How to Use Reviews & Ratings to Increase eCommerce Conversion Rates and Reduce Spend

eCommerce Conversion Rates

There are an estimated 24 million eCommerce sites around the world — and more are being created every single day.

As the digital buying world continues to become more competitive, brands must use every tool at their disposal to increase their conversion rates. What many eCommerce brands don't realize is that they can get incredibly useful data and insights from the customer feedback they already have - online reviews and ratings!

In this article, we'll explain everything you need to know about using review analysis tools to increase eCommerce conversion rates for your brand or product.

Understanding eCommerce Conversion Rates

An eCommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that end up purchasing from your store. Conversions are a broad topic and can be tracked in different ways, including:

  • Online sales
  • Products added to a cart
  • Items added to a wishlist
  • Email signups
  • Social media shares

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) refers to the process of improving the shopping experience to drive one of these KPIs — usually sales.

How is it calculated? Just divide the conversion by the total number of visitors. If your store gets 10,000 visitors and you convert 100 of those visitors in a set period, your conversion rate is 1%.

The average eCommerce conversion rate depends on the industry. But according to Oberlo, it ranges from around 1.39% to 4.91%.

But to increase your conversion rates, it's important to understand what your visitors want. Where are they getting stuck on your website? How do they interact with different parts of your website?

To execute eCommerce conversion rate optimization, it's important to research, analyze, and test. to do this, you need to find the right tools to help you.

What Are Review Analysis Tools?

Your customers have a nearly infinite choice of places to buy from. When choosing where to shop, their emotions play a huge role in their buying decisions. While it might seem hard to measure how they feel about your brand, some tools can help you do this accurately.

Review analysis tools, also sometimes known as customer sentiment analysis tools, help you understand how your customers feel about your brand or product. Whether they like it, dislike it, or feel indifferent towards it — it's your job to fully understand what it is and why.

To find this out, review analysis tools help you sift through online reviews and social mentions to listen to your customers.

How Can Review Analysis Tools Increase Conversion Rates?

Now let's take a look at how to increase conversion rates in eCommerce.

The first step that a review analysis tool takes is by going through all of the data that has to do with your customer reviews and ratings.

It will take all customer product feedback and build a centralized repository where all the information is held. Next, using artificial intelligence, it will organize the reviews based on keywords, sentiment, topics, and more.

When the process is over, you can easily sift through the data to find valuable insights into consumers' preferences and behaviors. You can use these insights to plan tangible improvements, such as updated messaging or fixing a common complaint, to improve eCommerce conversion rates for your product!

Review analysis tools give you an incredible amount of data and insight that can be used in different ways. Let's take a look at different use cases in which brands utilize review analysis tools.

Brand Tracking

One of the most important factors in converting customers is understanding the sentiment around your brand.

As you change and evolve your business strategy, your customer's perceptions might change as well. Review analysis tools can be used to understand any shifts that may be happening in consumer sentiment over time or as a result of an event such as a product launch or update.

You can use these tools to measure and quantify customer reviews to further understand why they feel the way they do. You can even compare these metrics to see how you stack up against your competitors.

You can see here how Yogi was used to get insight into what factors consumers look for when purchasing new fragrances.

eCommerce Listings

With a review analysis tool, you can use the data to optimize your Product Detail Pages (PDPs).

When combing through reviews and ratings, you can see what features and claims your users are talking about the most and add them to your PDPs. You can also check out your competitors' shortcomings and emphasize why your brand is better and target their customers.

Also, one of the golden rules of copywriting is to understand how your users talk and to use that same language when speaking back to them. Review analysis tools are a great way to capture their verbiage to speak with them.

Tweaking your PDPs to match your findings can lead to higher ratings, increased conversion rates, and more revenue.

Product Improvements

Understanding your customers allows you to see what they really think about your products. By analyzing customer sentiments, you can find gaps and opportunities that can be used to improve your products.

These tools make it easy to get an in-depth view of what your customers like (and hate) about your company's products — and adjust accordingly.

Competitor Analysis

Another incredibly useful benefit of using an analysis tool is understanding what your customers think about your competition. Understanding their sentiment about your competitors is just as important as knowing how they feel about your products.

You can quantify and measure this perception against your own, and create marketing and copy that reflects that you truly understand what your customers want.

Other Benefits of Using Analysis Tools

Now that we've shown you specific use cases that review analysis tools can help solve, let's take a look at some other benefits that they can provide your business. Here are seven more benefits:

1. Optimize Your Marketing Strategy

If you've been running ads and posting to social media platforms at random, it's time to level up. Getting data straight from your customers' mouths is the best way to familiarize yourself with exactly what they want.

By using these insights, you can create a focused strategy that resonates deeply with your audience (instead of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks).

2. Measure the ROI of Your Marketing

Although numbers like your follower count, survey scores, website traffic, and engagement metrics are important, they aren't the whole picture of your business's success. How many positive interactions you're creating is just as important, if not more.

You can measure these positive and negative conversations with a product review platform. When combining these with other qualitative and quantitative metrics, you can get a deeper look into the ROI of your campaigns.

3. Improve Customer Experience

Even though businesses prefer to have positive feedback, negative feedback is even more useful. Your customers are your business's most honest critics.

Being able to see exactly what's bugging them can help you make meaningful changes to your products that will keep them coming back time and time again.

For example, if a hotel uses this tool and finds a trend of negative comments connected to the word "run-down," they can dig deeper and find the source of the problem. They might find mentions of "old" and "dirty." They can use this insight to refurbish old rooms and improve cleaning staff.

The simple insight might lead to fixing some of the biggest problems a business might have.

4. Generate More Leads

By improving your marketing campaigns so that they will resonate more with your audience, you'll be able to increase:

  • Traffic
  • Engagement
  • Conversions

This will help bring in more high-quality leads to your sales teams.

5. Build Stronger Customer Relationships

When a business takes the time to listen to its customers and make tangible improvements based on their feedback, it proves to them that you care about their happiness.

You no longer become a faceless business, but rather a personable, authoritative brand. This is a huge benefit that will help your business get the edge over competitors.

6. Save Time and Money

Combing data from reviews and ratings that already exist for your business can save a huge amount of time and money compared to other forms of market research.

Things like customer surveys and focus groups not only cost a lot, but they can take a long time to complete. With review analysis tools, you can get insights quickly and efficiently.

7. Improve Conversion Rates and Drive More Sales Revenue

Ultimately, every single use case and benefit we previously mentioned will result in getting and keeping more customers.

It's important to note that sentiments change over time. Trends tend to emerge and disappear. If you keep using a sentiment analysis platform to track what your customers are feeling, you can continue to make improvements to your business and drive more sales.

Start Getting Better Insights Today

That's everything you need to know about review analysis tools. Understanding your customers is arguably one of the most important factors when improving your conversion rate and creating more loyal customers.

Ready to find out what your brand can do with a Review Analysis Tool?