How to Get More Amazon Reviews in 2021:-
Reviews are a huge deal for sellers on Amazon. Imagine your experience as a buyer. What do you do first? You might have a look at the pictures, maybe read the description. You’ll then most likely check the reviews. This doesn’t always mean you’ll read them in detail. You might just check the star rating and review count. Regardless, humans react well to social proof, and a high review count and star rating might just tip a “maybe” into a purchase. This illustrates the importance of reviews and why you need to try your best to solicit as many as you can for your products.
Most Amazon sellers know that they need to get more reviews of course, but figuring out how to achieve this can be a frustrating obstacle, especially when Amazon are changing the rules regularly and deleting genuine reviews by the tens of thousands – it seems even they don’t entirely know what’s going on!
Reviews make a huge difference to how people perceive both your product, and your brand as a whole. Again, put your buyers hat on and look at the product page through their shoes, and you’ll realise how in many ways, reviews are seen as the only trustworthy piece of information on a lisitng. It’s likely you’ve never purchased off a company with no reviews or overwhelmingly negative reviews, and that’s where you will be at the start of your journey. Positive reviews drive sales. High review numbers drive them too. Unfortunately, sales are what drive reviews too, creating somewhat of a catch 22.
Without these positive reviews your listings are going to struggle, no matter how well optimised they are, and no matter how unique and high quality the product is. A lack of reviews will hold you back from converting customers, which indirectly prevents you from gaining ground in the rankings. On the same note, reviews breed reviews. If you’ve got reviews you’ll get sales and as a result, even more reviews. If you don’t have the reviews at the outset, chances are you aren’t going to be pulling in many sales.
Garnering positive reviews for your product is one of the most important ranking factors outside of generating sales under specific keywords. In fact, even a successful organic ranking campaign is likely to fail to provide a good ROI if you don’t have the reviews to capitalise on it – you may well rank to a high position and be seen by a huge amount of searchers, but if you don’t have the reviews to convert those searchers into sales, you are likely to slide down the ranks again with time.
Imagine if you’re undecided between two products, each of a similar price and specification. One has 3,000 reviews and the other has 20. Which do you think you’re going to buy? Now imagine your product is the one with 20 reviews and you can see where the problem arises. If you have 2,000 and the competitor has 20,000, the difference in conversion rates may be less stark. But at the start, when you visibly have very few, you are in a tough spot.
With that being said, here are some of the proven ways we like to get reviews on Amazon in 2021.
Is The Product Worthy Of A Review?
This perhaps doesn’t need to be said, but you’re not going to get very far if your product is a dud. If there’s something frustrating about your product like a component that breaks easily or missing feature the bad reviews will start rolling in. If your customers are expecting something you’re not providing then they’re clearly not going to be happy. What is reasonable for them to expect? If you’re falling short of that you’ve got a problem. One good method can be to scour your competitor listings for negative reviews to learn what people find annoying about this sort of product, and find a way to avoid that or improve on it.
If your product is good or, even better, very impressive, you’re going to naturally pull in good reviews. This is where you need to be.
If you feel like you’re getting a chunk of bad reviews, try to find a common theme among them and focus on improving your product.
For example if you’re selling a smoke alarm which works fine, but runs out of battery fast, you’re likely going to see reviews complaining about bad battery. You can carry on, in the hope that you start getting some good reviews, but those bad reviews might add up and ruin the balance. You may then find yourself, months down the line, stuck with 1,000+ reviews with your average star rating being low – a highly unappealing product to purchase. Instead, going back to the drawing board with the supplier and improving the products flaws will likely be the better option in the long run, despite being a headache in the long run.
Moving on from that point, and with the expectation that your product is sound and good to go, here are our top tips for the best way to get Amazon reviews in 2021.
1. Bundle Products or put something in for free
People love free stuff. An unexpected value to push people into writing a positive review. At this point your product is great and you have some natural reviews coming in. This trick is helpful to get people to write reviews who rarely do.
If they aren’t expecting the free item then you’re going to get a lot more positively surprised customers, which means much more positive reviews. It increases the value of the product in the customer’s eyes, as long as it is something relevant and useful. Spend some time thinking about this product. It could be something physical you attach with the product or maybe something digital based like a free e-book or guide. A great example of a free physical item is including batteries for the item you’re selling, or a smoothie recipe book with a blender, for example.
You can also bundle items together on Amazon. If they’re of a similar nature it’ll look like the customer is getting a lot more for their money. It removes the element of surprise, but the offering itself will be better so it might entice more people to part with their cash.
You might be wondering about the additional cost here. It will pretty much be negligible but try to remember you’re in this for the long term. You want to build up reviews and fast. This is a surefire way to do so and the money spent is usually spent well.
2. Don’t Forget Your Product Inserts
These are extremely popular and you’ve probably seen some with products you’ve purchased in the past. Usually a small slip of paper or card tucked into the packaging offering the customer key information and politely asking for a review.
You might already include something like this with details of your other ventures, website, contact number or returns information. All you need to do is add a review request.
If you don’t use an insert then you’re missing out. Simple. The chances are high that all of your competitors are using them. A product insert can increase consumer confidence. It’s a line directly to them. It will increase brand awareness and engagement and increase your chance of getting more orders down the line. You can even add things like a discount voucher off their next order to encourage this even more.
Don’t cram the card with text because it won’t be read in detail, and if it looks too wordy this could put people off. Be punchy in your wording and to the point. Frame it as a thank you.
It also gives you a chance to avoid a bad review. If you ask people to contact you directly if they have any issues, you’re giving yourself a chance to fix the issue and potentially avoiding a lasting comment on Amazon. If they like what you do there’s more chance they’ll purchase from you again or that you may even turn a negative review into a positive one.
You don’t want to say this outright though, as asking for positive reviews specifically instead of reviews in general is against Amazon’s ToS – but by being creative you can lead towards it. Here are some of the better examples we’ve seen:
Thanks For Your Order! It Means A lot.
We hope you enjoy your purchase
If you aren’t 100% happy with your purchase due to damage or dissatisfaction please contact us immediately so we can put it right.
If you’re happy, we’d love it if you could leave us a review. We’re pretty new to Amazon, and every review gives us a boost.
In that short amount of text you’re establishing rapport with the customer. Offering them a solution if there’s anything wrong (thus hopefully avoiding a bad review), and inviting them to leave a review. They may have never considered a review or even realised that was an option, but now it’s in the back of their mind.
If something is wrong they won’t first think about a bad review. Of course, when they contact you it’s up to you to approach the situation correctly and ensure one isn’t left. This means you have to respond in a timely manner and do all you can for the customer. Doing this right can give you a positive review, real life positive word of mouth, and a lifelong customer, all from one task!
However, remember Amazon are strict on this – don’t be tempted to ask for a positive review on your card. It’s against Amazon’s terms and conditions and you might end up getting into trouble. However that’s what you’re pretty much doing with the above message because the “otherwise” separates out the bad review from the good. Just be careful with how you word it and don’t ask the question outright.
This won’t cost you much of anything. If you need reviews and don’t really have the budget to use a paid review service then this is the route to take. It doesn’t cost much to get them printed out and is something you have to repeat quite rarely depending on volume. For all that, you can dissuade the bad reviews and get some more positive ones.
Of course, you want to make sure the insert is catchy in terms of design. Simple is best but the card should be an attractive colour. Either that or the font should be an eye catching colour on white. Don’t just use black on white card. This might drive the printing price up by a small amount, however it can stop people simply discarding it as colour will attract attention.
3. Automated Email Follow Ups Can Push Reviews
In the same vein as product inserts, email follow ups are great way to remind customers about reviews and encourage them to do so. There are many software tools that allow you to do this. Helium10 is probably the best all in one solution, but it’s also quite pricey as it does dozens of other things too. If you want a basic feedback tool that does everything mentioned here but don’t need a fancy package FeedbackWhiz is probably the best low cost option.
These tools allow you to automate email reminders and link them to your products.
These email reminders can be set to go out at any time. Maybe the same day the customer buys the product or even a month later. This decision is usually best made depending on the unique circumstances of the product. Is it something that takes a while to get the best out of, like a supplement? Or something which is an instant hit?
If you’re going down the email route don’t simply discard the inserts. They work better in tandem. A lot of people might think about leaving you a review once they’ve seen your flashy paper insert and then go on to simply forget. Then the email will drop into their mailbox a week or so later and they’ll be reminded and take the time to leave one.
You know what it’s like to be pummeled with emails. It’s annoying and likely leads you to automatically swipe then into the trash.
What do you delete automatically? Usually it’s stuff that looks like spam. If your name is in the subject line it’s more likely you’ll want to take a look at the innards. So “Hi Joe, regarding your amazon order…” is much better than “invoice 223”. The latter subject line would be very easy to immediately disregard and delete if you aren’t expecting any specific invoice, whereas the former is unquestionably addressed directly to you.
These are likely to be the only automated orders you’ll want to set up:
Order Confirmed
Pretty much is exactly what it says. You send this immediately after the customer has placed the order. People are used to seeing this and may worry if it doesn’t come through. It simply gives them peace of mind that everything has been processed correctly.
Here you take the opportunity to thank the customer and to introduce your company to them. Start everything off on the right foot. Then you go on to give them a accurate estimation regarding delivery. You also give them a link for contact information. Be this a number, email address or form, and invite them to get hold of you if there are any problems whatsoever.
Again, here you have your bad review deterrent. They’ll come to you first instead of immediately leaving a bad review.
Follow Up On The Order
Once the delivery has been received by the customer you send the follow up. Usually 1-3 days later or 24 hours after delivery.
Keep it short and sharp. Tell them they should have their order and that you hope they enjoy it. Again, ask them to contact you if there are any problems with the product, once more giving an appropriate link to do so.
Products arrive late sometimes for a myriad of reasons. If it is running late, they might speak to you about it here instead of leaving a bad review. It’s another way to head negative reviews off before they get written.
At this point some customers will write a positive review, so long as the product is good, because you’ve shown how much you care about their experience.
Review Request
You don’t want to send this email too close to the follow up, or you may end up just annoying the customer from emailing too many times. Think around 5 to 10 days, depending on the intricacies of your product and business.
Always start out positive “We hope the product is exactly what you wanted”, you can then remind them of the extras you might have thrown in. “we hope you found the batteries we included useful”.
Then comes the request. Again, ask them to contact you if they’re unhappy and need any further help,, and remind them that reviews are very helpful if they are happy. You can copy your product insert here if needed or try something else to catch their attention.
These are the proven automated emails that work. You may have some other great ideas to complement them, and depending on your product you might need them, but don’t fall into the trap of sending too many because the customers simply won’t like it.
A Little Bit More….
So those are our three main tips. If you’ve ever asked the question “How do I get reviews in Amazon?”, we hope they have helped get you a little closer to your goals. We’ve used these techniques time and time again to get the best for our customers, some of whom have over 15,000 5 start reviews, and now you can benefit from these strategies too. They’re guaranteed to help you increase reviews which will of course result in increased orders.
That being said, there are a few other options available to one wishing to absolutely maximise their product reviews.
Reviews With An Incentive
You might have heard of them. They used to be one of the best strategies for sellers on Amazon who could amass thousands of positive reviews by offering the product for free or by discounting the product. It worked for a while, but eventually Amazon caught on. Now, buyers of discounted products are rarely allowed to submit reviews, and even reviews for full priced sales are often blocked. Amazon attempts to block any reviews that appear to be connected to the seller or other reviews. Unfortunately their detection methods for this are terrible and it currently seems to delete just as many legitimate reviews as it does fake ones.
Trying this strategy nowadays might even get your selling account banned, which is of course a major roadblock in your bid to become a profitable seller on Amazon.
However, if you were so inclined, you could still do this through your own social circle by using slightly more distant friends and family that aren’t obviously connected to you. This is pretty time consuming, but also pretty tough for Amazon to track.
You can still purchase Amazon reviews but you need to be extremely careful in which company you decide to choose. This is primarily because many of them use the same reviews over and over again and some aren’t even written in proper english. It’s at your own risk and if you keep getting similar reviews Amazon might just catch on.
We can help our partners build positive reviews in a natural way similar to those listed above. Our technique is a little grey hat but highly effective. To discuss this and see how we could help you gain positive reviews, please feel free to contact us.
Organic Sales Campaigns
This is probably the most reliable method to boost your Amazon Ranking for your respective products.
Basically it involves real, normal people searching for a specific keyword and buying your product. Doing this often and consistently increases your product rank for that specific search term, leading to more genuine sales, which of course means more reviews. Simply put, your product will show higher on the list of results once the search term is entered, leading to a higher percentage of the searchers seeing your product.
We’ve provided organic ranking campaigns just like this to hundreds of businesses and helped their products rank consistently higher in the search results, bringing in more sales and reviews. To discuss how this works and pricing please feel free to contact us at any time for an indepth proposal on what we could do for you.
Of course we can help in other ways too and offer a range of Amazon marketing services to boost your business to the next level. Consider getting in touch and see how our proven ranking process and other services can help you.
Hopefully this guide has helped you see how important reviews are and how to get them. We endeavour to continue bringing guides to this blog to help you build your business and succeed on Amazon. If you’re at the start of your business journey consider our guide on How to Start an Amazon Business to give you a jump to success. Good luck!