By Anne Holland, Content Director
Want to know how to make the power of Web 2.0 work for you? Consider adding consumer-generated content to your site. The easiest and most powerful way? Add customer reviews.
Whether they buy online or off, consumers researching shopping decisions online absolutely adore reviews written by their fellow shoppers. Here's a chart of data on it, plus some real-life data from MarketingSherpa Case Studies:
Chart: Consumers Prefer Sites With Customer Reviews 
Source: MarketingSherpa and Prospectiv, Online Shopping and Email Relationships, January 2007
Methodology: A survey was fielded to members of the Eversave.com customer panel on Feb. 2 and closed on Feb. 5 after receiving 698 responses.As you can see from the chart, the majority of consumers we surveyed prefer sites with peer-written product reviews: 58% “strongly” or “somewhat” prefer sites that include reviews, while only 14% don’t trust them.
Many marketers we've interviewed for Case Studies bear out the power of reviews for their conversion rates. Examples:
o After PETCO added reviews online, top-rated products were converting at a 49% higher clip; shoppers using the ratings section of the site for navigation spent 63% more than shoppers using other navigation column hotlinks; and shoppers who read reviews and shopped via ratings navigational hotlinks had an average order size 40% higher than the average shopper.
o The president of AWinestore.com told us that adding customer reviews was one of the critical factors that helped his ecommerce sales leap 80% in a single year. (The industry average is 20% growth.)
o Libida.com, an ecommerce site for women, considers reviews so critical to conversions that they insert fliers into all fulfillment packages offering $25 off their next order for all reviewers (even negative ones) .
My suggestion: you don't need to be an ecommerce marketer to take advantage of the review factor. If you’re selling to consumers offline, use the Web to collect real-life reviews for repurposing offline. If you’re a B-to-B demand generation marketer, consider adding reviews to your white paper and/or webinar offers. The psychology is the same -- fans love to write them and prospects love to read them.
Everyone can steal an idea from Amazon.com’s book -- review away!
Useful links related to this articleEcommerce Benchmark Guide 2007:
http://www.sherpastore.com/e-commerce-benchmark.html?89
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We want to draw attention to Anne Holland's last paragraph--the B-to-B relevance of "customer reviews". Anne is right. All most of us want to know about finding a supplier is (A) What's their track record? and (B) whom do we know that know them? When we don't have a personal reference to call on, we tell Prism clients the next best thing is to have a website that provides those kind of references from people, brands or companies to which prospects can relate--just the way consumers can relate on e-commerce sites. Alexander Prisant, COO, Prism Ltd.