Product Reviews - The Most Important Ecommerce Content

Importance of Product Reviews
What is the most important user generated content on any ecommerce web site? After seven years as a Director of E-Commerce the answer to the question of the most important ecommerce content is three words – Reviews, Reviews and Reviews. Products with reviews convert, but this simple truth is only the tip of why product reviews are so important. Product reviews are also important because:

• Tribes form around reviews
• Customers sell each other
• Google loves product reviews
• Reviews feature “customer speak”
• Reviews generate authenticity points
• Most reviews are positive
  

Tribes & Reviews
Evaluating an excellent Software As Service (SAS) review application made by Austin based Bazaar Voice (linked below) I asked, “How many reviews are too many reviews.” I was astonished to hear this answer, “there is no such thing as too many reviews.” Skeptical I thought this answer was sales talk. Then I started thinking. “Why,” I wondered, “would someone write the 100th review of a product?”

After 99 reviews the person writing the 100th review isn’t thinking of adding to already complete product knowledge. Nope, we write the 100th review to join the tribe. We want to be a member of the group who loves a product capable of generating 100 reviews. We are pack animals. We warm our hands close to electronic fires seeking kinship and meaning. Writing the 100th review expresses our desire to be a tribe member. We want to be good Boy Scouts. We want merit badges we can wear proudly. “Yes, I’m a member,” our reviews say.


Customers Sell Each Other
Once my team and I realized how reviews form community we created a “Buzz Team” to elevate reviewers. We understood the 1:10:89 rule (1% of users will add content to your site, 10% will comment on content created by the 1% and 89% will ride on the train created by the 11%, see my User Generated Content post for more on the 1:10:89 rule). As online marketers our chief job may be to create places where customers freely and honestly influence each other. Days when we “sold” things are gone. Today's marketing is guiding, curating and acting as caretakers of the gold in them there user generated content (UGC) hills.


Google Loves Product Reviews
Google’s started with the academic web. PageRank understood links represent votes, votes of importance. When a scholarly article is highly linked it is more important than similar articles with fewer links. Brutal maybe, Darwinian certainly, but an accurate proxy capable of organizing more information than can be imagined. Create things people link to and your site is or will become more important.

Reviews are great link bait (content capable of generating links). A great review may be linked thousands of times across the Internet. Even an average review will have social network links to it, at least from the author. Again, the 100th review is valuable. One review with one link from Facebook or Twitter is helpful. A hundred reviews with social network links are powerful. A thousand reviews is a tribe, a tribe your marketing team can learn how to effectively support simply by reading your "buzz team's" reviews.


Reviews Feature “Customer Speak”
I’ve been marketing one thing or another for more than thirty years. I think and speak like a marketer. How I think may or may not be consistent with how customers think and speak. Chances are good your customers speak about your products differently than your company. Difference is good, but can’t be ignored. This is one of those times when the customer is ALWAYS right. How your customers discuss your product and its many benefits is the truth. If customers don’t use marketing speak then change your marketing. It is a fool’s errand to try and change customer speak. Be glad anyone gives enough of a hoot to speak about your product and then adapt your marketing to the market's truth.

You don’t have to limit your marketing to how customers speak, but buy the keywords you read and use the action verbs and descriptive adjectives you read in ad copy (if you are smart). It is faster to climb the sizable product adoption life cycle mountain describe by Geoffrey Moore (for technical products but applies to everything) if you do so with how your product is actually being adopted. Trying to impose your marketing lingua franca on customers is another fool’s errand. Remember what T. S. Eliot said, “good writers steal, bad writers imitate.” Stealing from your customer’s user generated content provided for FREE in customer reviews is SMART and something you may want to institute across your marketing.


Reviews Generate Authenticity Points
It takes courage to hear what customers say and then act on it. Customers know getting negative feedback is tough. Customers grant ecommerce web sites brave enough to feature positive and negative reviews authenticity points. Reviews act as something other than user generated content. Reviews create a security blanket that extends to the site. If your site features tough truths with the hard working comments you’ve included rectifying problems then your site will have more credibility. Customers know mistakes happen. If your company looks at mistakes as learning opportunities, embraces mistkaes to find new ways to WOW customers then your customer service efforts will come through in reviews. Saying, “customer service is important to us” means nothing. If your customers say, “customer service is important to them” it rings true. There may be no more clear definition of our different marketing times than the previous sentence.

This is the tricky part of marketing in the age of Google. When I worked for P&G and M&M/Mars we shaped marketing messages, sent them out into the world via a handful of “portals” and monitored reception. Times are different. Share your company’s product dreams and mission in the "About" area of your site and don't expect many visitors :). Every product and company needs a positive creation story.

How brands and products will be perceived, shaped and modified is in the hands of tribes that form around them. Cool products create customer evangelists. Customer evangelists are customers who make it their mission to act as town crier, organizer and unofficial brand spokesperson. EMBRACE YOUR SPECIAL PRODUCT EVANGELISTS. You should hold these special people, people willing to give their most cherished possession – their time – very close. Reward your evangelists with recognition, competition and social capital and they will build multimillion-dollar brands with you.


Most Reviews Are Positive
Have you ever purchased a product after reading a negative review? I have too especially if the negative reviews were specific. Some people don’t want exactly what I’m looking for and vice versa. The importance of negative reviews can’t be overstated. Negative reviews make all the positive reviews believable AND they may just sell the product to someone looking for what the negative reviewer doesn’t like.

The biggest issue any E-Commerce Director faces is not negative reviews. The biggest problem is reviewers tend to be too general. Great reviewers are hard to find. “I love it,” isn’t a review. This is why a star review system (or some equivalent) is so important. Stars provide a snap shot summary of how a product competes. Stars are the key to getting customers to read reviews. Stars earn attention reviews earn money.

Not all reviews or reviewers are created equal. This is why we created a Buzz Team. One of our Buzz Team’s most important features was teaching reviewers how to be specific, use common keywords and learn to write about products from a collective point of view. A collective point of view understands reviews are meant to help others. The best way to help other customers is to be specific about what was good, bad or neutral in a product’s performance. The best reviewers understand their mental state can influence a review, so they take deep breaths and give products several chances to confirm experience. Hold a reviewer capable of writing a hundred words or more about a product experience close to your ecommerce heart since they are worth their weight in gold.


Product Review Resources
As an E-Commerce Director I worked with and evaluated several review engines and would highly recommend:

BazaarVoice

PowerReviews

TechCrunch Article about BazaarVoice and PowerReviews

Excellent Review Sites

REI (Powerreviews)

Bass Pro Shops

Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Berlin Johnson is a favorite author. Everything Bad Is Good For You is a must read for any information architect. I can't wait to read Where Ideas Come From: The natural history of innovation. Here is Steven discussing the book on Booktv:

Where Ideas Come From on BookTv

Here is a good review I found online:

Niel Bekker's Review on Memburn

Will post my thoughts after I read the book, but know it will be on my recommended list from listening to Steven discuss it on Booktv.

Martin

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Fixing Email Marketing

Fixing Email Marketing’s Problems
Reading comScore’s email usage data it is easy to think email is aging out. Younger users are abandoning web based email for mobile and other devices as older users use email more. Age isn’t email marketing’s problem. Email marketing’s problems cuts to the core of what happens when new marketing tools are used in an old marketing way.

Email marketing is in trouble because it works. As a Director of E-Commerce I saw how powerful email marketing could be. Emails provided the highest net profit of any marketing strategy. Email marketing’s high return is easy to understand. Emails are cheap to deliver, their impact is immediate and email’s ability to move large numbers of customers to conversion is unrivaled. Scooping traffic off of search engines is less targeted and more expensive. Traditional advertising via print is all but dead and organic search can be a crapshoot based on Google’s algorithm changes. Mailing your own email list appears to be the most effective marketing strategy…until it isn’t.

We are about to cross the Rubicon. Younger users are the canary in email marketing’s mine and they are leaving web based email marketing in droves. Email marketing is being killed because marketers, and I place myself in this tribe, are ignoring Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing rules and implications. We marketers were so glad to see something work we piled on. We increased email frequency even as we decreased relevance thus violating Seth’s two primary rules for permission marketing – something customers want, when they want it:

Email Blasts Kill Relevancy
Four in 10 global marketers (43%) use email segmentation to personalize messages by audience, according to a recent survey from Alterian. Another 44% are still employing email blasts of some kind, although 26% use basic personalization and 18% blast out on a mass basis. This means only a small portion (13%) deliver emails based on preferences at the individual customer level, monitored in real-time.

Frequency Fatigues Email Lists
The most common complaint given by consumers as a reason they unsubscribe from a company’s permission-based emails is that they come too frequently (54%). Another 49% (more than one answer permitted to this question) cite the content becoming boring or repetitive over time. Receiving too many emails closely follows, being cited by 47% of respondents.
Ref: Marketing Charts

I confess. As a Director or E-Commerce I increased email frequency during peak times to help make net profit and sales goals. Any increase in frequency without sophisticated segmentation means relevancy declines, customers get bored and feel marketed too instead of part of “our company’s tribe”. You don’t spam your family. Using new technology in old ways may work in the short term but abuse hurts over the long run. New technology is a mirror. Consumers have had it. Push marketing is already dead on the margin. The death of push marketing is pulling down newspapers and magazines. It is almost too expensive to put print on paper. Expense isn’t the problem. Traditional advertising doesn’t speak to us anymore. Even many Super Bowl ads seemed hopelessly out of step expensive examples of companies talking to themselves about themselves.

Many companies blame the recession for poor sales and spotty reception for their advertising messages, but there is a marketing revolution going on. A switch has been turned. Consumers been pushed around long enough. Consumers are in control and our options proliferate faster than we can keep up. If your company doesn’t have something meaningful to say no amount of advertising spend will mask meaninglessness. We see behind the curtain. We know there is no wizard. Cluetrain Manifesto anyone?

Email Marketing’s Solution
“Whatever is happening is what is supposed to be happening,” is one of my favorite Eckhart Tolle-isms. We can fix email marketing’s problems when we truly fix our marketing mindsets. Here is how to fix our marketing minds in the hopes our actions will follow (lol):

• Because something works doesn’t mean we violate permission marketing’s “customer in control” tenants. Violations make whatever marketing is working NOT WORK. Don’t use email marketing to sell used cars.


• If your email marketing doen’t have a “frequency” control button easily within your customer’s reach during subscription or on their MyAccount profile then create one. Customers MUST be in control of your email frequency. They are in control not you.
  


• Sophisticated email marketing segmentation is a MUST. We used Responsys and they had a good handle on how to segment emails. See Responsys email marketing lifecycle management.


• Sharing and informing are important email strategies that always look lousy on paper but they build legitimacy, relevancy and engagement. Your newsletter may not APPEAR to make money, but it may be the most important email marketing you do (more on the importance of newsletter type email marketing in a future post).


• What are your conversation metrics? If you talk AT your customers more than you interact and listen to them then your conversation metrics are in the red. Polls, surveys, contests and games can help lift your email marketing back into the black. We always found our poll based emails were among our most opened. People want to be involved so involve them.


• Does yoru email marketing speak with forked tongue? Email must be consistent with Facebook, Twitter and traditional marketing (catalog, print) or cognitive dissonance results and confused customers don’t buy. Speak with one voice or don’t speak.


• Simple is better than complex. No matter how simple YOU think your email marketing is it isn’t. No matter how many times you’ve whacked your email marketing with Occam’s razor it can be simplified at least three more times.


• If you don’t have a social marketing strategy, using your products and company talents to do some larger social good, GET ONE. Social Marketing’s importance during a time of social networks can’t be overstated. Turns out doing the right thing is the right thing (read Tim Sanders book Saving The World At Work for more).
  

Email marketing is not dead, but it can be killed. Marketers should listen to the canary’s song and change their email marketing. And, by the way, mobile marketing is upon us. So far mobile marketing is too hard for mainstream marketers to understand so the abuse meter is low. Let’s hope we learn Mobile Marketing’s new rules, whatever they may be, and adhere to them better than we did email marketing’s permission marketing tenets. Rereading Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, rereading any Seth Godin book is never a bad idea, may help remind us of the rules of our new marketing game….maybe.

Good luck and remember ScentTrail E-Commerce can help you develop a winning email marketing strategy.

Martin

Email: martinsellingzoe(at)aol
Twitter: ScentTrail
LinkedIn: Martin Marty Smith

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The Daily ScentTrail

When I started writing about scenttrail as a web marketing term in April 2008 Google returned less than ten pages for the keyword search “ScentTrail”. Now almost fifty thousand pages are returned for “ScentTrail”. Google learns and stretches toward infinity on any keyword.

ScentTrail Defined

ScentTrail Manifesto

Posts linked above describe web marketing scenttrail, a particular thing not to be confused with perfume or hunting. In 2008 I wrote about web marketing scenttrail. While I searched for definition and clarity a common theme emerged. Web marketing scenttrail always happens now. What happened yesterday isn’t as important as what is happening. Since now is what is important creating The Daily ScentTrail as an excursion into the outer reaches of my web marketing knowledge and favorite web sites seems a natural next step.

The Daily ScentTrail celebrates the organic and ever changing magic that is the web. The Daily ScentTrail features a single web site, providing link love and short notes about why the site earned recognition as The Daily ScentTrail. The Daily ScentTrail is my attempt, like artist Jonathan Brofosky, to count to infinity. I calculated recently it would take over 300 years to spend a single minute on every web site, a number that is sure to increase as web sites proliferate reaching toward infinity. The Daily ScentTrail reviews a single exceptional web site daily.

Send suggestions for The Daily ScentTrail to martinsellingzoe(at)aol.

First Daily ScentTrail: Tim Sanders

Understanding our developing “new” altruism is a favorite topic. Two things coincide to create new altruism: rise of social networks and our human predisposition to help one another. Tim Sanders is one of the three horsemen that helped me understand our human desire to assist, to help. Robert Wright’s NonZero and Michael Shermer’s Mind of the Market are the other two writers who shaped my emerging new altruism ideas.

Love is the Killer App

Tim Sanders’ Web Site

Tim’s influential book, Love Is The Killer App described what would become our social networked future. It is one thing to see the future as it unfolds quite another to understand it in advance. Tim’s Love Is The Killer App understood technology would serve our desire for connection before Facebook, Twitter, Loot and Flickr took such firm hold. Tim understood technology manifests natural human desires not the other way around.

Tim is my favorite kind of liberal arts technologist. He writes, consults and creates. If you want to learn about our new altruism start at Tim's excellent web site. TimSanders.com is our first Daily ScentTrail. Thanks Tim.

Tim's Twitter: http://twitter.com/sanderssays

Other Links:

NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

Mind of the Market by Michael Shermer

Jonathan Borofsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Borofsky

ScentTrail Manifesto

What is ScentTrail?
If the fundamental condition of our times is dislocation then scenttrail is the art of finding a path. Think of the junkiest junk yard or the most dense woods and look for the path. There is always a path. In there somewhere is a way home.

ScentTrail Defined
Defining ScentTrail as a modern marketing term was one of my first posts (ScentTrail Defined way back in April 2008). If Moore's Law is rapidly changing every aspect of our social and commercial world then the hypertext link is its accomplice. We live in a time of hyper-connection. Link love, creating links to favorite web content, is fueling a new altruism.

This "new altruism" is shaping our world. Social networks increase what authors Robert Wright (NonZero) and Michael Shermer (Mind of the Market)describe as a "genetic predisposition" toward altruism, a genetic predisposition on Moore's Law faster, cheaper CPU speeds. Q: What does it cost to scale a business today? A: Much less than yesterday and more than tomorrow. Our connections will grow.

ScentTrail Infinity
As social network's new altruism grow will our parsing abilities keep pace? Steven Johnson believes video games prepare us for our disjointed yet conjoined (via the hypertext link) world. In Everything Bad IS Good For You, Johnson asks a simple question. Can our modern minds watch old entertainment? I tried and failed. We've adjusted baseline. We expect speed, furry, connection and flatness. Anything else seems boring, trite and old.

ScentTrails, breadcrumbs we use to see our web marketing vapor trails, are constrained. ScentTrails may aspire to infinity but are limited by time and space. Recently I calculated it would take 300 years to spend one minute on every web site, a conservative estimate sure to increase. Since we don't have three hundred years we create favorite and throw away scenttrails. Favoriting is reputation fuel respected by social networks, Google and our fellow web travelers. We use Twitter to find filters, follow them and perpetuate their thinking with a slice of our own.

ScentTrail Marketing
It struck me, way back in 2008, how different modern marketing is. Marketing in an age of Moore's Law's constant tumult, as generations of computers get cheaper they change things all over again, means the care and feeding of scenttrails may be the primary marketing challenge of this time. Attribution is a bitch. Attribution is understanding a company's web marketing scenttrails. Where did converting traffic (also known as people or customers) come from? What made them convert? What role does each rock in our ever changing web marketing river play? Print advertising, catalogs, organic search (SEO), paid search (SEM), email marketing, contests and games are just a few marketing channels. Each channel creates its own attribution questions, assumptions and scenttrails.

Smart web marketers have learned to adopt a light and generous touch. They share attribution and scenttrails. The understand multi-channel marketing's puzzle rarely goes back the same way twice. Ten percent here, five there and thirty over in another place is not an uncommon web marketing formula. From the outside it is hard to see how such an inclusive yet seemingly subjective formula is anything other than magic math. One of the hardest things to learn about web marketing is living in a modeled, not literal, marketing world. "Models are fine," I can hear some say, "but I need to know where and how we are making money."

Yes is the answer to the when, where, how and why question. When a puzzle goes together differently every minute of every day process is the only thing you own (as Dov Siedman points out in his book How). Internet marketing is about the journey and what is happening now. Understanding scenttrails and web marketing is more than 2 + 2 = 4 certainty. If understanding scenttrails stills seems a mystery wrapped in an enigma join the club. It is all good because this ambiguous yet connected world is the fast, furious and flat web marketing times we inhibit.

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