Customer feedback is pretty self-explanatory – so we won’t be dumbing it down for you too much… but have you considered the multiple streams of potential customer feedback any one business could have access to? Email surveys, and third-party sites like TripAdvisor and TrustPilot – not to mention the mammoth world of social media – are all examples of online customer feedback in the modern world.
Then there are website reviews, too – and this is where your WooCommerce site comes in.
Why is customer feedback important?
Customers are the lifeblood of your business – whatever your business is, it wouldn’t exist without customers. And with technological advances, the buying process has changed around the globe.
A recent study noted that an incredible 93% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. What’s more important, over 63% of customers are more likely to purchase if a site has product ratings and reviews. So if you take one thing away from this blog, it’s the importance of WooCommerce feedback.
But customer feedback isn’t important just for increasing sales – there’s more to it. Here are some of the things a good customer feedback system can help you accomplish:
- Build brand awareness and trust – this does go hand in hand with sales, but how a business is perceived (online and in reality) says a lot about how it’s engaged with, and how successful it is deemed to be.
- Connecting with customers – online reviews – whether that’s on your WooCommerce site or social media – can offer the opportunity to have a two-way discussion, directly with your customers.
- Increased return customers – an online review might help a customer purchase for the first time, but what will bring them back? In this case, you can offer incentives such as discounts on future purchases if a customer leaves a review. (FYI: At WooNinjas we put concepts to practice. If you’ve tried any of our products, you can leave us a review and contact us to get a discount code for your next purchase).
- Increased search engine visibility – Positive reviews indicate that your site is trustworthy. This is why good reviews, especially good Google reviews, can help improve your organic search engine ranking – and bad ones can negatively affect it.
- Helps direct your business – your customers know what they want (and what they don’t!) – giving them the opportunity to tell you can help direct your future business plans and decisions, helping you do more of what works and waste less time on products or features people won’t buy.
Whatever stage your WooCommerce business might be in – it’s never too early (or late) to incorporate customer feedback into your site. In fact, it’s pretty vital.
How to collect/gather feedback on your WooCommerce Store
First, it’s important to ensure that your current WordPress theme supports reviews.
Simply put, this means any theme that allows for comments, as reviews are stored as comments, with the difference being in the formatting. Using the native comments template function can be the simplest way to gather customer feedback- but enabling WooCommerce product reviews offers so much more.
Next is to ensure you have the built-in reviews feature turned on, which can be found via WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Enable product reviews. (Remember to save your changes!)
You’ll then want to look at what your reviews look like, or where they may be added to your site. Simply check out one of your products on your WooCommerce site and check that it’s visible. This is the quickest and easiest way of enabling reviews.
There are, however, multiple ways of collecting product reviews.
There are various ways to collect feedback on your WooCommerce store, thanks to the wide range of plugins and extensions available, such as this Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin. This tool by CusRev helps you supercharge your customer feedback collection system by:
- Sending automated email reminders to each customer after their purchase to encourage them to leave a review
- Enabling customers to include ratings, images, voting, and more in their reviews
- Adding a customer-run question and answer feature
- Offer discounts in exchange for reviews
A premium alternative for WooCommerce product reviews is Sky Verge’s WooCommerce Product Reviews Pro extension. Among its many features, the extension allows you to:
- Enable updating reviews so your customers can back and edit their comments.
- Implement upvoting and downvoting systems to highlight the most helpful reviews.
- Identify official admin/employee review responses using badges.
- Display social buttons for social login compatibility
Among the many customer feedback WooCommerce extensions, we also find the Google Merchant Center Customer Reviews Integration, which allows you to incorporate reviews from Google. With this extension, Google can display your Seller Rating in search results which automatically helps you build trust among potential buyers and clients. Likewise, the Trust Pilot Reviews extension connects your WooCommerce store with Trust Pilot allowing you to build up trust and authority through verified reviews.
When it comes to adding these features to your store, you can either set up any of these extensions on your own or hire WooCommerce experts to configure them for you. However, if you have a unique customer-review feature in mind or to do something fun such as adding gamification elements to your product reviews, make sure you reach out to a WooCommerce developer for help.
How to share customer feedback
Now that you’re collecting customer feedback on your WooCommerce store – what do you do with it?
The first thing you should do is pay attention to it. As we mentioned above, customer feedback can be gold dust for many reasons. Understand what your customers are saying about what you’re offering and you can reap the benefits. You’ll know whether you need to tailor your offering – by altering, removing, or adding certain products – to ensure more sales and more positive feedback.
But it also works as marketing material, too. Especially when it’s authentic!
Here are some ways to consider sharing your WooCommerce customer feedback:
Email campaigns
Email campaigns can be excellent tools for marketing to new customers – and retaining old ones.
Lead generation email campaigns can showcase your customer reviews – whether that’s a written testimonial as a footer or simply your excellent TrustPilot score – and you can benefit from an increased conversion rate (and potentially sales) as a result.
Landing pages
This might seem like a no-brainer, but including your reviews on the landing pages of your website can turn ‘maybe’ customers into real ones. With so many people making use of the vast array of reviews and feedback available online, it would be folly not to harvest that to your advantage when you have good reviews to work with.
Social media
Once again – all positive feedback you receive should be celebrated! Good reviews are an excellent source of social media content. Use them to promote your business, create brand awareness and even interact with the customers leaving the review.
Remember, social media can be a platform for customer feedback, too – so this one should be noted in particular. It works both ways – if you have a win on social media, use that positive feedback in your other areas of marketing where possible.
At the source
The best thing about incorporating customer reviews on your WooCommerce store is that they appear at the very source – collecting the feedback and sharing it can be done seamlessly and as an automated process.
So at a very bare minimum, make sure you’re enabling reviews as guided above – and make sure you’re checking them regularly, at the very least.
WooCommerce Feedback is your friend
Customer feedback can really be make-or-break, particularly considering the staggeringly high statistics regarding online purchases. Make sure you get it right by allowing reviews on your site, and the best practice would be to spread your review wings across multiple sources.
Think social media, third-party sites, and your website as three key areas to gather and share customer feedback for your WooCommerce store for maximum benefits.
Remember, whatever size your online store or business – and whatever your requirements – WooCommerce can be customized to your exact needs and there are endless options at your disposal for incorporating a customer feedback system. Whether you use it to figure out what’s working and tailor your products, or simply increase your sales, feedback will always be your friend.
Use it wisely.
