Generating reviews for your products is one of the most important aspects of selling products on Amazon. Here are 3 important reasons why:
Increased sales - Sales immediately increase when the average star rating improve, for example from 4 to 4.5 stars
Increased conversion rate - 90% of customers on Amazon read reviews, and it's one of the most important aspects of the buyer decision
Protection from unethical competitors - To bring down the average rating of a product with 1000 reviews is much more difficult than for a product with 10 reviews. The more reviews a product has, the more protected it is
So what are the latest strategies that top sellers use to consistently grow their reviews?
Here is a quick summary of the methods you can use to get reviews for your products on Amazon:
Vine Review Program
Early Reviewer Program
Insert Cards and Emails
Automated "Request Review" Button
1. Vine Review Program
This used to only be available to sellers who were Amazon Vendors, but in 2019 it became available to all sellers who are brand registered.
Vine reviews are usually very long and detailed which is great, and the reviews will also have the Vine Reviewer Badge. The reviewers in the Vine program are called Vine Voices, and they are selected by Amazon to write trusted and unbiased reviews.
Restrictions of the Amazon Vine Review Program:
You need to set aside 5-30 products to give to the Vine Voices for free
The brand of the product you enroll must be brand registered with Amazon
Fewer than 30 reviews on your product at the time of enrollment
The only cost is the products you will give away for free.
2. Early Reviewer Program
This program is intended for newly launched products to get those first few reviews. It costs $60 and after you have enrolled, some of your buyers will be contacted by Amazon and be offered a gift card if they leave a review.
Restrictions of the Amazon Early Reviewer Program:
It costs $60 that will be deducted when you received the first review
The brand of the product you enroll must be brand registered with Amazon
The product must have fewer than 5 reviews at the time of enrollment. If you have 4 reviews when enrolling, you can still get 5 reviews from this program
The price of the product must be greater than $9
Amazon will try to gather reviews for 1 year or until you have received 5 reviews from the program, whichever comes first
3. Insert cards and Email
You can ask the buyer to leave a review, either via an email or with an insert card in your product packaging. For years these were the only ways to generate reviews and many sellers still rely on these methods.
Just remember that when asking a customer to leave a review, it's very important to communicate in a way that is compliant with Amazon's Terms of Service. Failing to do so may lead to a warning, and in the worst-case suspension of your seller account. Amazon takes this very seriously, and so should you. Having said that, insert cards and follow-up emails remain a very effective way to generate reviews for your products.
4. Request Review Button in Seller Central
In 2020, Amazon added a button in Seller Central that allowed sellers to request a review from their customers. This would trigger a standardized email, sent by Amazon to the buyer, asking for both seller feedback and a product review.
You cannot edit or modify this email in any way, they are already pre-defined by Amazon and will even be automatically translated to the customer's preferred language.
These standardized emails would appear more frequently in the buyer's inbox compared to conventional email automation tools (see (3) above), making them very effective for generating reviews. Additionally, requesting a review in this way is 100% compliant with Amazon's Terms of Service and you literally cannot do anything wrong with this method. You can only trigger Request Review once per order, 5-30 days after the product has been delivered to the customer, but it's not possible to accidentally do it twice.
This is the best method to consistently generate reviews for your product if you are uncertain about the rules when writing and sending emails.
Manually clicking the Request Review button in Seller Central is incredibly time-consuming, especially for bigger sellers. That's why we fully automated the Request Review function in Seller Metrix - no chrome extension needed and really easy to set up. You also have full flexibility to select what type of orders to request a review for, as well as at what time the request should be sent. Let me show you two examples:
Product A is a leather briefcase. The target audience is business professionals so we want to avoid stressful mornings. Maybe a good alternative is in the afternoon, or maybe in the evening when the customer is off-work. You might also want to avoid sending the email on Mondays? I would recommend sending this email asap after delivery when the briefcase is brand new. There is not really any evaluation time needed for this product.
Product B is a powdered baby formula. For this product, we are targetting parents, and we might want to send it later in the evening when the baby is sleeping. Because the product would take some time to evaluate, I would wait around 7-21 days before requesting the review.
You can easily set all of this up with Seller Metrix and create your own rules for when you want to request a review for your Amazon products.
See the video below with detailed instructions on how you can utilize this fully automated request review feature in Seller Metrix.