April 2020 - PowerReviews

APRIL 28, 2020 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS— PowerReviews and Reputation Studio today announced a new partnership, to offer an integrated solution that enables brands the ability to respond to reviews collected by PowerReviews directly from the Reputation Studio platform.

The combined solution enables brands and retailers to facilitate strategic and effective follow-up action to customer review feedback. This results in exceptional reputation management, enabling our mutual clients one platform to manage their brand reputation.

Brandon Matthies, Head of Product Management at PowerReviews, comments:

“We were really excited to form this partnership to support the needs of our clients. Reputation Studio integrated with our new Enterprise API to enable a seamless experience for our mutual clients, such as Conagra. We are really focusing on building out integrations with partners like Reputation Studio to provide more value to our clients.”

Jon Jessup, CEO of Reputation Studio, said:

“A lot of our customers leverage PowerReviews for their Ratings/Reviews and Q&A, so this new integration is a great win for them to be able to streamline their consumer care with Salesforce Service Cloud. This solution finally allows the eCommerce teams to have their customer service teams be able to handle responding to customer reviews and answering customer questions. The efficiencies our mutual customers see from this innovative approach is incredible!”

powerreviews logo website

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

PowerReviews (PowerReviews.com) is a software and data company that works with 1000+ leading brands and retailers to bring authenticity and transparency to commerce. The PowerReviews Customer Content Platform has three solutions that help our customers collect and manage customer-generated content to improve the product and customer experience across the customer journey. We help clients meet the evolving need for social proof, accelerating the path to purchase and brand advocacy.

PowerReviews is known for innovation, consultative partnership, and actionable insights, supported by our open platform and approach. Our dedicated team of experts provides thoughtful analysis and turn-key service. PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA.

Reputation Studio

ABOUT REPUTATION STUDIO

Reputation Studio (reputationstudio.com) is a Salesforce partner that helps brands aggregate consumer-generated content into a single platform to complete the 360-degree view of customers and respond in near real-time. Our application of AI-driven sentiment and intent analysis yields deeper insights, incredible efficiency gains, and uncovers massive opportunities to interact with customers on a personal level, across all channels.

Born in the Salesforce AI Incubator, Reputation Studio is paving the way for brands to digitally transform the way they manage consumer-generated content. Our team is passionate about helping brands build relationships with customers and discover the full potential of data discovery using the Salesforce.com platform. Reputation Studio is headquartered in Park City, UT, USA.

Product sampling is one of the fastest ways to receive customer-generated reviews.

But it’s not just about the volume of your reviews; it’s also about the quality.

Let’s look a little deeper at why product sampling campaigns are so effective. Along the way, you’ll learn how you can leverage this knowledge to make sure your campaigns are more effective than the competition’s.

Why Product Sampling is So Powerful

When someone begins a search for your product online, they’re not always looking for the product. They might be looking for product reviews.

63% of people now say that they seek out websites for the purpose of researching customer reviews.

If your product doesn’t have great reviews, you’re already lagging behind the competition. How can you catch up?

Product sampling offers some of the most efficient and cost-effective marketing to incentivize high-quality product reviews. It works by employing several psychological principles to drive response:

Reciprocity

Reciprocity is a foundational element of persuasion featured in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. Cialdini cited one study in which waiters and waitresses provided customers complimentary mints along with the check. Customers reciprocated with higher tips: They gave 3% higher tips when one mint was provided and 14% for two.

Social proof

We’re social creatures, and our search patterns reflect this. Social proof means we look to other people to “prove” a concept before we try it. That’s why data shows one-quarter of search results for the biggest brands are links to customer-generated content. Customers trust the wisdom of the crowd.

Outreach and discovery

According to Pew Research, half of adults under age 50 search out online reviews before making new purchases. If you don’t have product reviews in place, these users may not even find your product in their research

Here’s the catch: Your competitors also know that product sampling is a great formula for generating these results.

So how do you leverage product sampling to beat the competition that’s already engaged in proper sampling? And can you do it on a budget?

What’s Missing from Ordinary Product Sampling Campaigns?

Most ordinary product sampling campaigns focus solely on generating reciprocity. They don’t focus on creating a product sampling campaign that functions like a sophisticated marketing program.

Here’s what they’re lacking:

Word-of-mouth

In the digital era–especially when so many of us are working remotely or practicing social distancing–word-of-mouth happens online. 92% of people find this effective in marketing campaigns. Does your product sampling campaign make it easier for users to share word-of-mouth, or are you just hoping it will?

Data

Don’t perform your product sampling in a vacuum. Your product sampling campaign should include data collecting. You want insightful, user-driven data that can assist a product sampling program in the future. That’s what happened in Vornado’s case, who leveraged these insights with PowerReviews. They saw their sampling campaigns move from an 83% completion rate to 97%.

Trust

Genuine user feedback hits key psychological triggers, which makes potential customers trust that your product is high-quality. Consider that in the health & beauty market, consumer feedback has more influence over buying decisions than price. Any product sampling campaign aimed at the quantity, not quality, of reviews will likely lag behind.

How to Make Better Use of Product Sampling

Maybe you’re thinking, “Okay, but how can we implement a superior product sampling campaign in practice?”

Even if you don’t have a big-time budget, you’ll still be able to generate a higher volume of authentic reviews than other providers if you approach your product sampling program the right way.

Here’s how.

Customer-Generated Visual Content

You don’t just want words. Customer-generated visual content is extraordinarily powerful.

This is especially true for millennials, for whom customer-generated content is 20% more influential than other types of media. Overall, 88% of customers look for visual content in product reviews prior to making a purchase.

Long story short: If your product sampling campaign can collect more customer-generated visual content, you can put it to work across marketing campaigns and social media. You’ll have an instant advantage in establishing credibility for your product

Trust for Customer-Generated Content is Higher

This is social proof in action: The more customer-generated content you use, the more your potential customers can trust you. Ads generated from user content can have click-through rates as much as four times higher, with a 50% lower cost-per-click.

With an effective marketing campaign that reduces your cost-per-click, you can generate more types of trusted customer-generated content without spending big-budget dollars.

Quality of Reviews

Want your product sampling campaign to outperform the competition? Focus on the quality of your reviews.

One way to measure quality is to look for more engagement. For example, we’ve found that longer reviews tend to perform better. Marketing efforts focused on a product sampling campaign also tend to generate longer reviews. As Vornado found, their reviews from product sampling resulted in longer reviews.

0 %

Reviews collected from sampling campaigns are 44% longer than those collected organically.

0 %

Response rate for samples sent vs. reviews written for Vornado's latest product sampling campaign.

50000

Number of reviews syndicated to retail partners.

Product sampling alone isn’t enough; the quality of your product sampling campaign matters, too. That’s how you go beyond the power of ordinary product sampling and beat the competition’s product sampling campaigns.

How to Get Strategic with Product Sampling

Brands do best with a strategic approach to product sampling campaigns.

It starts with driving a higher response rate. If you can send out fewer product samples than the competition and still drive more responses, you’re onto something.

That requires advanced targeting (targeting based on purchase behavior, demographics, affinity groups, geographics, and more) to make sure that you’re sending the product samples to the right people.

PowerReviews’ network of 500,000+ everyday influencers and brand advocates help extend this reach, and as a result, PowerReviews sampling clients see the industry’s highest review submission rates (85%+). That means brands spend less on samples, but still generate a higher volume of authentic reviews than with other providers.

The sampling program with PowerReviews is an instrumental part of our [Customer-Generated Content] collection strategy. What's really phenomenal is that we see a 90% response rate from our sampling campaigns.

Chris Oh, Head of Digital and Social at Maesa

What else makes for strategic product sampling with PowerReviews?

Here’s what Alison Krakowiak, our Product Marketing Manager, shared from her perspective:

Community

Our PowerReviews community drives the success of our campaigns and includes about 800,000 consumers from diverse backgrounds. They are highly engaged and genuinely love engaging with new products/brands and sharing their experiences with others in the form of honest reviews.

Consumer Targeting

Having this large community enables us to work with brands to target very specific consumer groups, and we can make sure brands are engaging with the right people for their products. Working with the right people helps drive more relevant and reviews and also converts samples to reviews at a higher rate, meaning brands send fewer samples.

Sampling Process

Our clients have enough going on in their day-to-day, so we work hard to make sure our sampling process is easy and fits in seamlessly with their current systems and plans. We include dedicated product managers and optional shipping and fulfillment services so clients can focus on other things while we generate reviews for them.

Reporting

In addition to helping consumers drive stronger review coverage across their brands/product catalogue, we also help them learn. Reviews contain a huge amount of consumer insights and sentiment, so we analyze and organize those into digestible reports to help brands learn more about their products and their consumer base.

Customer Service

We assign dedicated project teams to each sampling campaign we run, which ensures clients are supported throughout the execution of their program. We handle all questions and issues in real-time before, during, and after a campaign.

How many reviews should you expect per product sampling campaign?

Many brands considering product sampling campaigns worry they’ll send out a bunch of product samples (which can be expensive) but that the campaign won’t generate very many reviews.

The good news: PowerReviews has been able to deliver 85-90% submission rates for clients due to strong targeting capabilities and consistency in campaigns execution.

“Targeting is key, so making sure we engage with the right customer for the right product will ensure higher submission rates and more reviews,” Krakowiak said.

“We can target over 300 different data points–everything from age, gender, and location to where consumers shop, what products they currently use, what their hair/skin type is, and other things like interests, lifestyle, and household income range. Having this data at our disposal allows us to connect clients to customers that matter to them the most and who will deliver the most authentic and relevant reviews.”

In conclusion

Product sampling is a powerful way to build credibility and trust with your potential audience because it lets your audience speak to the features and benefits of your offerings (without you having to do it yourself.)

With the social proof generated through high-quality reviews from your product sampling campaigns, you can build trust with your audience, drive more sales, and make data-informed decisions.

Plus: By using a strategic approach, you can generate a higher volume of authentic, high-value reviews than the competition–even if you aren’t spending as much on your campaigns.

The bottom line: The impact of product sampling campaigns reaches far and wide, so be sure you’re putting it to good use for your brand.

APRIL 9, 2020 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS— Shure Incorporated today reveals how it has, over the last year, been leveraging PowerReviews’ ratings & reviews and social curation technologies to spearhead a comprehensive website redesign, fuel product development, broadly showcase its offerings and generate exceptional customer engagement.

Shure, a leading global manufacturer of microphones, headphones and audio electronics, has now captured more than 700 reviews of its products with an average star rating of 4.6 and 1,200 customer images on its social channels using PowerReviews software.

Also leveraging the PowerReviews platform, this content is then showcased across the company’s own digital properties and other critical ecommerce platforms where consumers can buy its product offerings. This provides outstanding and authentic endorsement from existing customers to buyers as they enter the later stages of their customer journey.

Jason Walker, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing at Shure, comments, “Our users are more than just customers; they’re a passionate community of fans. Reviews have helped us tap into our community and given us insight on how they perceive our brand.

“After we started working with PowerReviews, it’s been like opening a door on a whole new fan community. We’re able to highlight real customers using our products in a variety of places and circumstances, which we simply wouldn’t have been able to leverage without PowerReviews.”

Saarah Shaikh, Senior Director of Customer Success at PowerReviews, said:

“We are delighted to deliver so much value to and help a company as outstanding as Shure deliver superior experiences to its customers, showcase these to potential buyers and generally help it execute on its mission of being ‘the most trusted audio brand worldwide.’”

Walker says: “Since partnering with PowerReviews, our entire organization has seen the value of reviews and how they’ve enabled us to connect with our customers. From communicating to creating to listening, our products play a role in our customers’ passions. PowerReviews has given us the ability to facilitate and leverage their excitement and amplify it to our audience.”

This information is taken from a newly-published case study, which can be accessed on the PowerReviews website here.

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

PowerReviews (PowerReviews.com) is a software and data company that works with 1000+ leading brands and retailers to bring authenticity and transparency to commerce. The PowerReviews Customer Content Platform has three solutions that help our customers collect and manage customer-generated content to improve the product and customer experience across the customer journey. We help clients meet the evolving need for social proof, accelerating the path to purchase and brand advocacy.

PowerReviews is known for innovation, consultative partnership, and actionable insights, supported by our open platform and approach. Our dedicated team of experts provides thoughtful analysis and turn-key service. PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA.

ABOUT SHURE INCORPORATED

Shure (www.shure.com) has been making people sound extraordinary for nearly a century. Founded in 1925, the Company is a leading global manufacturer of audio equipment known for quality, performance, and durability. It makes microphones, wireless microphone systems, in-ear monitors, earphones and headphones, conferencing systems, and more. For critical listening, or high-stakes moments on stage, in the studio, and from the meeting room, you can always rely on Shure.

Shure Incorporated is headquartered in Niles, Illinois, in the United States. It has over 30 global locations which include corporate locations, manufacturing plants, distribution facilities, and engineering hubs. Its mission is to “be the most trusted audio brand worldwide.”

APRIL 1, 2020 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—PowerReviews reveals the significant impact that COVID-19 has had on both consumer behavior and their interaction with online ratings and reviews in its report published today.

The PowerReviews Ratings & Reviews Retail Market Trends Report – COVID-19 Edition is based on analysis of consumer activity across more than 1.5MM review product pages from the websites of more than 1,200 brands. It reveals:

Skyrocketing conversions, with an increase of 101% between February 24 2020 and March 21 2020 but no notable increase in product page traffic
Review submission volumes and sentiment stable
Product review length falls 22% from February 24 2020 to March 22 2020
Consumer product review engagement up 104% from February 24 2020 to March 20 2020

Carol Krakowski – Director, Insights at PowerReviews, states:

“Ratings and review content is having greater impact on consumer behavior in the COVID-19 era, providing the validation and social proof necessary to drive sales. According to our figures, conversions and review engagement peak within a two day period. This is no coincidence.

“But it’s not just the fact that both these metrics increase that is significant, it’s the extent to which this is the case. Both conversions and review engagement more than doubled in less than a month.

“However, review length is down in the same period. Given broader consumer trends of high conversion levels at the moment, the next month represents an excellent opportunity to generate deep and impactful review content for brands and retailers.”

Traffic steady but conversions skyrocket

Conversion levels peak on March 21 2020 after doubling within a month.

Review engagement increases significantly

Consumer interactions with review content more than doubles during COVID-19 period, peaking on March 20, 2020.

Read the full research findings on the PowerReviews blog.

Research Methodology

PowerReviews research is based on analysis of activity across more than 1.5MM product pages from more than 1,200 retail/brand sites between February 24, 2020 and March 24, 2020.

FURTHER INQUIRIES

Andrew Smith

Marketing Director

andrew.smith@powerreviews.com

312-802-9846

About PowerReviews

PowerReviews is a software and data company that works with 1000+ leading brands and retailers to bring authenticity and transparency to commerce. The PowerReviews Customer Content Platform has four solutions that help our customers collect and manage customer-generated content to improve the product and customer experience across the customer journey. We help clients meet the evolving need for social proof, accelerating the path to purchase and brand advocacy.

PowerReviews is known for innovation, consultative partnership, and actionable insights, supported by our open platform and approach. Our dedicated team of experts provides thoughtful analysis and turnkey service. PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL.

Why Product Sampling is So Powerful

Reciprocity

Social proof

Outreach and discovery

What’s Missing from Ordinary Product Sampling Campaigns?

Word-of-mouth

Data

Trust

How to Make Better Use of Product Sampling

Customer-Generated Visual Content

Trust for Customer-Generated Content is Higher

Quality of Reviews

Response rate for samples sent vs. reviews written for Vornado's latest product sampling campaign.

Number of reviews syndicated to retail partners.

How to Get Strategic with Product Sampling

Community

Consumer Targeting

Sampling Process

Reporting

Customer Service

How many reviews should you expect per product sampling campaign?

In conclusion

Webinar Speakers

What's the difference between an "everyday influencer" and a "micro influencer?"

Are “everyday influencers” getting paid?

Isn’t that the strategy of legacy brands to hire celebrity ambassadors that drive to brand and speak to it?

Is verified purchases = trustworthy reviews = trust?

How would you start using Everyday Influencers for a brand that is just starting out?

Do you know where/how consumers provide recommendations?

Although more brands are beginning to understand the value of everyday influencers, celebrity campaigns are still more popular. Do you think brands will shift more to activating everyday or nano to micro influencers?

If an influencer with 100,000 followers reposted an influencer who has only 1000 followers but is more authentic, how would that be perceived?

How much should we spend on a paid influencer campaign to make it worth our while if we have a pretty tight budget?

How do you handle trolls in direct consumer influencers posting?

What do you do when you want to reach new audiences outside of your already existing customer profile?

Do you think "everyday influencers" should be compensated for the branded content they produce for a brand?

What are some successful ways to report on ROI with influencers?

Could partnering with everyday influencers also be considered a good activity to implement in the context of Travel & Tourism services as opposed to Retail products?

Have you seen success with tying PowerReviews with a specific retailer campaign?

What are some proactive ways that you can engage these everyday influencers to create quality content for the brand? Is it possible to provide specific asks to these "loyal" consumers?

I have an emerging jewelry brand and I'd like to try working with Everyday Influencers. Could you suggest how to go about working with them?

What are the keys to contracting with micro and everyday influencers? Do you consider alternate payments (non-monetary)?

Approximately how much time should I allocate to starting a relationship with an Everyday Influencer(s) and what have you seen worked out successfully?

Influencers with high following don't necessarily have the most engagement. How do you look at influencers from an ROI perspective? And how do you prioritize awareness vs driving product sales through unique links?

You’ve talked a lot about trust, but how would you define it?

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

ABOUT SHURE INCORPORATED

Traffic steady but conversions skyrocket

Review engagement increases significantly

Research Methodology

FURTHER INQUIRIES

About PowerReviews

Consumer review behavior: Key trends in COVID-19 era

01

02

03

Order volume and conversions are up but traffic stable

Traffic steady but conversions skyrocket

Review submission levels and sentiment stable but review length shortens

Review volume stable

Review length falls significantly but sentiment stable

Review engagement surges

Review engagement increases significantly

Summary

Download a copy of the research:

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Consumer review behavior:
Key trends in COVID-19 era