work in our culture. Every employee is empowered to make a positive impact on our company, our customers and our community.”

PowerReviews believes that employees won’t be professionally effective if they aren’t personally fulfilled. To foster a healthy work-life balance, PowerReviews offers benefits such as flexible paid time off and encourages all employees to join committees that enact change both within the company and the local community. In addition, PowerReviews’ unique hiring philosophy has helped the company attract a team of diverse employees, opening the organization to a broader set of skills and life experiences.

In the past two years, PowerReviews has seen explosive growth and hired more than 150 people to support its continued expansion. Throughout this rapid growth, PowerReviews remains committed to maintaining its employee-centric work environment.

Nominees for the Best and Brightest award were evaluated by an independent research firm on employee selection, engagement, development and enrichment, retention, community initiatives and strategic company performance.

To learn more about PowerReviews, visit https://www.powerreviews.com

About PowerReviews
PowerReviews works with more than 1,000 global brands and retailers to increase conversion and improve products and the customer experience with ratings and reviews and Q&A software. PowerReviews unifies and amplifies the voice of the consumer throughout their journey, across all channels to help consumers make better purchase decisions and to help businesses drive conversion and improve products and services. Ratings and reviews solutions from PowerReviews are essential for consumers as they search and shop online and in-store, driving traffic on more than 5,000 websites, creating actionable insights to improve products and services, increasing conversion, and growing online site-wide sales up to 17%. The PowerReviews Syndication Network reaches 2,500 retailers and more than 700 million 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

In an ideal world, shoppers would navigate directly to your site anytime they were in the market for a product you sell. But the reality is, today’s consumers have nearly limitless options when it comes to researching and purchasing products. And in a vast majority of cases, they’re not starting their search directly on a brand or retailer site.

In fact, a recent PowerReviews study found that more than a third (35%) of shoppers choose to start the purchase journey on a search engine, compared to 21% that start directly on a brand or retailer site.

Why Your SEO Strategy Matters

This data sends a clear message to brands and retailers — if you want shoppers to find your product pages, it’s key to develop a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Many factors come into play when it comes to determining where your pages rank in search engine results.

Your company probably has someone on the team who focuses on many of these things, including freshness, keyword density, and inbound links, just to name a few. But one of the best ways to improve your SEO is to leverage the content that your users are already creating — including ratings and reviews and Q&A.

Read on to learn how brands and retailers can use reviews for SEO and how this content improves search engine presence, which will lead to more traffic and increased conversion.

Reviews Improve Ranking

Search engines prize fresh and relevant content. And a steady stream of ratings and reviews and Q&A can help keep your site’s content relevant and fresh with keyword-rich, permanent assets on your product pages. Then, search engines can crawl it which enables shoppers to find it.

Reviews Improve Click-Through

In 2011, major search engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing came together to create Schema.org, a single standard for structuring content on websites. Brands and retailers that adhere to Schema.org standards can benefit from an improved presence on search engines.

If a brand or retailer uses Schema.org standards, search engines can pull information from product pages and use it to enhance search results with what are called “rich snippets.”

The most common type of rich snippets are star ratings and review counts. If your site is structured according to Schema.org standards and you have ratings and reviews, star ratings can appear when your product pages appear in search results. These rich snippets catch the attention of shoppers and significantly improve click-through rates. 

For example, let’s say you’re looking for a gift for your nephew, whose favorite movie is Toy Story. You navigate to Google and search for “realistic toy story dinosaur.” One of the top results is from Toys ‘R’ Us and includes a star rating and the number of reviews for the product. If you take a closer look, you can even see the pros, cons, and best uses listed below the star rating. You see that the toy has a great star rating, encouraging you to click through to the product page.   

Are Your Reviews Structured Correctly?

We’ve found that more than 80% of brands and retailers are optimizing their content for crawlers. But around 30% are structuring it incorrectly.

But ensuring your site (including your reviews) is structured according to Schema.org standards doesn’t have to be overwhelming. In fact, if you’re an existing PowerReviews client and have our in-line SEO feature enabled, we do the heavy lifting for you.

Our in-line SEO feature essentially gives web crawlers the values they need to understand what your ratings and reviews content says.

If you’re a current PowerReviews customer, contact your Client Success Director or Community Manager to request in-line SEO be added to your account. And if you’re not currently a PowerReviews customer, contact us to learn more about how ratings and reviews can help improve your SEO.

Ratings and reviews are an important tool for driving more traffic and sales for apparel brands and retailers. In fact, we’ve found that once an apparel product in the PowerReviews network starts generating reviews, that product will experience an average 49.36% increase in traffic and an average 14.48% increase in conversion rate.

How can apparel brands and retailers better leverage reviews in order to increase traffic, conversion, and insights? Read on for five tips.

Capture the Voice of the Consumer
Allowing apparel shoppers to hear from other consumers gives them the confidence they need to make smart purchases. Be sure you’re sending post purchase emails to shoppers asking them to write reviews for items they’ve recently purchased, since PowerReviews data has found that about 60% of reviews originate from these emails.

In addition, remember that many apparel orders include more than one item. According to an article from Internet Retailer, the average consumer purchases 4 apparel items per order. Make it easy for shoppers to review all products they’ve purchased within a single page, rather than requiring them to navigate to individual pages to write reviews for each product.

Highlight Size and Fit Feedback
According to a survey from Body Labs, 64% of consumers say incorrect fit is the primary reason they return clothing. Avoid unnecessary returns by providing your shoppers with comprehensive information about the size and fit of your products, including the input of other shoppers. Ask your ratings and reviews provider if they offer an easy way to capture size and fit information from your consumers and display it on the product page to increase buyer confidence and help consumers make the right purchase decision.

Allow Consumers to Submit Photos and Videos
Apparel is a visual category, and items look different on different people. If you’re not already, start asking your shoppers to submit photos and videos as part of their reviews. That way, future shoppers can see what your products look like on various body types and get ideas for different ways to accessorize.

Optimize for Mobile
Shoppers are turning to reviews — whether they’re shopping online from a laptop computer or pulling out their phone prior to make a purchase in store. PowerReviews research found that 70% of consumers want to access products ratings and reviews while in-store. So be sure shoppers can easily access product information — including reviews — regardless of the device they’re using.

In addition, make sure the entire process for writing a review, from the post purchase email to the write-a-review form, is easy to complete on a mobile device. If a shopper gets hung up on any part of the process, they’re likely to abandon it completely. evo, a leading online retailer of outdoor gear and fashion apparel, switched to a mobile-friendly post purchase email template and experienced a 203% increase in reviews written on mobile year over year.

Generate Reviews Quickly
Since apparel items move on and off the shelves quickly, it’s key for apparel brands and retailers to generate reviews as quickly as possible. After all, if a shopper waits too long to write a review, the product may not be available anymore. Consider collecting information at the time of checkout by asking the customer a simple question: “Why did you buy this item?” This makes it easier for your customers to provide feedback while they’re still in your ecosystem and provides you with additional content to help drive traffic, sales, and insights.

Want to learn more about the importance of reviews for apparel brands and retailers? Download The Guide to Reviews for Apparel Brands and Retailers.

Reviews play a key role in increasing conversion rates for brands and retailers. So it comes as no surprise that one of the most common questions we hear from our customers is, “How can we collect more reviews?”

The best way to increase the number of reviews is to make the process of writing reviews as easy as possible for shoppers. It starts with sending shoppers a post purchase email, asking them to review items they’ve recently purchased. Make sure it’s mobile friendly, since more than 50% of consumers are reading emails on a mobile device.

But it can be challenging to get shoppers to write reviews for multiple items. That’s why PowerReviews developed a new product feature called Review Your Purchases, which streamlines the process for writing multiple reviews for products within the same transaction. This allows brands and retailers to generate more high quality content which can help drive traffic, conversion, and insights.

Why Review Your Purchases?
More than 60% of the consumer orders coming through the PowerReviews network include more than one product. And for some categories, orders contain quite a few items. For example, the average apparel order includes 4 items.

But until now, if a consumer wanted to write reviews for multiple items in an order, they’d have to navigate to multiple pages to write each review. At PowerReviews, we saw this as a big missed opportunity for brands and retailers to collect more reviews and increase overall site coverage. That’s why we developed Review Your Purchases, which allows shoppers to quickly and easily review multiple products from one order (or throughout their purchase history) from a single screen.

How it Works
Let’s say a customer purchases a camera, a 10 inch tablet, and a 10 pack of ballpoint pens, all in a single order. After the customer gets his items in the mail, he receives a post purchase email asking him to review all three of the products he purchased. He clicks through and is able to easily review all three products from a single page that looks like this:

As the shopper continues to purchase products from you over time, he can access a landing page that includes every product he’s ever purchased from you. And he can easily review any product he’s purchased right from that landing page.

Review Your Purchases makes the review collection process easier for your customers, so you can increase product coverage and generate a high volume of quality content that’ll help improve the performance of your ecommerce site.

What You Can Expect
PowerReviews customers have seen some impressive results by adopting Review Your Purchases. During the program pilot, a major retailer experienced:

• 93% increase in reviews quarter over quarter
• 36% increase in product coverage
• 400% increase in review completion rates

And after they started using Review Your Purchases, a large sports retailer experienced:

• 75% increase in reviews collected year over year
• 252% increase in review completion rates quarter over quarter

Start Collecting More Reviews
Already a customer? If you’re an existing PowerReviews customer interested in generating more, high quality content with little effort on your part, contact your Client Success Director or Community Manager to learn more about Review Your Purchases.

Not yet a customer? If you’re not a PowerReviews customer but interested in learning more, contact us for a free demo.

Today’s consumers want all the information they can get while they’re researching products, and they’re increasingly turning to user generated content to help them make informed purchase decisions.

The pressure is on for marketers of consumer products to collect relevant UGC and create a seamless shopping experience across all channels – digital, mobile and in-store.

Join PowerReviews and Registria in this 30-minute webinar to learn the top 3 actions you can take to generate and leverage UGC as well as:

• Get best practices in growing customer databases with “Super- Buyers” and engaging with them real-time
• Explore how leading retailers and brands are successfully leveraging ratings and reviews to increase conversion
• Understand the impact of ratings and reviews on conversion, traffic from organic search, return rates and offline sales
• Learn how a global brand leverages a registration engagement program and ratings and reviews

Featured Presenters

Dave Munro, Director Marketing Services

Dave has been in the email and digital marketing space for 17 years, and has worked with several email service providers including Merkle, Yesmail, Quris and Oracle.

As the lead on Registria’s Marketing Services practice, Dave helps Registria clients make the most of the customer data they collect from product registrations, forms and promotions by managing and executing email and mobile marketing campaigns.

Matt Parsons, Chief Customer Officer

With more than 15 years of client service experience, managing client success, software implementation, technical support, sales operations, customer renewal and content moderation functions in the financial, telecommunications and e-commerce industries, Matt’s first foray in ecommerce was at Fogdog.com.