Gardener’s Supply Company Sows Inspired Commerce with Customer Content
The Opportunity
As a PowerReviews customer for more than ten years, Gardener’s Supply had long understood the value of ratings and reviews content in driving ecommerce sales and revenue. However, the company recently began using PowerReviews solutions to amplify authentic social media content on its own digital channels with excellent results. Following this success, the company also started leveraging PowerReviews UGC Analytics platform. This has identified some extremely actionable nuggets focused on improving product quality.
The Challenge
Gardener’s understood the importance of ratings and reviews for its overall customer experience and sales strategy, as well as the impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, it noticed its customers were increasingly sharing the bountiful visual harvests of their gardening pursuits with Gardener’s products, via social media.
While copious, this content was not amplified beyond the social media channel it was created in. This represented a missed opportunity: it was not being integrated into the Gardener’s website, where it could have a tangible impact on customer purchasing decisions. While the goal was to weave this rich user-generated content into Gardener’s website’s product detail pages, the team struggled to accomplish this with its existing social media discovery platform.
When PowerReviews introduced its social collection capabilities, featuring ease-of-use and streamlined integration with Gardener’s website, the team was sold.
Enhancing Procurement Strategies
Working with PowerReviews, Gardeners has collected and displayed over 14,000 reviews and 1,500 images over the last year on its website.
In just a few months, the team has also amplified hundreds of images from Instagram by tapping into this large pool of visual content that many customers were already creating and sharing. The images are added to galleries displayed on Gardener’s product detail pages, enriching the shopping experience with color and context from users’ unique experiences. A summary at the top of each product detail page shows the total number of product reviews collected, the average review rating, and a distinct call out such as, “96% of respondents would recommend this to a friend.”
Product Launch Success
Gardener’s noticed that in instances where customer reviews were collected prior to the peak sales season, new products experienced a marketable boost in overall sales.
Curated customer content has also helped fuel the company’s new procurement strategy. Recently, the company started adding “market available products,” warehoused and drop-shipped from other vendors, to expand its offerings while reducing the risk of carrying additional inventory.
“We have been pleasantly surprised by the significant return on investment of this initiative as we have not had to design promotions or develop custom copy. This merchandise has been selling well and we know the customer feedback has made all the difference – helping [shoppers] feel confident in purchasing from us and distinguishing our offering via first-hand positive experiences,” said Everse.
Actionable Intelligence Delivering Critical Product Insight
Gardeners has also recently started leveraging the PowerReviews analytics suite UGC Analytics – to gain deeper insights on its product catalog. Immediately, it started offering significant value.
“Our products generate five-star ratings even when they include a description of a problem. We, therefore, need extra analytics capabilities to identify very specific improvements that will make a big difference overall, even when at the raw star data level you wouldn’t think there are any issues.”
This is game-changing evidence to not only optimize the product catalog and drive improved customer experiences but also to take to merchants for product improvements.
This is just one example of many. Analysis of Gardeners’ review content is enabling the company to elevate – not only the way it leverages its UGC but also – product experiences across its entire catalog.
