A Quick Guide to Featuring Customer Reviews on Your Website: UX Design Tips to Boost Conversion- Part I

Trust is one of the primary factors in converting a prospect into a loyal customer. However, most of the potential customers these days are slower or hesitant to trust companies right away when researching online. They are not easily convinced of advertising campaigns, branded content, or marketing strategies that a business uses to promote its products and services. So, what should you do as a business to build that trust?
Start collecting reviews from your happy customers and add them to your website.

Positive customer reviews represent consumer satisfaction and brand success, and so understandably, they can help prove the value of what you have to offer and establish credibility. Find out those customers who are happy with your brand, collect and analyse their reviews, and strategically utilize their feedback to make a significant impact on your target audience.

What is a Customer Review?

A customer review is an unbiased feedback of your business, brand, service or product that is usually shared by a customer who has made a purchase from you. Therein they talk about the authentic benefits and experiences they have had of what you did for them.

These honest testimonials from your valuable customers can be long or short, and may also include suggestions to help improve some aspects of your business in the future.

Reviews can be in different formats, but only certain distinct qualities make good and effective customer reviews, and you should include only these on your website to make the buyer’s journey shorter.

Before we discuss what makes a good and effective customer review that helps your business, let’s learn about customer reviews further.

Types of Customer Reviews

There are different types of reviews and they have diverse effects on your potential leads. You can display your customers’ feedback in various formats, but it’s essential that they align closely to the values and concerns of your target audience.

Quote Reviews: Positive statements about your brand from a happy customer displayed as a quotation are always more effective than paid advertisements. This review type is usually demonstrated with an image of the customer being quoted so that the target audience relates more to the message.
Video Reviews: Video is one of the most popular content mediums these days. When used as a format for user reviews, it can build strong credibility since a happy customer demonstrates support for your brand, product or services with a combination of visual images and audio. Also, if the video is compelling enough, it has the potential to go viral.
Social Media Reviews: Social media offer instant platforms for users to share opinions. A happy customer can write or post a review in a text or visual format on different social media channels for the world to see, and it has the potential to influence a huge number of people. You can easily find these reviews, engage with these customers over social media, and share them with your online consumers.
Audio Reviews: Like video reviews, this type of customer review can be effective in the same manner. It is economical as you can create a compelling brand success story by adding together various positive customer quotes in one track. It can be uploaded, listened to, shared and consumed easily.
Blog Post Reviews: This presents the customer’s experience in an informative way in the form of a blog post. It consists of the subtle details of the customer’s journey that the customer may post on a blogging platform. It can also be written by a company from the brand’s perspective after interacting with the customer and shared either on the company’s business blog or other authoritative blogging platforms relevant to your industry.
Customer Interviews: Here you ask your existing customers to share feedback in the form of an interview. It is an excellent way to showcase the real-world application of specific aspects and features of your products and services to potential leads. You can record the interviews of willing customers as a video or audio piece or even a blog and post it over various relevant mediums for your target audience to see.
Case Study Reviews: This portrays an in-depth analysis of a customer’s experience using facts and observations. It demonstrates a complete customer story and proves the benefits of certain products or services with a more scientific approach. It works best for B2B companies where leads can compare and evaluate if you fit their needs.
Peer Site Reviews: There are many review sites where customers share feedback about companies they have had experiences with. A lot of consumers check out these review sites (such as Yelp, MouthShut, etc.) before making a decision, especially when they are engaging with your brand for the first time.
Influencer Reviews: This type of review is usually expensive to produce as it involves a celebrity, spokesperson, or a social media influencer endorsing your company. Influencer reviews can significantly boost the popularity of your brand if your target audience feels deeply connected with the person.
Press Reviews: Positive feedback from media outlets can help reach out to millions of potential customers. Though it can be difficult for growing companies to get such kind of review from the press, being on the news can improve brand awareness significantly.

User-Generated or Solicited Reviews: Which One is More Influential?

Now that you are aware of the different types of customer reviews and how they can help build credibility for your business, let’s categorize them into two groups – user-generated content, and solicited content reviews.

User-generated content review is when a customer voluntarily shares and publishes feedback mentioning your brand, product or service on any public platform. These are the content created by the user for other users after he/she makes a purchase from you, and such content have become an essential part of today’s online buying experience.
Solicited content review is when you ask your customers directly to share feedback on what they think about your business based on the experience they have had, and they oblige. Customer interviews, case studies, influencer reviews, and press reviews are some of the different forms of solicited content reviews.

User-generated and solicited reviews can be produced as images, videos, audio, blog posts, social media posts, etc.
Both the types involve real comparison, evaluation, analysis, and the feel from the customer’s end. Both are equally powerful and effective to influence the masses when they are investigating products and services. So, you must leverage your customer reviews to your brand’s advantage.

What Makes a Good and Effective Customer Review?

In this section, we’ll examine what qualities make a customer review more relatable to your target audience.
A good and effective review should tell a customer story that motivates other users to read and convinces them that they can also potentially benefit from your products and services. It should use descriptive and enthusiastic language that voices the genuine feelings of the customer, and most importantly, highlight the value of purchasing from you.

Here are a few essential elements in a great testimonial that can help inspire and convince users to take the desired action.

Authenticity: When users read your customer reviews, they live the experience of your customer and judge if the product or service fits their needs. An authentic description of the customer experiences demonstrates how their problems were solved by your products and how they improved your customer’s life.
Conversational and Honest Tone: The tone of the customer reviews should always be easy to understand, conversational, and genuine. An overly formal or technical tone can put off readers. Do not change the language and tone used by the customer in the reviews except for grammatical errors. Users are smart thinkers and they will likely figure out when an opinion is honest or not. Never use fake reviews.
Personalization: Personalizing the review with a company logo, before and after images and videos of the products purchased, or other imagery, including that of the customer, can help users get inspired easily. Personalization can help potential customers connect with the experiences of your existing customers in a better way and also motivate them to remember your products and services over time, making it easier for them to consider purchasing from you.
Action and Emotion-Centric Words: Users feel interested when they find the right words that capture their emotions and trigger the desired action. A direct and detailed addressing of the customer’s problems, the action that was taken to solve the problems, when and how specific benefits were achieved, etc. can help create a convincing testimonial.

But, why should you put customer reviews on your website? Keep reading.

The Importance of Customer Reviews on Your Website

Reviews from your customers serve as testimonials for your brand. As we mentioned earlier, good positive reviews act as recommendations for your brand from your existing customers to potential buyers. Potential customers consider these reviews as the most reliable, trustworthy, and authentic source of information about how you deliver to your customers.

According to Baymard Institute, 95% of users relied on customer reviews to learn more about products.
A 2021 study reveals that shoppers choose websites based on the availability of reviews. It points out that at least 79% of consumers specifically look out for websites with product reviews out of which 85% are millennials.
When you curate your customer reviews from various sources and publish them on your website in the formats preferred by your users, you bring the useful reviews to your target audience in a single place, instead of making them search on the internet. This saves their time and accelerates the process of trust building.

When done correctly, customer reviews on the website can serve as a built-in marketing tool, improve page sessions, increase visibility and search rankings. Every user visiting your website can read them, and instantly make an impression of your business based on those customer experiences when considering a purchase from you.

In our next blog post, we will continue discussing this topic, including but not limited to how customer reviews on your website can help grow your business, and UX design tips for customer reviews to boost sales. Stay tuned.