There have been so many positive recommendations of the value of reviews for e-commerce, that the case doesn’t really need to be made anymore. Quite simply, user reviews increase conversions. They can eliminate any doubts potential customers may have about a product or can help product selection.

We like leaving reviews too. Stats reveal that 47% of online shoppers have reviewed products online, which suggests there is no shortage of people ready to provide their opinions.

Why You Need Customer Reviews

Tip Number one, why you need customer reviews. Most websites don’t even have reviews setup on their site. They use outside sources like Google or facebook reviews.

This doesn’t help them any with SEO and search engine results. This will provide social proof, but most likely customers will never see it unless they go searching for it. Take any reviews from other sources and make sure you publish them in your site so your potential leads and visitors.

See the reviews, see your social proof and see the other customers trust you. This is most important for e-commerce business to have reviews listed underneath each product. You can do this by asking customers for reviews on the specific product that they purchased. You can also send follow-up emails asking them for the reveal or incentivize them with discounts, coupon codes.

This’ll provide social proof not only in Google reviews and facebook reviews but also on your website during the checkout process.

The Stats

Tip number two, the stats. Did you know that businesses and websites that have customer reviews or more than one product can mean a five percent increase in conversion rates? Sixty-three percent of customers are most likely to make a purchase from a website that has reviews on the ideal and identical products that they’re getting ready to purchase.

Consumer reviews nearly 12 times increase for products when they’re being sent there from other websites and businesses. Think of it as a word of mouth referral online.

When somebody sees people just like them trusting your product, purchasing certain products, and leaving their honest opinion, they’re more likely to trust your brand and make that purchase on checkout.

Think about it for yourself. When you go to Amazon to make a purchase, most likely you’ll scroll to the bottom, read four or five reviews, and if they’re all happy customers, you’re much more likely to purchase that product.

• According to Reevoo stats, 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.
• 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews. (iPerceptions, 2011).
• Site visitors who interact with both reviews and customer questions and answers are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting and spend 11% more than visitors who don’t interact with UGC. (Bazaarvoice, Conversation Index, Q2 2011).
• Consumer reviews are significantly more trusted (nearly 12 times more)than descriptions that come from manufacturers, according to a survey of US internet users by online video review site EXPO. (eMarketer, February 2010).
• According to Reevoo, reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.

Long Tail Targeting

Tip number three, long tail targeting content strategies are changing day to day and month to month, but especially in the next coming year. Your content strategy needs to be completely different. Use your reviews to make long tail targeting.

Short term targeting is clearly out of the question for most businesses. If you’re not already a trusted website on Google for years, it may take you even longer to get to the first page of Google rankings, but if you use long tail targeting around your reviews for not only social proof but also for common searches customers might search for, you’re more likely to show up in the Google rankings.

If somebody’s searching for your ideal product, which may be four or five words long, make sure you’re getting reviews on that product page, so when somebody types in that exact product, you are most likely to show up.

The additional content generated by user reviews increases the chance of ranking well for long tail searches. In addition, people leaving reviews tend to use the same language that other people will use when actually searching for them.

Email Customers Post-Purchase

Tip number four, email customers post-purchase. After any customer makes a purchase on your website, you need to have a strategy to email them, thanking them for making the product and continuing the relationship. If you can set up your email marketing like using MailChimp or constant contact based on your e-commerce products, you’ll be able to email them automatically with the product that they’ve purchased, thanking them.

Now that you have this data, you can ask for reviews on the specific product pages that they purchased. If they purchased a large black t shirt from your website yesterday, you can send them the exact link to that page asking for a review the next day or after they’ve it, it’s arrived at their door. Use this to make it easy for your customers to sign up, leave a review, and come back to your website on a consistent basis

Sending an email after a customer has purchased an item to ask for a review is a good idea, but the timing is a key issue here. You need to give customers enough time to have received the product and had to chance to start using it and form an opinion, but it still needs to be sent when the purchase is fresh in the customer’s mind.

Make The Process As Simple As Possible

Tip number five, make the process as simple as possible. Most customers will not go searching for the review page to leave you a review. You need to make it easy for them to go to the page and we recommend even giving them ideas or writing half of the review in your own language, so all they have to do is copy and paste most of it into the length of you provided.

After they purchased the products arrived and they’re happy, email them with the link to the product page that they purchased on asking for the review. With that quote that you’d like them to stay on that page, you’ll increase your chances of getting a review on that exact product. If you can set up a strategy like this,

Some users may not have a lot to say about some products or may have a limited attention span, so make it nice and easy to leave opinions. Offering customers the option of leaving a quick rating out of five or ten is one way and provides a useful summary score to add to product pages, while another way to get a little more useful detail is to ask users to give different aspects of products a rating, as Reevoo does.

The Key Takeaway

We recommend making it as easy as possible for leaving reviews, always asked them to leave reviews on your website. This will not only increase customer satisfaction return rates, but we’ll also leave social proof and get SEO content from each review and product that you have on your e-commerce website.

Now we all know content is a great idea for your business to build your brand and to get more traffic back to your website. Today we’re going to share our top tips on creating content for your website.

Content around your website is helpful tips and different things that people can go to, like guides, case studies, and things to help them even more. As soon as you build trust and authority through your website, visitors will continue coming back because they know that you’re going to be able to help them. So let’s jump right into it.

Tip number one, live videos;

Now, this is going to be quick techniques. You can go for longer techniques later on, but this is something quick. You can do a live video on either Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.

You can save it to your phone and then upload it into your website, this is like multitasking one-on-one. Do a live video and use that for all these other purposes. This is a great way to get video as content on your website.

Use the same piece of content for multiple channels and get customers coming back if that video really helped them. Now you can also use this to share on YouTube, Facebook, depending on the platforms and link back to your site.

Now you have links coming to your site from social media and also people wanting to go to your site to watch your video.

Tip number two, podcasts;

Podcasts are a great way for content on your site. You can even use the video that we mentioned in tip number one, turn that into a podcast and upload that into your blog.

You can use the multiple channels to put all the content in one place and put it as a new post in your blog. You can also use podcasts to get links back to your website, so when the podcast is over, write a short description with a link back to that specific page on your website.

Tip number three, messaging communication;

As you are creating content, you’re asking your customers to leave you comments, to message you and ask you questions. Now you can use that content, if somebody sends you a text, a Facebook Message, leaves you a review or leaves a comment, you can copy and paste that and use that as a piece of content.

This provides social proof. It shows that customers are reaching out, they’re asking you questions, and most importantly you’re helping them. This will relate with any new website visitors, so you can snapshot images of your messaging with your client’s text messages and even the reviews anywhere on your website.

Tip number four, case studies;

You have your current clients you’re working with, use this to create case studies. If you’ve helped somebody out, mention it in your next blog posts, in your next content about the steps that you took to make sure that they were successful.

You can lay it out, you don’t have to give them all of the details, but you can do a step by step process as a case study showing how they got those results.

Now, when a potential customer sees those results from somebody, sees the actions that you walk them through it, it’ll make them much more likely to want to reach out and work with you.

The Key  Takeaway

The point here is to make it easy, don’t overcomplicate content. You’re never going to be number one on Google if you’re just starting out, but you can show up for certain niches in keywords that are a little bit longer, so use these content ideas and just post consistently to your website.

Use the same videos, podcasts, or blogs, or even images, share them everywhere. Get those links out there and you’ll see an increase for your business. 

Why are you reading this article? Because it ranks well and loads quickly. The simple fact is that unless your e-commerce site is the Shopify of your industry, your ranking and load speed dictates whether people will visit it. From Google to hosting, I’ve explained why site speed matters and how to make your website load faster.

Recommended reading: Increase Traffic Using Reviews

Google says page speed is important

Page speed has been an important ranking factor for years. In 2009 Google published a blog post titled Speed Matters where it discussed the importance of web page speed. It explains that slowing SERPS down by half a second means people make 0.6% searches. Since then, speed has only increased in importance.

Google measures the speed of your website and compares it to competing sites. If you want to rank well your site needs an above average load time:

• Excellent: load time of less than 1 second
• Good: load time of 1-3 seconds
• Average: load time of 3-5 seconds
• Poor: load time of 5-7 seconds
• Awful: load time of over 7 seconds

A delay of just one second has a huge knock-on effect, not only on your e-commerce site but on your business too. These stats show how important speed is, with a one second delay leading to:

• 16% decline in customer satisfaction
• 11% fewer page views
• 7% reduction in conversions

Mobile searchers demand fast pages

Mobile became the top ranking search device in 2015. The following year Google began to favor websites using Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) tech. Three years later Google confirmed it was now making page speed part of its mobile search ranking.

Be mobile-first if you want your website to rank well, with plenty of fast-loading mobile landing pages.

The average mobile page takes 15 seconds to load, but mobile searchers only wait around three seconds for a page to load on their phone. That means there’s a lot of websites are losing customers because of page speed. WebPageTest is a great free tool for finding the mobile page speed of your website:

Credit: WebPageTest

It gives you a detailed breakdown of the content on your web pages, so you can review them and establish what’s causing them to load slowly:

Credit: WebPageTest

As you can see from the screenshot above, even the biggest websites on the planet can have slow load times. Sites like CNN can get away with some slowness because their size and USP gives them some leeway – but not a lot. If you’re a smaller website (for example, a scrappy e-commerce startup) your searchers won’t hang around.

Use proper hosting to keep your website fast  

The host you choose for your e-commerce site plays a big role in how quickly its pages load. Your web host allows your site to be viewed on the internet – page speed is defined as:

“The length of time at which web pages or media content is downloaded from website hosting servers and displayed onto the requesting web browser.”

A good hosting provider has minimal downtime and optimal bandwidth. A bad one leaves you with sluggish pages and a low ranking website. Here are two ways to ensure to your hosting provider is working to improve your site ranking:

• Pick the best hosting type: You can choose shared, VPS, or dedicated server hosting for your website. The size and traffic of your website dictate which one you need, so a smaller site can get away with shared hosting. However, if you demand the fastest site possible you should pick a dedicated server
• Select a CMS with in-house hosting: When comparing big content management systems with their own dedicated hosting, such as BigCommerce and Shopify, there’s often little to choose between your options – most have very little downtime. What’s important to note is that a hosted CMS gives you hosting that’s faster and with less downtime, while a self-hosted, like WordPress, option gives you freedom of choice

Optimize images to increase page speed

Images can really slow down your website. The larger your images are the more data they occupy and the longer they take to load. But the size of your images isn’t the only reason they’re making your website load slower. From using the right dimensions to adding caching details, there’s a lot you can do to optimize your images.

• Enable image caching: Caching means that repeat visitors to your site can use saved (cached) versions of your website when they return. This cuts down the search time their devices need, increasing the loading speed of your website. You can optimize your image caching by using a tool like imgix. It caches your full image library, giving you faster web pages and a quicker website
• Use the correct dimensions: If you save an image that’s 1200 x 1200 then scale it down to 120 x120, your browser may load it at the original size. To make sure your browser doesn’t work harder than it has to, use images that are the size you need them to be
• Shrink your thumbnails: Carousel features are a great way to display your most popular articles, or products. The problem is that the thumbnails displayed on your carousel are pulled from the source image. This draws the thumbnail from a large image, making your browser work to resize it. Using a CMS with built-in image size parameters means the smallest image is downloaded, keeping your browsers workload down
• Some file formats are bigger than others: Your website can cope fine with images saved as PNG, GIF, and JPG. File formats like TIFF and BMP are much bigger and will take your website longer to load

The Key Takeaway

Page speed is crucial to your website and your business. Google ranks pages based on how quickly they load, both on mobile and desktop. Your audience won’t hang around waiting for your website to load. So optimize your images and sort out your hosting, otherwise, your rankings will drop…and with it your revenue too.

We also recommend using tools like “abandon cart” to help follow-up with users if they leave your site early before finishing their purchase.

Stop looking for SEO hacks and start building trusted referrals back to your website. One of the most important things that Google looks for on a website is other websites that are trusted by Google referring customers to you. That means having your URL, your website links in other websites, so if somebody clicks on it, there’ll be redirected to your page.

That just shows Google and search engines that you’re a trusted website and other people are trusting you so they should trust you also.

Share Social Media Links;

Now, when you set up social media links throughout the Internet, you can include your website URL in all of them, not only in your profile and about page, but also in any posts that you create.

Now one common mistake a lot of business owners make is that they don’t set up the correct link. They might put the link in there, but they don’t test it to make sure that the link works correctly, go back to all your social media links, test them out, and make sure that they’re properly linking back to your website.

Another thing you need to do is properly link all of your URL’s in the posts that you create. So what about if you create a post around the blog and Facebook?

Now, if you want to make sure you link to that exact blog back, then your website, you don’t want to make the customer have to search for it, so you don’t want to just put your website URL or your website blog URL in the post. You also want to include the exact blog URL that you’re talking about on social media.

Share Your Reviews

All right, tip number two, share your reviews. These are reviews that your customers are already giving you. They’re either putting them on Google, on Facebook, they’re putting them on the Internet for you and for your business, so now you can create blog testimonials and reviews in your website.

You can also share those on social media and then you can send them out to other websites to get more links back to your page. This not only shows trust from current customers, but it’s also an easy way to get Backlinks back to your website.

Give Interviews & Podcasts

Tip number three, give interviews and podcasts. This is a great way to get your links on other people’s networks. Get their followers to find you. Find your website and link back to your page.

Not only are you telling other people’s customers about you and your business, but you’re also able to include links in that podcast or interviewees website and podcast page.

A lot of business owners think this takes up a lot of time. It’s actually very easy for you to do and try to agree to a request to be interviewed to get your links out there.

A top tip that we recommend is create a special offer for that specific podcast. Create that page on your website and ask the interviewee to include it on their page. Now you’re giving a special offer to their audience, but you’re also giving, telling them that you’re going to give them a great deal if they click on that link back to your site.

Share Content Everywhere

Tip number four, share your best content everywhere. This goes right along with the blog post, this blog posts and sharing our best content to help you with your SEO backlinks. We’re going to share it on social media, on our website, and ask other websites out there to share it for us.

We’re out there as the trusted source, the experts in this industry, people are going to see this. They’re going to be searching for it on Google, social media, and they’ll come back to our website and this blog page. They’ll have instant trust if we help them as much as we can and we hope that they’ll reach out to us when they’re ready to work with us.

Create A Partner Page

Tip number five, create a partner page. This is creating backlinks for other businesses that you work with. You’re doing them a favor. You’re supporting their business by creating that partner page, but now after you create the partner page, you have the links back to these other businesses that you like to work with.

Now that you’re linking you can ask them to return the favor. So let’s say you have five partner pages out there. You can go back to each one and ask them to link back to your site. There are five backlinks from trusted sources!

The Key Takeaway

The key takeaway here is to get your links out there and make sure they work properly and share and help people as much as you possibly can. This is one of the most beneficial things by creating a trusted website is the more trust you have for your website, the more backlinks and the more search engine results you’ll receive. 

Today we will be showing how to create Facebook Stories for your e-commerce business. This gets great results for e-commerce businesses and a lot of brands and businesses out there. Facebook stories are very similar to Instagram stories. It’s where you can share short videos that relate to your business or yourself, so potential customers in social media, visitors can see.

This is going to be very key to your e-commerce business. If you do it right, you can actually get more customers, more signups, and increase revenue just from using Facebook stories.

20 Second Videos

Facebook story videos are now twenty seconds long, so you have a little bit longer of a chance then you do Instagram to make that story. Instagram stories are only 15 seconds long, so now you have five more seconds to share your story.

Use Facebook Stories to share your brand and tell the customers about what you’re offering. This gives you more opportunity to add a call to action at the end. So let’s say you share about 15 seconds of your story, your pitch, your brand then the last five seconds, use that to ask the person to send you a message or swipe up to go to your e-commerce store.

Create Around Your Store

Creating stories around your e-commerce store is all about getting customers to get to know your brand, adding a relationship factor. You can add stories of your office space, walking around, videos of your employees, show your e-commerce products, and videos of your customers using your products. This is a great opportunity to share that relationship side of your business and your brand.

It’s the same thing, we want to be able to create relationships through these stories, so show those important aspects of your business, make it more personal, and that’s where you’re going to see the results.

Day In The Life

Show a day in the life of your business, and we mentioned this before, day in the life. Show people what it’s like to work at your business, to work with your business, and to experience what your brand is all about. People want to see the insides and outs of the day to day work and the things that are going on so they can build trust with you.

Now, don’t worry about making these stories perfect. People want something that they can relate to, so show short videos of your clients, you coaching your clients, working with your clients, of the employees, and just show a day in the life of what somebody could expect. That’s going to help people build trust with you and your brand.

Add Strong Captions

A lot of times when somebody’s scrolling through Facebook or Instagram stories, they don’t have their volume turned on. So that’s why you need to add strong captions so they can read along as the story swipes, right?

So tell them what you’re talking about in each slide. Think about it as yourself, they’re not listening, they’re only seeing your mouth move. So you’ll need to add captions to tell them what you’re talking about, just in case they don’t have the volume turned up.

This is really going to help with user engagement and also make sure that they don’t swipe out and they continue watching your story! Use these captions as abandon cart ads if a customer abandoned the cart in your e-commerce store. Create bold captions pointing out that they left something in their cart to get them back to check out.

The Key Takeaway:

Build the relationships through your stories. Show the insides of your brand, show people what to expect, what you’re like, what your culture is like, and they’re going to enjoy watching your stories so they come back on a day to day basis. 

When they’re ready to buy from your store, they can swipe up or click on your links on a daily basis as you’re creating your stories. 

You can even retarget your website visitors to see your Facebook Stories. This is a great opportunity to get consumers who already know your brand back to your business. Here is a great article we wrote about Facebook Retargeting Ads.

Facebook Retargeting is simply a tactic where you target the people who have already engaged with your brand on Facebook or visited your website. You’ve probably seen them before. Those ads that mysteriously follow you around Facebook after you clicked on an ad or visited a new site.

Any type of website out there, whether it’s a WordPress site, a Wix site, or you just have a Shopify site for e-commerce, it’s always best to set up your facebook pixel in the head section of your website, a facebook pixel. We’ll start tracking all website visitors where they come from, what their Facebook pages, and technically as much information as they can get from your customers that visit your website. Once you set up your facebook retargeting pixel on your site, once you can leave it and start creating an audience around it to build up so you can advertise to them later.

Get set up

Step number one, get it set up so we recommend setting it up right away. What you have to do is go into your facebook ad manager, create a new pixel for your Facebook business page, copy and paste the pixel into the head section of your website.

Now, some websites are different than others. As an example for WordPress. If you’re technically knowledgeable about your site, you can insert it into the head code of your WordPress site. Additionally, you can download a plugin which will allow you to easily insert any codes, analytics, or pixels into your website without worrying that you would break it once the pixel setup on your site, you’ll start seeing visitors in your Facebook ad manager so you know that it’s working. Go back and check a day later to see if that number has increased so you can be ensured that the ad Pixel is installed properly.

Create Your First Custom Audience

Tip number two, create your first custom audience. Now that you’ve installed the Facebook pixel correctly, you can set up a custom audience in your Facebook ad manager. This way, you can start targeting people that visit any part of your website or specific pages of your website.

If you only want to target and create an audience around people that have been to your shopping cart, you can set up an audience and name it shopping cart audience.

If you want to target only people that have been to your home page, you can set up an audience based on visitors that visited your homepage and target them. Additionally, you can target anybody that’s visited any page of your website.

We recommend setting up specifically in generally so you can go back and advertise to any group later on. Once you build up your audience, the goal is to get a thousand or more visitors to your pages so you can start advertising to this audience.

Create a Facebook Product Ad

Tip number three, create your Facebook product ad based on the visitor’s audience and pixels of the pages that you’ve set up. You can start targeting any of those visitors with ads. If you run an e-commerce site, we recommend posting pictures and images or even videos of your products in a Facebook ad, so anybody that’s been to your site or knows your brand will recognize any pictures or videos that they’ve seen on your site.

Now in a Facebook ad and maybe more willing to purchase from you, you can create custom ads based on people that have been to your shopping cart, telling them to come back with a 20 percent coupon that they can use for your business.

Get Social Proof

Tip number four, get social proof. Now that you’ve set up your pixel, your audience, based on people that have visited your website and created your ad, you need to start getting likes and comments on that Ad. This creates social proof, so any other visitors or audience that have seen your brand.

Now they are seeing your facebook advertisement on their newsfeed. They’re going to see that other customer enjoy your products and are happy with your business, so when they see likes and comments on the ads that you’ve set up, they’re more likely to take advantage of the offer or click on the ad to go back to your website and purchase.

You can do this by sending out a link to your email list or your facebook messenger list, asking them to go engage with the Facebook ad or they could even receive an even greater discount just for giving you some love on your facebook end.

Setup Abandon Cart

Tip number five, set up the abandoned cart. Now that you’ve created the ad audience pixel and got some social proof, you can now target people that have only been to your cart and didn’t purchase.

If I go to your website right now and I go to your checkout and I changed my mind, get busy or just don’t want to buy right, then you can continue showing me that same product I was going to buy on a consistent basis in my newsfeed, so when I am ready or when I do remember, I’ll recognize the product, your brand, and I’ll see that you’re making it easy for me to go back to your site to purchase the summary.

The Key Takeaway:

When you tie all of these tips together, your website will see an increase in not only growth traffic, but most importantly revenue. People are busy. They have their own schedules. Sometimes they just forget, but if you keep reminding them, continue building your brand and showing them that you’re always there for them, they’re more likely to come back to your website, make a purchase, and stick with you for the long run.

This isn’t a setup and forget ad strategy. You’re going to have to split test and continue making changes until you find what works best for your business and your audience. Sometimes even then, once you find what works best, you’ll still have to change it because of the marketing changes so often.