Should I Offer Incentives for Product Reviews?

Collecting product reviews for your eCommerce store is a great idea if you are looking to leverage social proof and boost your conversion rate!

But where do you begin when you are trying to collect a bunch of legitimate product reviews from your customers?

A great start is by sending review requests to each customer that purchases from you.

But once you have review requests set up to be sent to your customers, how can you ensure that you have a high response rate?

The big question then becomes this...

Should I Offer Incentives for Product Reviews?

Yes! The best way to improve your average review response rate is by offering incentives.

The majority of shoppers rely on product reviews to make a buying decision, but 81% of online shoppers don’t write to them!

That is why offering incentives is so important.

Not only do you want to make it easy for past customers to write a review, but you want to offer incentives to reward your customers for their time and effort to fill out a product review.

What Types of Incentives Can I Offer?

With Fera, there are three different times of incentives you can offer within the review request email:

1. Discount
2. Loyalty Points (with Smile.io)
3. Cash Back

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Which Incentive is the Best to Offer?

Each incentive has its own unique benefit and reason it would be the best option in different situations and for different customers.

Remember, the more you ask from your customers, the more of an incentive you will have to offer.

For example, a video review should come with a better incentive than a written review.

Discounts

Pros of offering discounts

Discounts are great incentives for when you want your customers to come back and purchase from you again. By continuing to offer them discounts for submitting reviews to you it will help ensure they become a loyal customer and create a cycle of repeat customers.

Cons of offering discounts

Some cons of discounts are if the products you offer are something customers only need to buy once or aren't planning to buy again from you for a while.

So if they have no need for a discount at that moment, they may not bother to fill out a review for you if they don't see the value in the incentive type.

The other con of this strategy is if you are not a discount brand.

If your reputation is built on your product, always being the same price and never discounted, this may hurt your brand reputation.

Discount offer examples

• Review: 10%
• Photo: 15%
• Video: 25%

Loyalty Points

Pros of offering loyalty points

Loyalty points are best to offer as an incentive when you are looking to create a community of brand-loyal customers.

Fera is integrated with Smile.io, so you can connect to your customers' Smile account and reward them with points.

To set up your smile.io account check out this guide on Youtube.

Cons of offering loyalty points

The only drawback to this form of incentives is that if some of your customers don't have a Smile account already they may be unfamiliar with how it works and what they can do with their points.

Loyalty point offer examples

• Review: 100 points
• Photo: 200 points
• Video: 500 points

Cash Back

Pros of offering cashback

Cashback is the best incentive to offer if you are looking to have a high response rate and quickly increase your amount of product reviews for your eCommerce store.

Offering cashback is usually the most attractive incentive out of the three options.

Cons of offering cashback

Now there are a few drawbacks to giving cashback such as a hit to cash flow.

So you need to monitor how many review requests you send out to make sure you can afford it if everyone were to write a review.

The best way to accommodate this type of incentive is to build it into your pricing.

Discount Offer Examples

• Review: $2
• Photo: $5
• Video: $7

Think about your bottom line

Like every discount, store owners should calculate how to set up either their cashback incentives or discount incentives to ensure they are still making a profit.

Questions to ask before creating an incentive

Some questions store owners should ask themselves (and communicate to their customers) is:

• If the discount will be applied to one item or the whole order?
• What items in the store will be eligible for discounts
  • Sale items v non-sale items
  • Branded v non branded items
• How long will the discount be valid?

Discounts and cashback are incentives that most store owners are equipped to offer, but make sure that your discounts work for you and your customers!

Get started with offering incentives for product reviews

If you are looking for a full walk-through on how to fully set up review campaigns with Fera, follow this guide review request campaigns. 

Once you do that, be sure to learn how you can add reviews to your Wix website or add product reviews to your Shopify store!