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A Quick Guide to Featuring Customer Reviews on Your Website: UX Design Tips to Boost Conversion- Part II
In our previous blog post, we have thoroughly learned about customer reviews, including the different types and formats, what makes a customer review good and effective for your target audience, and the importance of featuring customer reviews on your business website. Let’s continue to explore the topic and learn further.
Customer Reviews on a Website can Increase Your Revenue: True or False?
Esteban Kolsky (the founder of thinkJar and highly influential customer strategist and researcher), who conducts very comprehensive annual surveys, shared in his latest study that:
Can testimonials from your customers really help grow your business? Let’s find out the truth.
Each customer review on your website is a communication from one customer to the public that heavily influences their purchasing decisions in the future as well as your brand perception.
Positive reviews, user-generated or solicited, are an essential part of the buying journey. We repeat, potential buyers trust user reviews more than brand promotions because they believe more in recommendations or referrals from customers who have tried the service in real.
The recommendations help them know that other people have made a purchase from you, whether the product(s) worked, if they are satisfied besides what your brand promotes about its products or services. These reviews from people who have already invested in you help them understand your products or services in a better way and encourage them to become a buyer. This frame of reference, therefore, leads to better customer acquisitions and more conversions.
A latest research found that user reviews increased revenue per customer by 62%.
Think about it. A visitor lands on your website and sees a few positive, raving, genuine reviews of your flagship product. If he or she is interested in your product and finds out that other people are liking it as well as recommending it to others, why wouldn’t the person want to try the product?
A study from 2021 notes that there was an 8.5% increase in conversion among website visitors who were served some form of user-generated content reviews on product pages. The study also reveals a 100.6% lift in conversion when visitors interacted with the user-generated content in some manner.
So, if you can take advantage of human psychology and leverage the influential and SEO value of legitimate customer reviews appropriately, it can significantly help boost your revenue.
Best Ways to Feature Customer Reviews on Your Website: UX Design Tips to Boost Conversion Rates
Whether you have a single dedicated review page on your website or review sections included in product pages, they serve as a powerful tool for building trust.
Based on a study from 2021 mentioned above,
- 98% of consumers feel reviews are an essential resource when making a purchase decision
- More than 99.9% of consumers read reviews when shopping online
- 57% of shoppers read reviews to assess potential purchases before shopping in brick-and-mortar stores.
So, it’s important to make sure that the review page design encourages potential buyers to do business with you.
We reviewed several businesses and e-commerce websites, best practices, and trends to compile these UX design tips for featuring customer reviews on a website that boost conversion rates and user experience. Let’s explore what you need to follow on your website when it comes to designing a customer review page or review sections.
1. Include Only Relatable Reviews
When it comes to adding customer reviews to your website, make sure to include only those that make up for the requirements of potential buyers. Reviews that talk about the quality of your products or services, how they helped your customers, what problems they have solved for them, the post purchase services you offer that have helped your customers, and alike will attract potential buyers the most.
However, you must remember that each customer and their interactions with your brand are unique. Some customers may share detailed personal stories about their buying experiences with you; some may share just a few lines, while others may simply make generic comments such as “Nice job!”, “Excellent service”, “Thank you”, and so on. Always select and highlight the most relatable ones for your potential buyers.
2. Include Relevant Information about Reviewers
When featuring a testimonial, make sure you include as much information about the customer’s purchase such as the product or service they bought, purchase date and location, review date, and verified purchase as this help to build credibility.
It is also important to include the customer’s name, profession (position, company, etc.), or occupation, and image as feasible. Users always find it more relatable when they see a human face in the reviews. However, if any customer does not want to provide their full name or image, you may use intelligible initials or a username chosen by the customer to add value to the usefulness of the review and to prove that the review is coming from a real person.
3. Provide a Link to Your Purchased Products
Potential buyers will want to collect more information about the products or services purchased by your customers when they read a review. Make sure you have proofs to support the reviews so that they become more credible to your prospects.
To achieve this, you may add links to the purchased products or services in the important reviews so that visitors can immediately check them out. In the case of B2B sales, you can establish the credibility of a client review by linking the testimonial to the client’s website or a case study. This will help boost prospects’ purchase decisions and push them through the stages of the sales funnel faster.
4. Combine a User Rating System with Reviews
A lot of potential buyers look out for ratings distributions when assessing a product or service before making a purchase. After they check the rating, they read some of the reviews to get a more in depth picture of how the product worked for different customers.
Rating gives quantitative information to the crowd and it works well if you have a large user base. Include a ratings distribution summary that shows up inside the product listing as well as at the top of the review section. It can benefit customers who are unfamiliar with your product or who are unable to make a decision.
Also, some potential buyers wonder how the rating summary was calculated when they browse the rating section, so you may consider adding a text next to the rating section, explaining how the ratings are calculated. Amazon does this really well and you may take inspiration for your website.
However, make sure to keep the rating system simple. It should inform the user what is being rated when they rate a product, and that the rating has been recorded.
You can opt for a 1-5 stars rating scale where five stars indicate an “excellent” while one star indicates a “terrible” product/experience. If you want to provide a more specific or detailed rating of a product or service, you can choose a 1-10 stars rating scale. The ratings should get updated on the website whenever they are available.
5. Include Review Count with Rating
Review count can also help to perceive a product or service better when the rating summaries of some products are almost the same. For example, if two or more very similar products have an average rating of 4 stars, customers can determine a product’s popularity based on the number of reviews available and make an informed purchase decision. Combining the star ratings and review counts with the reviews can greatly improve your user experience.
6. Position the Ratings near Price Information
Customers can immediately get attracted to a product or service when they view a product name, rating summary, pricing, and call-to-action button placed together. This is because they can quickly assess and form an impression about a product, its popularity, and affordability based on this precise visible information.
Remember, customers want to learn more about a specific product or service only after they become interested, so always move customer ratings above the price information and include the reviews, user-submitted photos or videos, and other detailed information further down the page. Most e-commerce websites carefully use this strategy on product pages.
7. Include a Snapshot of Collected Reviews
Review snapshots provide a summary view of all customer reviews, including the pros, cons, rating distribution, and links for each product. Many e-commerce websites display review snapshots on product detail pages paired with labels such as quality of material, value for money, easy to clean, durability, etc., and review scores for easier interpretation.
8. Add a Clickable Rating and/or Review Count Text
You can make each star rating text and/or review count text clickable to take users to the related reviews where they can find more details about the products they are interested in and explore further. This shortcut will increase the discoverability of the review section and allow for an easier navigation experience. When a user clicks on these shortcut links to check out the reviews, you can incorporate either of the two common UX patterns – opening in a side panel or jumping to a section down the product detail page.
9. Include Keyword Filters
To make it easier for users to find relevant reviews when assessing a product, especially of certain product features and aspects, allow filtering reviews by keywords. You can use the most mentioned keywords or feature-based keywords in customer reviews in the form of a filter so that users can quickly search, find, and sort what they are looking for without having to read through several reviews. This will help users get more information about their desired products in less time and decide faster before making a purchase.
10. Add Visuals submitted by Customers
Besides text reviews, it is a good idea to put customer-submitted pictures, videos, and other visual content on the customer review page on your website. As a brand, you create professional product photos and videos in proper studio lighting and put them up on your website. But users always want to check how your products look and function in real-world contexts in a typical setting.
Product photos and videos from customers who have made a purchase will help make the testimonials more credible, attractive, and engaging, and reinforce your brand message. Ask your buyers to submit photos and video reviews of the purchased products. Include the visuals in the review section to help other users get a better idea of how a product looks and works in real life. These visual references will serve as a guide to potential customers, and help boost your conversion rates.
11. Allow Users to Upvote and Comment under Reviews
When you allow website visitors to vote and comment on reviews from customers, users can register approval in terms of helpfulness and also interact with each other as well as with your business for further clarification. This can improve engagement and boost the integrity of your website’s reviews since it will help potential buyers verify the trustworthy feedback from your customers when looking for product or service information.
12. Make the Page Mobile-Friendly
This is basic, but always remember that a major portion of potential buyers will access your website from mobile devices when seeking information about you. It’s possible that up to 50% of your web traffic won’t be able to view your customer reviews if the page design is not responsive. Keep a check if your page design is optimized, make the content easier to read on mobile devices, and use intriguing graphics.
Where to Place Customer Reviews on a Website
If you are unsure of where to display your customer reviews on your website, you can get a clearer idea in this section.
Not all of your customers will provide a testimonial, but try to collect as many as you can. Select the most impactful reviews and feature them in the key areas of your website such as the homepage, about us page, landing pages, sales pages, contact pages, and in the sidebar. The homepage is an ideal place to display the best of your reviews since most visitors land on the homepage when finding a business through a Google search. You should also utilize a schema markup tool. Other effective places also include the blog, underneath blog posts, exit intent popups, and a dedicated testimonial page.
However, you should always use a user behaviour tool to track user navigation to gain valuable insights so that you can place the reviews in critical areas where the most activity happens on a certain page of your website. Once you have this data, you can run A/B tests on specific pages to determine if the reviews are providing a positive result. Keep checking user behaviour reports, heatmaps, and scroll maps to find which placements converted the best and repeat.
The Takeaway
Most prospective buyers, whether familiar or unfamiliar with your brand, will want to hear other customers’ opinions about your business and feel encouraged before trusting you.
Positive customer reviews increase the credibility factor of your brand since they help build trust and social proof for your business. They work as organic word-of-mouth marketing, boost engagement, and are highly effective in boosting conversion when featured correctly.
Though there are no rigid rules, we hope you get the best out of your customer review sections with these UX design tips for customer reviews on your website.
At Leidsens, we are happy to help! Get in touch with us to discuss your design project.
