How to Get Reviews on Amazon Like a True Pro

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Does your product attract embarrassingly few reviews on Amazon? Do you struggle to get more positive reviews or even your first one?

Even if your product is "okay", people may not necessarily leave a positive review.

If you don’t understand what drives customers to leave their feedback, you’ll never be able to get more reviews on Amazon.

Thus, you won't be able to grow your business and customers will end up spending their money on your competitors.

However, there's one simple solution to this problem.

If you want to know how to get more reviews on Amazon, beat your competition, and make more money in the long run, you’ve come to the right place.

Here’s what you will learn in this post:

• Why reviews on Amazon are so important
• How great reviews impact your business
• The rarely mentioned "secret" to get more reviews on Amazon
  
• What really drives customers to leave reviews
• The only strategies you need to get more reviews on Amazon

Let’s dive right in.

Why Are Reviews on Amazon So Important?

In fact, there’s only one reason why reviews on Amazon are super important:

More Reviews = More Sales = More Money

You may ask yourself why you can make more money with more reviews? Well, there are exactly 2 reasons all experienced Amazon sellers will understand:

You Get More Visitors

The first reason why reviews are uber important is that you get more visitors to your Amazon listing.

Amazon’s Algorithm determines a product’s ranking by evaluating the chance that it will sell and make a customer happy.

To do so, Amazon first checks if a product is 100% relevant to a given search query. After that, they analyze how often a product sells over time.

If a product is 100% relevant to a given search query and sells stable, they take more specific criteria into account like CTR, CR, or Customer Feedback.

Great Customer Feedback = More Traffic

So if you have more positive reviews than your competitors, Amazon will automatically rank your product higher.

As you can see on this heatmap, you make the most money if your product ranks between positions 1 and 3:

So more reviews will give your listing a powerful traffic boost.

However, there’s also another effect that you can benefit from. Let's jump over to the next section.

The Twofold Effect

As mentioned above, Amazon checks how often a product sells over time. If your product sells more often than others, Amazon will automatically rank it higher.

Keeping this in mind, reviews have a huge impact on how often a product sells.

If you've more reviews, customers are more likely to buy from you. This increases your sales on a first level and also your rank on a second level (If you sell more now, you'll sell even more in the future).

To substantiate this, I will now guide you through some very useful data. This is necessary to understand how customers are thinking.

I highly recommend reading through this section in detail.

In fact, if you understand the data I'm going to show you, you’ll do 5 times better at getting reviews on Amazon.

Most Trusted Source of Information

Let’s start with the most trusted source of information on products and services. According to a survey by Deloitte, 60% of people say that customer reviews are their most trusted source of information.

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That’s similar to the amount of people who say that their most trusted source of information is Family and Friends.

Only 16% of people say that they rely on the retailer's website. So seems like customer reviews are 3,75 x more important than your Amazon listing itself.

Most Important Factors of Online Shopping for U.S. Shoppers 2018

Furthermore, here are the most important factors of online shopping for U.S. shoppers 2018:

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After search and navigation, 53% of people prefer to read detailed customer reviews which help them make a decision.

Key Factors for U.S. Users to Shop via Amazon 2019

In addition to that, here are the key factors for U.S. users to shop via Amazon 2019:

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Seems like a decent amount of people prefer to buy on Amazon because Amazon products have great reviews.

There’s no more talk. Reviews on Amazon are super important.

If your product sucks, you will never be successful. Customers have their strategies to identify bad retailers:

Common Ways Online Shoppers Worldwide Research Unfamiliar Digital Retailers 2019

Here’re common ways online shoppers worldwide research unfamiliar digital retailers 2019:

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It seems like everyone identifies a bad company by its reviews.

So by now, you understand how important it is to get reviews on Amazon. Now, it’s time to understand how to get them.

To do so, I'll first show you the process of how Amazon reviews are obtained. 

Again, I will guide you through some useful data. I highly recommend to check them out and read the whole section in detail.

The Rarely Mentioned "Secret" to Get More Reviews on Amazon

There's a rarely mentioned secret that marketing experts won't tell you simply because it is "unsexy".

To find out what it's about, let's go through the whole process of "getting-reviews":

The first step is that a customer buys one of your products. If you use FBA, Amazon will handle shipping for you.

In general, you can't do anything about delivery. However, if customers don’t receive products on time, they won't be satisfied at all.

Fortunately, Amazon does a good job when it comes to shipping. So let us assume that your customer receives his product on time.

According to the kano-model, this customer won’t feel much satisfaction either, because shipping is a Must-be-Attribute.

If you don't know what's the kano model, here's a brief outline of it:

• Must-be-Attributes: Basic features that customers only become aware of when they're not fulfilled. If you can't provide them, customers won't be satisfied. However, if you provide them, they also won't feel much satisfaction.
• One-dimensional-Quality-Attributes: These are known by customers. They eliminate dissatisfaction or build satisfaction.
• Attractive-Quality-Attributes: Provide satisfaction when achieved, but do not cause dissatisfaction when not.
• Indifferent-Quality-Attributes: Customers don't care if they're fulfilled or not.
• Reverse-Quality-Attributes: Lead to dissatisfaction if present, but to customer satisfaction if absent.

The only way to motivate a customer to leave a review is by selling a product that has Attractive-Quality-Attributes.

These are the attributes that really force customers to engage with your brand and get them to reward your service.

Always aim for Attractive-Quality-Attributes. 

Finally, the "Unsexy" Truth is that if you want to get more reviews on Amazon, you'll need a better product. 

Good or bad reviews depend on whether your product is great or terrible.

Let's go one step further and take a look at what customers do after they've received a product.

Depending on their mood, here's what they're going to do:

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You can see that about 15% of satisfied customers are going to a retailer’s product page to leave a review.

That’s a lot.

All in all, here’s the whole process:

Customers go out after engaged with a brand and tell other people about their experiences. This also serves as a source of new inspiration for other people.

In the end, it's relatively simple. 

All customers share their experiences with others after they've bought a product, and some of them do this by leaving a review.

So in fact, if you want more reviews on Amazon, all you've to do is to sell a great product on Amazon and to sell A LOT.

Yes, it's really that simple. This has more impact than any other strategy.

So first of all. Make sure that you sell the best product in your nice. To do so, there's only one strategy you should use.

All you have to do is to study the problems of other products. If you can fix all these problems, you will get a TON of positive reviews.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Sign up for a free Helium 10 account

2. Download Helium 10's Chrome Extension here

3. Head over to Amazon and choose one of your competitors' products

4. Start Review Downloader

4. Set up Only Verified Purchase and only choose reviews with a three-star rating or less

5. Go through all these reviews, find all problems and fix them with your product

You can also use these insights for further optimization, e. g. for listing creation.

So now that you have the best product in your niche, you can focus on increasing your sales.

To do so, I highly recommend checking out this article about how to increase your sales on Amazon.

What Drives Customers to Leave Reviews?

If you have a great product and sell tons of units a month, it’s time to go one step further and develop a strategy to get the most out of the whole process.

Therefore, it's important to understand why people write reviews:

• Say Thank You: Customers write reviews because they are satisfied with the service they have received and want to express their appreciation. If you have ever received amazing service, you probably know what it feels like.
• Help others: A common reason for writing reviews is that people want to help other people.
• People Want to Help Companies: Customers want to help companies by pointing out a problem or showing them a way to improve their service.
• People want to be heard: People want their opinions to be heard and respected by the masses.
• People leave reviews to be part of the crowd.

Most people will give you a positive review if your product totally convinces them. That's mostly because customers want to reward excellent service.

Here’s also a graph showing results from a survey on Why Do Consumers Leave Reviews? by GatherUp.

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The Only Strategies You Need to Get More Reviews

Even if you need to focus on product quality and making more sales, there're several ways to increase your chances of getting reviews.

Here are the ones that pay off. If you use these strategies, you'll get more reviews than 90% of your competitors in the long run:

Trust Amazon’s Follow Up System

Amazon sends automatic follow up emails to customers asking them to leave a review and report any issues they had.

In general, Amazon only sends one follow up email. Yet, you can head over to Amazon seller central and request a review by clicking on the “Request a Review Button”.

Since it would be very time-consuming to click on this button for every order, you should use Jungle Scout's Chrome Extension to request reviews in Bulk.

Here's how to do that:

1. Sign up for Jungle Scout's Chrome Extension

2. Head over to Amazon Seller Central

3. Request reviews in Bulk

Join Amazon's Early Reviewer Program

Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program helps new sellers to get their first reviews.

After customers purchase a product, Amazon sends an email informing them that they will receive a $1-$3 gift if they leave a review.

Through Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program, you can receive a maximum of 5 reviews.

Amazon charges you $60 for the Early Reviewer Program.

Jungle Scout spoke to a few successful sellers to find out, whether the program is worth it or not.

What they found out is that most sellers seemed positive about the program, but there were two main complaints.

First, many sellers admitted that it took 2-3 months to get reviews. Second, sellers were concerned that negative reviews could potentially ruin their listing right from the start.

Since you can only get a maximum of 5 reviews through the program, I only recommend it if you struggle to collect that small amount of reviews.

If you gained a few reviews through your product launch, head over to some more advanced strategies.

I also highly recommend checking out this article to learn more about the Early Reviewer Program.

Use Helium 10 Follow Up

Helium 10 Follow Up is an E-Mail Automation Tool for Amazon Sellers. But there are a lot of features that move the needle.

The main reason to use this tool is that you'll be able to close more sales and get better feedback by asking customers to leave a review.

And the best thing: It's automated.

All you need to do is set up an email autoresponder that contacts each customer after a sale and asks them if everything is okay and to leave a review.

Not only you will get more customer feedback on Amazon, but you can also reduce the number of negative reviews.

Here's how to use it:

1. Sign up for Helium 10 and get 50.000 emails for free

2. Head over to Follow Up

3. Set up Amazon MWS API Access

4. Set up your campaign. You have a variety of options that you can check out here.

Finally, get more positive feedback and make more sales.

Join Amazon's Vine Program

If your brand is registered and you've less than 30 reviews, you can join Amazon's Vine Program.

You then have to submit 30 products to all the vine reviewers. They test it and write a review for you.

According to Amazon, 25% of reviews occur within 5 days after the order and 99% of reviews occur within 35 days.

Thus, Amazon Vine could be a great opportunity for you to get reviews fast.

If your brand is registered and you've less than 30 reviews, don't miss out on this opportunity.

Build an Email List

As long as customers buy your products on Amazon, they’re Amazon’s customers. And Amazon has strict rules that you've to follow if you want to contact customers.

A great way to do something about this is to build your email list. If you build your list, you can request reviews from your email subscribers.

An email list is also super useful for new product launches since you can email your subscribers to try your new product.

Fortunately, there're lots of ways to do so. Here are only a few examples:

• Social Media
• Blog
• Product inserts

Building your email list often goes hand in hand with building your brand outside Amazon which is incredibly important for your business.

Utilize Product Inserts

An easy way to get reviews on Amazon is to use product inserts. However, there are several things to keep in mind if you use this strategy:

• You can ask for reviews, but always stay neutral. Asking people to give a five-star review, or even showing a five-star image, is against Amazon's guidelines.
• Tell people to join your email list and follow you on social media. As mentioned above, this will help you get more reviews and also help you for future product launches.
• Furthermore, give useful information about your product and make sure people find a way to contact you if an issue comes up. 

You should take advantage of this strategy because it costs you almost no money and you will see more results over a longer period.

Run Promotions

So in fact, this is a strategy to promote your products. Sellers usually launch products on Marketplaces like Jump Send to make more sales right from the start.

A great tool to use for this strategy is Jungle Scout Launch.

If you sell highly discounted products with great quality, chances are good that many customers will leave a positive review because they want to reward you.

Remember that most buyers leave reviews because they exactly want to do that.

I recommend doing a giveaway when you launch a product. Once sales start to increase, you shouldn't do giveaways anymore unless you're really not selling enough.

Request Reviews From Customers Who Have Left Positive Seller Feedback

Buyers who left positive seller feedback are more likely to leave a product review.

So it’s essential to check your seller feedback over time and email all buyers who left feedback asking them to leave a product review.

In Conclusion

To summarize what you've learned, here're the most important things:

• Positive reviews have a great impact on your business.
• There's no magic trick to get more reviews on Amazon.
• You've to sell a great product and you've to sell A LOT to get more reviews.
• The easy way to create the best product in your niche is to use Helium 10 Review Downloader.
• You can implement strategies to increase your chances for positive reviews.