And our high touch but big impact tip for crushing the competition
Amazon has become the hottest battleground for competitive brands to battle for a rapidly increasing share of customer dollars. The hard work that goes into becoming one of the top competitors in a category or key search has become largely table stakes. More than any other factor, what wins once you’re there is your star rating.
In close competition, that very important difference in star rating between competitors is much smaller, and therefore much more addressable than many realize. In our analysis across the top 6 results on several top verticals, the difference between top of the pack and bottom result was a tiny .3 stars. That’s just a 6% difference.
By the time you’ve got a product in a mature market, most of that road has been paved, but you should still look to make incremental improvements as you can. For new products or products about to launch however, you still have much more control over how your product starts ranking right out of the gate. The approach we detail herein is really built to take advantage of that opportunity.
The primary difference between product launches that quickly settle to the middle of the pack and those that soar to the top is the work you do to actively ensure a first batch of authentic reviews from great target customers. Authenticity is a big key here. Amazon has implemented strict policies around how you can and cannot drive reviews, and with good reason. They’ve done everything they can to create a shopping experience that is informative and truthful to the consumer, by only allowing non-incentivized and unbiased reviews from other consumers. Sellers are banned from offering any kind of compensation in exchange for a review, and cannot reimburse buyers after leaving reviews. Amazon has also banned reviews from review communities where members either explicitly or implicitly receive future benefit for leaving a review.
Our approach combines the common tactic of asking customers to leave reviews with a much less common approach of no-strings-attached 1×1 sampling. Using our platform, we recruit from scratch a base of your existing customers into a completely white labeled program, and then identify and segment those who would be a best fit for this product. We then communicate, fulfill, and follow-up at all touch points with these samplers to ensure they have a seamless experience throughout.
By inviting the best cohort of real brand fans to participate in a sampling program that does not require them to leave a review, gives them no incentive to leave a review, and they receive no future benefit once they do, our approach consistently provides results that are fully compliant with Amazon, and an average .4 stars higher than Amazon’s own Vine program. The Vine program is one established method of sampling, and could be a good fit for products that have a broad appeal, and aren’t in very competitive markets.
If you’re considering this type of program, either leveraging Crowdly or DIY, you should understand that these are not the easy pay-to-rate programs of the past. These are fully and truly no-strings-attached sampling programs, where users may decide to leave reviews, or might choose to take the product and ghost. With a manual approach, our first initial results had less than 40% of people leaving reviews, but as we’ve developed our platform and practices, we regularly benchmark at least 60% participation. You also need to stay in touch with participants regularly, and combined with the cost of the product, this approach is usually recommended for the first 50 or so reviews per product. It doesn’t easily scale into the hundreds, but in a marketplace where small edges could mean exponential wins, the payoff and ROI on a strong launch can be gigantic, increasing searchability, trust and legitimacy, competitive dominance, and those buy-box wins that drive fast revenue growth.
Your real brand fans are your biggest asset. Involving them in a sampling, especially for a new product, gets them excited and makes them feel like a valued voice. By sharing a product with no requirement for a review, and checking in with customers to hear their thoughts, those high quality reviews will surely trickle in.
To learn more about our sampling and review programs, reach out to erin@crowdly.com.