Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David
Guest Post by Ihor Dubovetskyi, CEO at Profit Whales
Good Reviews are ever more important.
Amazon has always been explicit about that its search algorithm, the A10, values products with good reviews.
Just like human customers do, in fact.
Because of this, getting good product reviews were and still is a priority of all businesses trading on Amazon.com. This holds true for all tiers of Sellers:
- A new product will largely be ignored by potential buyers if it has no/ too few reviews;
- A seasoned product with lower sales volumes (and reviews) will lose their BSR to a mature competitor with more reviews;
- Well-established sellers who have been trading for a long time will get more sales with reviews superior (both in quantity and quality) to other top competitors’ ASINs.
Old ways no longer get us there
Ever since Amazon’s team bothered themselves with the quality of product reviews, it was becoming more and more difficult for the Sellers to get them quickly. What could have been easily achieved before 2015 via essentially “buying” the reviews has become a much more complicated task in 2020. It requires multiple steps, a clever communication strategy, and understanding the buyer’s psychology.
That is if a Seller is willing to get a review rate over typical 1%, of course.
Amazon restricts direct customer communication
Let me quote the Amazon.com “Clarification to Communication Guidelines”:
“In general, you may contact a buyer who has purchased from you on Amazon only to complete an order or to respond to a customer service inquiry. You may not contact buyers in any way for marketing or promotional purposes, including via email, physical mail, telephone, or otherwise”
Some Sellers may see this (rather harsh) policy as an unfortunate loss of opportunity. Others see it rather as an invitation to get creative.
In fact, we at Profit Whales encourage all our agency clients to be creative when addressing their buyers: both with the medium and the message. After all, the cost-effectiveness of even our automated PPC management software depends on how good the client’s ASIN is. And that certainly includes good reviews!
An example of alternative communication
For the sake of the topic, we will use Facebook Messenger as a selected tool of communication with prospective customers.
Imagine that your marketing manager is tasked with generating sales and good reviews using this channel. In general, this is what he/.she might be doing to complete the task:
- Design a captivating and creative post about your product on Amazon
- Launch paid advertising for the post with Facebook tools
- Observe the reaction and make a list of prospective customers who engaged with the post (liked, commented, etc)
- Contact the perspectives via Messenger and confirm that they are into buying your products.
- Offer those who are ready to buy a discount, to incentivize them to jump to the product page on Amazon and buy one (e.g. with a 10% discount coupon code)
- Observe if the discount was activated (and write it down somewhere, against the ID of a buyer who received it)
- After a short time, contact the buyer to ask if he/she received the product OK and they like it. This action is two-fold actually:
– if the customer isn’t happy with the product, the manager can help with troubleshooting or a return (and thus avoid a potentially bad review).
– if the customer liked it — the manager can…
- … ask the customer to leave a review on Amazon.
Chatbot’s place in the scheme
Or…
The said manager may spend some time and create a chatbot to help automate these steps.
Chatbot services, like ManyChat, SufflePro, or ChatFuel, Re:amaze are good enough for the task. Let’s see what a chatbot can take over from the above sequence.
At step “4” a chatbot reacts to a Facebook user liking the post (with a “like” or “love” reaction that is). Once this happens, a pre-written sequence of events fires automatically. Chatbots generate the first personal message for the user.
The message contains a dynamically-inserted user name and is sent via Facebook Messenger to greet the prospective buyer. The same message asks if they would be interested in a coupon for our product on Amazon. The message ends with two buttons: “Yes, I want the code” and “No, thanks!”;
At step “5” for all users who opted “Yes” before, our chatbot generates the next message. This one contains a call to action and the actual incentive code (coupon code in our example).
It goes like “Excellent! Here is your coupon code _________! It is a limited time offer for __ days, so make sure you use it before that!. Just copy the code to your Amazon’s cart and enjoy your shopping with us!”;
N.B.: some extra work will be needed to integrate coupon codes with the chatbot. There are a few services out there that can do that for you, like IFTTTD or Zapier
At step “7” the chatbot waits for a reasonable length of time (seven days are typically enough) to make sure the buyer has the time to make the purchase. After that, it auto-generates a message like: “Hello again! We’re writing to you to make sure you received your product OK”. This message is followed by button options, like “I did not receive it yet”, “Yes, I received it”.
If a chatbot gets the latter reply, it can then go to asking another question.: “Did the product meet your expectations?” with the optional answers like “Yes, it’s great!”, “Not sure yet”, or “It’s bad, it isn’t what I wanted at all!”.
Finally, at step “8” those customers who answered the “Yes, it’s great” before will receive the chatbot’s final message. It asks the customer to “If possible, please support our business by leaving an honest product review on Amazon” + a link to the product page.
N.B.: it is important NOT to mention that a review should be “positive”: this often gets people annoyed and technically is a violation of Amazon’s genuine review policy (not to mention this is unethical).
Building such a chatbot can take several attempts and improvements. And whet it will be running, there will still be some customers who dislike the bots or those who do not follow the designed question-answer path. So your marketing manager is still likely to need to intervene from time to time.
Why should I bother again?
In general, a well-designed chatbot will make your customer communication smooth and not prone to delays or human errors. In the long run, the sheer number of processed customers will outweigh any loss a human-managed communication might have averted.
Unless you are selling something luxury and obscenely expensive like personal yachts or Antarctica tours that is.