March 2021 - PowerReviews

MARCH 31, 2021—CHICAGO—US grocery consumers have flocked online at a rate never seen previously due to the Covid pandemic — with time savings being the primary motivating factor rather than Covid-related safety concerns.

However, the store is far from dead. Consumers are increasingly favoring a blended store-online grocery shopping approach.

These are just a few of the key insights from a new consumer survey from PowerReviews, a leading provider of ratings and reviews and User-Generated Content solutions.

The PowerReviews Evolution of the Modern Grocery Shopper study draws on survey responses from 7,916 grocery shoppers across the country, surveyed in February 2021. Key findings include:

More grocery shopping is happening online than ever before

73% of consumers had purchased grocery items online within the most recent three months of being surveyed, compared to 17% when we asked the same question in 2017. This represents growth of 4.3x.
61% of consumers shop for groceries online more now than they did pre-COVID.
Top reasons for online shopping include time savings (59%), personal safety (49%) and avoiding impulse purchases (31%).
Ordering directly from a local grocery store (as opposed to online-only ordering services such as Instacart or Amazon Fresh) is the most popular way to shop for groceries online; 65% of consumers say they’ve done this.

Brick-and-mortar grocery is alive and well

93% of consumers had made an in-store grocery purchase within the most recent three months of being surveyed.
95% of consumers who shopped for groceries online have also made an in-store grocery purchase within the same time period.

Ratings and reviews positively impact the behavior of both online and in-store grocery shoppers.

82% of online grocery shoppers say they read reviews at least occasionally.
83% of consumers are at least somewhat interested in accessing product ratings and reviews when they’re considering a new product while shopping in a brick-and-mortar grocery store.
78% of online grocery shoppers are more likely to purchase a new grocery item if customer reviews exist for that product. The figure is 64% among in-store shoppers.

Andrew Smith – VP, Marketing at PowerReviews, says:

“Although consumer shopping behaviors have shifted online over the past year at an unprecedented rate, grocery was one vertical where consumers always seemed to place more value on the store over online.

“Our results show this is still the case to a certain extent, but shoppers are clearly more comfortable doing their grocery shopping online today than pre-Covid. The fact that consumer convenience is the biggest reason for this is indicative that this trend will continue long after the pandemic is behind us.

“Trends evident in other shopping verticals are mirrored in the grocery sector. Shoppers are relying more on validation from existing shoppers when making buying decisions in the form of user-generated content. Ratings and reviews are key to providing the buyer confidence necessary for grocery consumers to convert — according to our survey, whether shopping online or instore.”

Read the full survey results on the PowerReviews website.

Research Methodology

The PowerReviews Evolution of the Modern Grocery Shopper consumer survey draws on responses from 7,916 active grocery shoppers across the United States who have opted in to offers and discounts from retailers. The survey took place in February and March 2021. Throughout the survey, we defined Boomers as born in the years 1946 to 1964 (aged 56-74 on Dec 31, 2020), Gen X as born in the years 1965 to 1980 (aged 40-55 on Dec 31, 2020), Millennials as born between 1981-1996 (aged 23-38 on Dec 31, 2020) and Gen Zers born in or after 1997 (ages 22 and younger on Dec 31, 2020).

ABOUT POWERREVIEWS

PowerReviews (PowerReviews.com) is a conversion-first UGC vendor obsessed with helping brands and retailers grow their businesses. PowerReviews enables these organizations to generate better quality customer product ratings and reviews in larger volumes and then analyze and benchmark all this data to optimize their UGC programs for conversion, while improving product quality and customer experience.

PowerReviews is headquartered in Chicago, IL, USA.

Media Contact

Erin Lutz
Lutz Public Relations (for PowerReviews)
erin@lutzpr.com
949-293-1055

You know you need to ask for reviews. You also have ideas for how to ask for reviews.

There’s only one piece of the puzzle left for you to figure out: when to ask for reviews.

Congratulations — this is actually the easiest part, especially since we’ve already done the research for you. We’ve analyzed the data from hundreds of thousands of review requests and post-purchase emails from PowerReviews clients to determine the optimal time for asking reviews.

What we found may surprise you. Certain days of the week perform better for review collection. Ultimately, however, the best time to ask for reviews depends on the types of products you sell, as well as the demographic makeup of your audience.

Let’s dig in.

The Best Day(s) of the Week to Ask for Reviews

In general, we’ve found that Wednesdays and Saturdays have the highest conversion rate for review request emails. Maybe people are looking for a way to break up hump day, or they have more time on the weekend.

Whatever the reason, emails sent on these days tend to lead to more reviews. This is not to say requests aren’t effective on other days (we’ve seen plenty of evidence to suggest this is the case). But scheduling your post-purchase emails on a Wednesday or Saturday seems to give it the best possible chance of generating a review.

What Time Should You Email Your Review Request?

The best time to send your review request emails depends on your customer base, and their past interactions with your email campaigns. Review your email analytics. Based on that data, you can determine when your customers will be most likely to open and engage with your review request emails.

If you’re starting fresh with a review collection email program and looking for some general best practices, however, the best time slot is between 10am and 2pm. This timeframe captures people on their lunch break, when they have a little extra down time to leave a review. 6pm can be another peak time, when people have finished their workday.

When to Ask for Reviews, Depending on What You Sell

Now you’ve got two days of the week you can dedicate to sending your post-purchase emails. But how many Wednesdays, or Saturdays, should you wait before sending your review request?

You don’t want to send your email too early. You could come off as too eager, but worse, the person may not have even had a chance to try out the product yet.

The vast majority of people prefer to leave a review after they’ve used a product at least once or twice, and 34% of people would like to use it even more before writing their review.

Younger generations, in particular, prefer to be able to vet a product a bit longer before leaving their review. While 40% of Boomers are happy to write a review after using a product once, only 27% of Gen Zers are.

At the same time, you don’t want to wait too long either. People prefer to leave reviews while the product is still top of mind. 77% of people will write a review within a week of receiving or using the product, and 8% will write a review the same day.

There’s also a risk that if you wait too long, your email will get lost among all the other review request emails they’re getting. People order a lot of things online these days, and that shopping behavior has only increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 in 5 people buy something at least once a week. For 6% of Amazon Prime members, they purchase something every single day.

Getting the timing just right is key to maximizing your review submissions. You want to give people enough time to be able to leave a detailed review (customers rate longer reviews as more helpful), without waiting so long that they lose interest.

How long should you wait before sending your review request? Between 7 to 21 days, depending on the type of product the customer purchased.

Hard Goods – 21 Days

When we talk about hard goods, we’re referring to products that last a long time, such as refrigerators, washing machines, and computers.

We recommend waiting 21 days before sending your review request for these products. Why so long? With products like these, the person is expecting to use them for a long time. They want to make sure it works as expected, and they need time to confirm that.

Send your review request too early, and they may have only used the product a few times. With some of these products, like a new computer, they may have not even had a chance to set them up yet!

Soft Goods – 14 Days

Soft goods describe items that are used immediately and only last a few years, such as apparel, cosmetics, and personal care items.

We recommend waiting 14 days before asking for a review on these products. That’s a perfect amount of time for a person to have received the product and used it at least once or twice. With the purchase still top of mind, they’ll be in a good place to write a thoughtful review.

Perishable Goods – 14 Days

Perishable goods are used immediately and have a short lifespan. These may include food and beverage items, as well as flowers and plants.

Like soft goods, we recommend waiting 14 days before sending your review request email. Perishable goods are used quickly, and you want to ask for a review before the person has already forgotten about how much they enjoyed it!

Seasonal Goods – 7 Days

Seasonal items include holiday and seasonal products. They could be perishable, like holiday-themed foods and beverages. Or they could be a soft good, like apparel or decor. Regardless, many of these items are put to use as soon as they’re out of the box.

As a result, you don’t want to delay your review request longer than a week. 7 days is the ideal time for sending a post-purchase email on seasonal goods. The person has probably already used the product, if not multiple times, and you want to make sure you ask for a review before the holiday is over.

There’s another reason why you don’t want to wait too long to ask for reviews on seasonal products.

Reviews increase conversions by 115%, and there’s only a short window of time your seasonal products will be available. You have to make the most of that window to boost your review count — and your sales.

When to Send a Review Follow Up Email

If a customer doesn’t respond to your initial review request, how long should you wait before sending them a follow up? A good rule of thumb is 1 additional week, or 7 days. The product will still be fresh in their mind, but you’ve given their email inbox a little breathing room.

Do you really need to send a followup email? Yes, not everyone will leave a review the first time you ask them. In fact, only 68% of customers will. An additional 28% leave a review the second time you ask them. But 4% of people, you’ll need to nudge them a third time before they write a review. That’s why we recommend sending at least two emails as a best practice.

How many requests you’ll ultimately need to send can depend on the demographic makeup of your customer base, however. Our research shows that older generations are significantly more likely to leave a review after the first request. 74% of Boomers will write a review the first time you ask them, as will 70% of Gen Xers. For Gen Zers and Millennials, however, that percentage drops to around 60%.

The takeaway: If your customer base skews younger, always send at least two emails asking for reviews, if not three. Learn more about what drives customers to leave reviews.

Worried about being a pest? Don’t be. Our data shows that up to 80% of all reviews come from post-purchase emails. Asking for reviews over email can work wonders for your review collection, especially if you ask more than once.

Just take a look at the chart below. These are the review collection numbers for one of our clients, before and after they started sending post purchase emails. Can you guess what month they started asking for reviews?

That’s right. Simply starting a post-purchase email campaign skyrocketed this client’s review collection numbers to the tune of 900%.

It’s Always the Right Time to Ask for Reviews

Do what you can to get more reviews, by asking at the right time, and asking more than once. It’s worth it! Why? 97% of consumers typically read reviews before making a purchase and 81% of online purchases take place on pages with ratings and reviews content.
Timing your ask is just one part of a successful review collection strategy. From collecting and displaying reviews, to managing and responding to negative ones, there’s always more you can do to squeeze more value out of your customer reviews. Learn more in our Complete Guide to Ratings & Reviews for 2021.

At PowerReviews, our engineering team works on a diverse range of projects. It’s a great place to learn a ton, build skills and grow your career. Read on to learn about just one of these projects – which we were recently working on.

We are always looking for ways to evolve our technology stack with an eye towards scalability. A recent challenge we faced was the stability of our data ETL processes, which are critical to supporting our analytics platform.

For context, our ETL processes handle up to a million updates every day and account for 250gb of daily data transfer. So to say they are a big deal is an understatement.

We recently adopted AWS’s Data Migration Service to overhaul how we move data from our core transactional databases to our Analytics Warehouse in Snowflake. This adoption reduced a multi-day, high-maintenance, data load process to a mostly automated, hours long job.

We wanted to share how we accomplished this 1) to give a flavor of the sorts of challenges we face every day at PowerReviews and 2) in case you are facing a similar challenge.

We started by evaluating different approaches and technologies for streamlining our warehouse loading process. These included AWS Kinesis, RDS Postgres Snapshot Exports, and using the wal2json plugin offered by the Postgres community.

Each of these solutions were evaluated against our previous ETL implementation in the following areas: operational cost, scope of architecture changes required to implement, and overall completeness of the data capture capability offered by the technology.

We landed on AWS’s Database Migration Service (DMS) because it offered us a managed solution towards leveraging Postgres Write-ahead Logging (WAL) replication to source data for our analytics platform.

AWS DMS – at its core – is an abstraction layer over Postgres’s WAL replication that allows us to concentrate on the data itself, leaving the low level details of the implementation to AWS to manage. In general we look toward managed solutions to keep our DevOps team lean and mean.

With our technology choice made, we went to work on an implementation. Our DMS solution connected DMS replication instances with each of our databases.

These instances included DMS task definitions which defined which tables to capture change data and deliver that change data as JSON files to S3 storage buckets. The file uploads to S3 trigger notifications that initiate loading of files into Snowflake, our data warehouse technology.

The file loading process then orchestrates reconciliation of insert/update/delete actions to our analytics source of record.

Another choice we made along the way was to use a tool called dbt. dbt lets our data analysts take ownership of the entire analytics engineering workflow.

With dbt in place, we are able to hand off further ingestion of our data to our analysts – who handle the incorporation of this data into aggregate views. These drive our public facing analytics reports in Tableau.

As a result of our migration to DMS, and the introduction of dbt, we’ve realized a ton of benefits to the business.

These include moving our engineering focus from tuning of bulky ETL queries, managing database performance, and chasing down data discrepancies to instead expanding the reach of our analytics platform and exploring new and valuable insights in our data that we can provide to our customers.

If you’re facing similar ETL challenges, we would love to hear from you. And if you’re interested in tackling similar tasks, we are in growth mode so are currently hiring extensively in engineering.