How To Use Your Ratings And Reviews In Marketing Emails
Trust. Consumers have it. They want to give it out. They just need your brand to step up to the plate and deliver. The big question is, what are you willing to do to get it?
There are plenty of ways brands can build trust with consumers. Developing good products and services, delivering on promises, and treating customers like people, not numbers, are a few of them. All of these are all the sort of best practices you want to put in place. It all makes a difference.
Something you can do that’s more tangible is focusing on user-generated content such as reviews and ratings. Honest reviews and ratings directly from your customers can go a long way to building trust and confidence in your brand. After all, virtually every customer checks out reviews online before buying anything today.
Here are a few ways to use ratings and reviews in marketing emails.
Build some FOMO to tip the scales
Humans are driven by emotion, and that’s true for consumers too. One of the most powerful drivers is the fear of missing out (FOMO). You’ve felt it; we all have. You don’t want to miss out on something fun or cool or exciting because you waited. That applies to the mundane, like going to your favorite bar for pub trivia on a Tuesday night to taking a new job, and yes, buying stuff.
Lots of eCommerce and retail brands use flash sales to help trigger a little bit of FOMO in consumers. When a product is on a countdown timer with a great deal disappearing or has limited inventory, these real-time updates can provide enough incentive to get people to buy.
You can help make flash sales even more attractive by using ratings and reviews. In your marketing email, highlight what other buyers of the products your promoting think. Showcase reviews, and with live images, you can even have your emails update with the most recent in real-time.
Highlight popular products
Even if you aren’t specifically sending a sales orientated email to your list, it doesn’t mean you can’t still tap into the power of ratings and reviews. Let’s say you’ve got a weekly newsletter that goes out and gives readers an update on what’s happening with your brand.
Why not include a content block that pulls in the week’s (or month’s) most popular product? With live images, this information can update in real-time, always showing your readers what’s popular when they open their emails.
It’s also a perfect space to include reviews and ratings too. Study after study shows that readers trust the reviews of others, even if they don’t know the reviewer personally. Including those reviews in your emails, and let your readers know you have a legion of recent happy shoppers who love your products.
Don’t let people forget about those abandoned carts
Building out an abandoned cart email campaign is a great way to boost your conversion rate and grab some low hanging fruit. The truth is, the vast majority of the people who come to your website aren’t going to buy something.
But, some will go all the way through the shopping process only to leave stuff in their cart. The reasons why they do this vary, but you don’t want to let them forget about it because you can get a small portion of them to finish the purchase.
Here’s another place where ratings and reviews can help. When you send your abandoned cart notifications, why not include the ratings and reviews for each of the products left in the cart? Make sure your potential customers know how much your actual customers love the stuff they are thinking about buying. It can help motivate them to buy.
Ratings and reviews are a secret weapon — use them
We all know today’s consumers are savvy and finicky. So when you do get positive feedback and happy customers, you never want to let that go to waste.
Even if you only have a handful of reviews on a product, it can be enough to help a consumer make a decision. Research shows that as few as nine recent reviews can motivate a customer to buy.
Your ratings and reviews aren’t things to use sparingly. Get them up on your site, and don’t forget to highlight them in your emails too. Seeing positive comments from other users can often make all the difference for a wary customer.
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