Monday, May 4, 2015

Warts Within Reason: Cultivating Effective Customer Reviews

Not Every Commenter, Honest
Let's say you sell stuff over the Internet (radical concept, I know, but take it as a theoretical). And let's also say that what you are selling has interest to your users, maybe to the point where they might know more about it than you do, or want to share their opinions about those products. Finally, let's suppose that, as the Internet has shown, these opinions may become a tad unseemly, or over the top. What should you, as a marketing pro who is concerned with your vendor relationships and branding, do about this?
Well, as much as I'd like to save us all a great deal of words and cut to something pithy... the answer from my experience is, well, It All Depends. Here's the factors that you need to keep in mind.
1) Your company's bandwidth, and commitment to, reviews.
There are sites that don't moderate comments, and those sites become, well, unfortunate. Eventually, automation software will be able to filter out the obvious spammers and purveyors of unrepentant profanity, but until then, you're probably going to have to throw some human eyes at the task. It's actually a fairly great gig for an intern (assuming they have a stomach that can take the harder stuff), since it can provide a deep and quick education on product merits, and a fair amount of entertainment value. But if you don't have one handy, you may need to do it yourself. If so, scan for trouble words, rather than obsess over the content. It's an impersonal medium, with a high degree of anonymity. Poor choices happen. Try not to dwell.
2) The likelihood of your suppliers to go off the rails over a bad review, and whether this would put you at risk.
I used to work for an online reseller of musical instruments, which is an industry where there were more resellers willing to carry a brand's goods than there were, well, goods. At least for the top providers. Which meant that if you offended a certain purveyor of guitars or amps or whatever, you risked losing that account as a provider, and giving your competition an extra bullet in their gun as they attempted to end your existence. Needless to say, we learned, with speed, which brands were going to see (and flip out) over someone's poor opinion of their goods, and who were not. (Hint: it's the same guys who threaten to go ballistic over MAP pricing, or anything else in your agreement. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.)
If your category doesn't have this feature, filtering out over the top negative reviews, assuming they aren't profane, is more trouble than it's worth. If you are at risk, it's not. Simple as that.
3) The technical strength of your community.
The best reviews aren't 100% positive, because that sets off the skepticism of anyone but the tragically naive. Besides, there's always something that's falls on a different point in the Great / Affordable / Durable Venn diagram. So what actually moves product? A strong and vibrant consumer base that generates its own content, preferably in defense of the product's merits. If three reviews are positive, then one troll slams it, and gets shouted down by the next two or three? Ca-ching.
A very important point on this: you can either censor an entry for being spam, profane or legally actionable, or you can let it run as is. Do not, under the fear of a firestorm that's far greater than any possible problem caused by the original review, edit the work in any way. Your approval process should not seem arbitrary. Even if there is rampant misspellings, criminal use of punctuation, or anything else that offends your sensibilities as a copywriting pro. The integrity of your review and comment boards is at stake, and if you start to "clean up" copy, the only thing that's going to happen is that any positive review will seem like a plant. (Oh, and don't plant. For reasons that are too obvious to write, and rhyme with beagle, and crass traction paw fruit, and clawed, but with more a of a fr sound. If you catch my drift.)
Besides, and this one is really hard to admit as a copy writer... those amateur comments with the poor wording, repetitive phrasing, etc., etc.? They've won in many an A/B test, depending on the consumer category, because they just seem more "real" to the prospects. Some days, being a copy writer just isn't fair.
4) The demographic bent of the buying audience.
Well, OK... but what if your demographic is kind of edgy and uses coarse language as a matter of course? Monitor for abuse, but allow. Similarly, if the demo is older and more conservative, or strong in regions with more of a chance to cause issues for your customer service, delete. And if your audience is all over the place, censor to the more stringent crowd, because...
5) Reviews usually provide a reason to buy one product or another. They rarely create business on their own.
Which means that having reviews, and a fair number of them, is important, but no review in and of itself is critical. Finally,
6) Auto-date the work.
The quality of brands changes over time, and a 5-star review from 5 years ago can, and should, carry less weight than opinions from last month. Your goal as a marketer should be to give the prospects honest tools to help buy, not a biased tool that will only produce one outcome. Remember, your reviewers are some of your most loyal and best lifetime value customers. Don't burn them for short-term gain.
* * * * *
You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.
You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com.
And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

No comments:

Post a Comment