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Honest Marketing report - Banner image

### Brand integrity: the new frontier for marketing

[Get the report here](/guides-reports/build-trusted-brand/brand-integrity-the-new-frontier-for-marketing?cta=banner)

Get more out of your customer reviews with our case studies, webinars and videos. Find the latest trends to promote your company in search and manage your online reputation.

Build a Trusted Brand - Trustpilot Webinars and Videos

Webinars and Videos - Build a Trusted Brand

Improving your online reputation with reviews

In this Trustilot webinar, we discuss the important of online reptation, how to build it from scratch, improve and monitor it, and capitalise from a positive online reputation.

Are you worried that negative reviews are hurting your bottom line?

Are you using your positive reviews to improve conversion rates?

In this webinar recording, you'll learn:

- Why your online reputation matters 
- How to monitor your online reputation 
- How to build your reputation from scratch 
- How to change a negative online reputation from zero to hero 
- How to capitalise on a positive online reputation.


Why ignoring your online reputation

Trustpilot tips and tricks: leveraging reviews to build a trusted brand

leveraging reviews across channels

In this Trustpilot webinar, we talk about the importance of social proof today, and talk you through how you can share your customer’s voice across all channels, including social media, to boost confidence and reduce scepticism.

In fact, it's growing so fast that it has now become essential for companies to implement social proof into their omni-channel marketing strategies. Indeed, online customers feel much more comfortable purchasing from a store when presented with evidence that others recommend it.

That’s why in this insightful webinar, two Trustpilot experts share some key concepts that you can start implementing immediately in order to power your business forward.

Watch the recording today, and learn how you can share your customer’s voice across all channels, including social media, to boost confidence and reduce scepticism.

Marketing & Reviews 101

### About Trustpilot

We were founded in Denmark in 2007. The reason it all started was because our CEO's mum was basically shopping online. She was looking for a washing machine. And back in 2007, buying a washing machine online was something that doesn't happen every day. So she was looking at various different websites, they both sold the same product, but she couldn't decide whom to buy from, because there was no way of knowing which website was most trusted. That's where it stemmed from, the lack of trust for consumers online. And since then, we've had over $173 million worth of investment. That's basically gone into growth to make sure that our product stays at the forefront of reviews. We now span 150 countries, 35 different languages, seven offices with over 800 employees around the globe. We've collected over 100 million reviews for 400,000 businesses around the globe.

### Why are reviews important today?

Reviews do really have an impact. 92% of consumers read reviews before making a buying decision, 44% think the number of reviews is important and 63% of consumers are likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews. So you can see, reviews are really important when consumers are looking to buy from you. We find that a lot of consumers will actually do a search on the company. So like company name plus reviews before they make that buying decision and that's where actually the majority of our traffic comes from.

So authentic content. Obviously back in the day, it used to be the brand would tell everyone what the brand should appear as, but this has basically changed now. Consumers are looking more and more for user-generated content. And this basically leads on nicely into the next part.

### Reviews and social proof

So, we've just heard that reviews have an impact on those buying decisions. So now I'm going to talk through the different types of reviews and how you can use these in your business. There are two different types of reviews, there's a service or your brand focused reviews, and then there's product focused reviews. And together, these provide a twofold view of social proof down the entire sales funnel.

There are also two types of reviews within that, that consumers can leave. There's an organic review or there's a verified review. Verified reviews are the ones that give consumer confidence on the authenticity of the review, that is, that it's come from a genuine experience. And another thing about the verified reviews is that they are easier for the consumer to leave. And on top of that, it helps qualify your brand for Google seller ratings, the gold stars that show up against your paid ads.

Now, the way in which we're asking for reviews, is very important and there's many different flexible methods out there. So I'm going to run through a couple of what Trustpilot can offer. So to start with, we need to, of course, understand and follow the consumer through their journey of identifying their need, making a decision, making a purchase and therefore having an experience. And that's when we're going to send that invitation.

### Collecting reviews

So we don't have to wait for people to come to your review profile or to your Facebook page to leave an organic review anymore, we can go to them. And so, there's multiple ways that we can do this, but some of the most popular ways, and for good reason, is how we can do it through our automation method called Automatic Feedback. Sorry about that siren, let's wait a minute. Yeah, is our Automatic Feedback Service. So this is triggered from your CRM or your emailing platform, or you might want to look into using one of our eCommerce plugins like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, but we can also help collect verified reviews on your site or even through your own SMSs or emails.

So now, understanding how we can collect review, we need to think about when is best to do so. If we go in too early, we risk a lower conversion rate or misconstrued feedback as it can all be a bit too vague, as the experience isn't yet complete. That being said, asking too late is also not the best thing to do. This can also give us a lower response rate or even worse, they don't remember their experience well enough to give us that qualitive review that we're after. But when we get them in the right spot, we get meaningful and relevant sentiment. Our customer facing teams get a chance to get in early, to turn anyone around and overall the customer is still riding high on the experience.

There's more than one way to help improve review conversions, but here are some of the most effective that we have found. 

Inviting absolutely everybody to leave a review. We don't have to wait for them to come to us, we go to them. This is more than likely to help us get more reviews.

There's also the option to send them a reminder. People do get busy and we forget that we've got an invitation sitting in our inbox. So no one minds getting a small little once-off nudge to leave that review. And then, if none of this works, which it shouldn't, but we can always A/B test, to see what is going to work for your unique set of customers.

### Incorporating social proof throughout the buying journey

We're going to look at a couple of examples of social proof throughout the journey. We'll look at some stats to validate social proof, that is something that we should be considering. So 92% of consumers read online reviews, 84% of consumers say that they trust peer recommendations, but only 22% of brands are actually trusted. So this could be a great gap you're currently missing with your marketing strategy, and a really easy and effective way to be implemented.

So you've got the header. So as soon as people hit the site, they're met with reviews that fills them with the confidence and it shows them that they can trust in your brand, straight from the get-go. And then they're able to just easily scroll through the reviews on site, make an informed decision and decide whether they want to proceed to the next step. You've got the footer, so as you can see, Safe Financial use social proof, it's huge to them. They have all their social platforms in one place, and then dedicated to building their brand reputation. Another great way for consumers to keep them engaged throughout the website.

So Bridgestone, they do more location based reviews, which is something a little bit new to us. We just brought that out, it's pretty cool. So you can obviously understand where potentially, which one's performing best in terms of location. And there could be a particular location that's not performing too well. But more specifically, it gives you again, that social proof on each of your locations. So if someone is looking to potentially come in store, they're then given that extra nudge with all these fantastic reviews, showing that they're going to get great service. And the location based reviews are also pretty good for localized searches, so we can mark up key landing pages and drive click through rate with review snippet stars.

So that was sort of the more service brand focus, but we can jump down into the product reviews. So at that point where the consumer has made a product choice and a selection, displaying product reviews from their peers basically, of what they also thought of the product, is a really good option. It helps generate that FOMO and drives them to make that decision that we want them to, which is to put it into checkout and purchase the chair.

We all have FOMO. But a lot of this has been focused on acquisition and it doesn't just have to be. Reviews can be used, and they should be used, to help turn your customers into returning customers. And we can see here in these retargeting emails, that's exactly what they're doing. Electricity Wizard, being a comparison site, is calling out how many reviews and trusted customers have had an experience with them. The same for rental of Omega Car Rentals.

We also see ads every day that we're on social media. So using trust marks, such as the Trustpilot stars alongside your customer's own words, is also another great way to re target. We know that social proof does help boost that click through rate when it's used across all of the marketing channels.

### Boosting conversions with trust signals

So having reviews on-site can help build your brand reputation and create consumer confidence, but we've done a lot of testament to the companies that we actually work with and so actually displaying reviews throughout the journey. And we've proven that you can convert up to 130% more, but as well, you can actually increase sales up to 315%.

Obviously, that would depend on the amount of traffic that you've got coming to your website. But either way, if you have two identical websites next to each other, one's got loads of fantastic reviews from a third party like Trustpilot, the other one's got no reviews, you're obviously going to choose the one that's got reviews. Pretty simple.

So top of the funnel stuff, so you can integrate the reviews on some of your key landing pages. So you could pick where you appear really well in organic search and basically mark them up with what we call review snippet stars, so they're basically just the stars that appear in organic search. You can also have product reviews, so again, product reviews allow you to integrate the review snippet stars onto each of your product landing pages, but as well, product reviews are actually hosted on your site, so it helps build your SEO for each of your product searches. And obviously, those stars are going to increase click through rate.

And then, last but not least, obviously the PPC, which I would imagine majority of you spend on. We can basically help you achieve the stars within your paid ads as well, because we basically have a license agreement with Google, and on average that will increase your click through rate for your ads by 10%. 

If you'd like to find out more about the importance of social proof to convert browsers into buyers, check out the report below!

Marketing & reviews 101: Leveraging your reviews across channels

Importance of reviews in offline advertising

In this Trustpilot webinar, we cover how impactful ratings and reviews are in advertising and marketing, and highlight how ratings and reviews also affect consumer trust, sentiment, and even their intent to make a purchase.

The report also highlights how ratings and reviews affect consumer trust, sentiment, and even their intent to make a purchase.

To celebrate the launch of this report, we’re excited to invite you to an exclusive webinar on May 17th, 11am BST/12pm CET where Trustpilot, Gain Credit, and London Research will showcase key results and highlights from our London Research report. 

Gain Credit, one of the brands featured in the report, will provide an in-depth look into how ratings and reviews have made an impact on their marketing and their company. We’ll also offer additional examples of how our clients have made the most of their ratings and reviews in above-the-line (offline) advertising.

Watch the webinar recording below:

### The methodology of the research

Let's start off with the methodology for the research. It's obviously worth saying that the aim of the research was really to learn more about the impact of ratings and reviews as a general level, and also to explore awareness of Trustpilot and various elements of the Trustpilot brand. In terms of the methodology, we did two surveys. We did a survey of more than 300 Trustpilot business partners and prospects. To complement that, we also did a survey of 2,000 UK consumers. The business survey was more global, but the consumer survey, we focused here on the UK market. We also did some qualitative research in the form of interviews with brands already harnessing Trustpilot in their offline advertising.

Finally, we did some statistical analysis using our part of the bottom line analytics to really get under the skin a bit more of the consumer motivations and to understand a bit more deeply the impact of different touch points, such as rating reviews in the customer journey. Also, to get a bit more nuance about the different elements of the Trustpilot brand. For example, the logo and the stars and trust for, more about that later. To look now at the objectives of the research, which I've already covered briefly. But essentially, this was around, as I say, a general understanding of the importance of ratings and reviews in the decision making process. That's the third bullet there. Then also looking at the use and benefits of Trustpilot in offline advertising, and, also, awareness of Trustpilot. I think it's worth saying for the uninitiated, above-the-line advertising, or ATL advertising, essentially overlaps quite a lot with offline marketing, so I guess, historically, its above-the-line was distinct from below-the-line advertising, which was more things like direct mail. 

Then the distinction has come to mean as well now more offline marketing as opposed to digital channels like online display or search advertising or social media. We're talking about more conventional media such as television, radio, print and billboards. Although, it should be noted that the lines are certainly blurry than actually a lot of these offline channels such as a billboard and TV, and even radio, have become more digital. 

### The importance of ratings and reviews

Okay, so if we look now at the first key finding of the report, and so looking at more the general research we did about the importance of ratings and reviews. What we found was that reviews and ratings, which we looked at separately as touch points, emerged as the most important sources of information when consumers are interested in buying something. When they're in buying mode, and we can see from this chart that reviews and ratings are actually at the top of the pile now in terms of how they're viewed as credible sources of information. 

That's partly to do with a lack of trust generally in information on the internet, whether that's through phenomena such as fake news, or a bad reputation that some aspects of display advertising have got over the years because it's not targeted. But not to say that all this advertising is bad in any way, but there is this general lack of trust in people looking for authenticity that reviews and ratings can provide. 

You can see here the percentage of UK consumers who are saying that each of these different touch points is either very important, important, and so on and so forth. Customer reviews, 40% of consumers regard these as very important. As you can see for consumer ratings, it's 38%. Then you can see in descending order the impact, or the perceived impact, that consumers think these have on their purchase decisions. It should also be noted that actually some of the other touch points, whether e-commerce sites or company websites or, as we'll see, even TV advertising can actually themselves have reviews. There is some overlap between these different touch points. 

Another key finding of the UK-focused consumer research was the high awareness of Trustpilot. We saw from our consumer survey that 58% of UK consumers are aware of Trustpilot. 

### How are consumers engaging with reviews?

There are two or three ways that the consumers interact with the reviews. 
Firstly is by leaving a review themselves, and not just actually leaving a review, but we've seen in a number of reviews, customers commenting on other reviews. For example, "I wasn't sure about borrowing from you, but I came and saw some reviews, and I'm really glad that I did." That's always a good positive first to come through. Apart from collecting feedback through Trustpilot itself, we have a number of internal mechanisms for collecting customer feedback, and again, we've seen some verbatim comments in there saying, "Wasn't to sure about it at first, but actually really pleased with everything that's come through, and really glad with what I've seen and everything else."

### Does your Trustpilot score help you build trust?

The next part of the findings we're presenting here is we wanted to test the hypothesis that a good Trustpilot score helped brands build trust with consumers and increases conversion rates in terms of online and offline sales. We had a couple of questions, we shall see here, as part of the consumer survey. We asked the extent to which they agreed that a good Trustpilot score made them more likely to trust the brand, and 76% either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that that was the case.

We could also see the extent to which consumers agreed that a good Trustpilot score makes them more likely to buy from a brand, and 72% of Trustpilot aware consumers, should stress that these are consumers who were aware of Trustpilot, said that they agree a good Trustpilot score makes them more likely to buy from a brand.

We wanted to look now at a couple of the statistical models we used as part of the research. The first one is really around the role of or the impact of different touchpoints including ratings and reviews in the consumer purchasing decision making process. What we've got here is a four quadrant where we've mapped the different touchpoints against their perceived importance and the impact on likelihood to buy, which is the X axis. We've used for this, or should I say, the statistician used for this multivariate regression modeling.

The most influential touchpoints are consumer reviews and ratings. This is something clearly that is in the interest of brands to use. The next most important quadrant is the 'maintain' one, and these are channels which are regarded by consumers, relatively speaking, as very important the search engines, company websites, and eCommerce. And I should stress here that all these touchpoints can certainly play a role in the influencing the customer journey, but we wanted to establish some kind of a pecking order here. In the bottom left, we can see channels such as direct mail, TV advertising, online display. One of the conclusions of the research is that the ratings and reviews can be used actually within those channels to make them more effective. And also, that those channels in isolation should really be monitored over time to see what their impact is on the consumer decision making in terms of trust and ultimately propensity to purchase. 

We found that there are things like the Trustpilot logo and Trustscore, the stars, the reviews, that ultimately directly drive trust, and it's the trust in turn which then drives propensity to buy. The elements of the Trustpilot identity, they do have an indirect or subsidiary role in actually driving buy, but it's actually earlier on in the decision making process where they come into play most importantly to really build that trust.

### The research's key takeaways

One of the really key findings of the report was the missed opportunity for many brands to harness Trustpilot in their above-the-line, offline marketing and advertising, and this part of the evidence by the survey we did of Trustpilot partners and business. For website, the vast majority of Trustpilot partner's customers use the brand, but when we look at the bottom of that chart for above-the-line channels, it's only eight percent we are using, but 16% are considering using it, and then the rest or around three quarters, no plans to use. It should be pointed out, some of those Trustpilot partners don't really do much above-the-line advertising, but there's a decent chunk of them who do so, and not yet leveraging ratings and reviews.

I think one of the things from the interviews that we've seen, generally in terms of the way Trustpilot's used, is that it's been a differentiator from other brands, particularly in the offline space, but over time it's becoming more of a hygiene factor, where brands need to be visible in that respect.

At the moment, there's still only a small portion of companies, relatively speaking, using Trustpilot in offline advertising. I think over time, and there's still very much an opportunity there, it will move from being a differentiator to a hygiene factor or table stakes as some people describe it.

And the survey of businesses also, when we looked at the perceived benefits, in the blue there, portion of respondents from the business survey, describing these benefits as major. There's a good consistency with the consumer survey in the building trust, creating more customer friendly brands. I think brands about very savvy that that's where the opportunity really lies and the indirect benefits around increased revenue, which is really what it's all about. In terms of conversion online and offline, there's a really wise benefit, I think, around integrating just offline activity to have that to appear to be seamless in your marketing or advertising as a brand that it can tie up have that consistency of the ratings and reviews figure both online and offline.

People ultimately use the Trustpilot logo and the stars as a by word for quality, and it's a quick way to get that message across and then be able to deliver on other things. There is a bit more to it than just plunking the stars and the logo on the ad, but by integrating that into campaigns, it can really help power any business forward. 

If you'd like to learn more about the importance of displaying trust signals both offline and online, check out the report below!

The psychology behind trust signals: Why and how social proof influences consumers

How reviews in offline advertising impact consumers and brands

leveraging your best marketers with trustpilot

In this Trustpilot webinar, we talk you through the importance of customer advocacy, how to build your own strategy, and how customer advocates can really pay off in the long term.

Yes, ultimately, they’re responsible for your company’s success. After all, what is a company without any customers? But your customers have a lot of power and can make an impact beyond revenue. Companies have recently begun to realize how to tap into that potential.

Customer reviews can be used to benefit a business, but reviews are only a subset of customer advocacy marketing - a strategy that utilizes customers across multiple marketing channels.

Customer advocacy is best exemplified by the advent and adoption of social media among all brands, large and small. A strong social media presence has proven to be a major asset for brands. When customers take the time to talk about your product or service in a good light, other potential customers listen because they may be looking for a brand with a reputation they can trust.

To learn how to start implementing a customer advocacy strategy and learn from the brands who have succeeded doing so, check out a recording of our webinar below. 


Leveraging your best marketers...

### What is customer advocacy marketing? 

In a nutshell, it's basically letting your customers tell your story through user-generated content. When you put this in your marketing, the goals of your marketing are still the same, you still want to drive traffic, drive conversion, sales, whatever it might be. But when you're letting your customers tell your story, you're probably going to see a higher conversion rate, more traffic, and just overall a better brand reputation. Customer advocacy can look like a lot of different things, you might be most familiar with customer quotes that you're putting on your website or better yet, reviews that are timestamped and from a third-party review platforms such as Trustpilot are great.

Also, video testimonials are increasingly popular, case studies are super popular for B2B companies as well, and last but not least, social media posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, but also maybe on some other consumer destination sites like Cora or other channels that might be more specific to your industry, are amazing too. 

### Why is customer advocacy important?

In reality, traditional advertising just isn't enough anymore, 84% of consumers don't trust advertising anymore, that was actually a key stat from a McCarthy Group research report. The reason is that we're basically just inundated with advertisements all the time. When we walk around, when we're on public transportation, on social media, on websites, all of these things are really kind of diluting the effect of advertising, so marketers really need to evolve. Implementing a customer advocacy strategy is one of the best ways, not only to engage with potential customers but also helps you build a customer relationship. So you can see that customer advocacy really works both ways in terms of helping you get more customers but also helping you keep your customers.

50% of small businesses say that having a relationship with their customers is their primary driver of repeat business, and repeat business is essential to keeping a business alive. Having repeat customers, having one customer make multiple purchases, and be responsible for a large amount of revenue is a pretty true and tested strategy for the long-term health of a company. Also, customers are really looking at brands who care, the reason why that is, is that with the advent of online eCommerce companies and the fact that essentially any company is easily accessible on the internet, you need to find new ways to differentiate yourself. Being a brand that customers trust and feel that care about them is a huge difference-maker, 76% of consumers say they view customer service as a true test of how a company values them. 

### Why online trust matters

Trust is actually one of the really important aspects of a company now that we're moving really far into eCommerce and digital marketing. Word of mouth, which has existed for a very long time, now has an online presence and it still matters very much for a company, and it's still the most popular method of recommendations for consumers, and we all know it. We talk to each other and we get movie recommendations, book recommendations, product recommendations, word of mouth is really compelling and really important and that also matters on digital channels. Social media is one of the best examples of how customer feedback really plays into an overall strategy. On average, a consumer will look at 10 information sources before making a purchase, social media is really one of them.

You can look at different Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts, you can see what people are saying about companies, what people are saying about specific products. A lot of companies are also leveraging these social platforms to kind of promote experiences, if you're a company that provides a service rather than a product, and this has proven to be really successful, we will touch on that a little later. Customer reviews directly also affect how a company's perceived, 92% of consumers now read online reviews and 40% of consumers form an opinion of a company by reading one, two, three reviews. It really matters what other customers are saying about you, again, we've talked about this before, traditional advertising and marketing, which is when a company's talking about themselves doesn't really work as much anymore.

So what really matters is to get an authentic review from a customer who can tell another prospective customer what they can expect from a company, what can they expect from a product, what can they expect from a service? These things really matter.

### How to start implementing customer advocacy in your marketing

Let's check out some brands who rock customer advocacy, and the first one is Lululemon, a popular active wear line. What they did was they asked customers to tweet or Instagram photos of themselves exercising or wearing Lululemon clothing with the hashtag #sweatlife. Why this worked is first off, athletic wear and athleisure wear, it's just really popular right now and people are already posting pictures or videos of themselves working out on Instagram and Twitter quite often anyway. So they started to capitalize on this trend and gave the power to their customers to post these photos and they started to repost them on their profile, which got a lot of great engagement.

They also picture real people in real situations, they're not photo-shopped models that you might be used to seeing in your advertisements, and it just makes it seem more real. This helps provide that credibility that people are consistently looking for a lot of times on social media or from friends and family. What it brought them was over 2 million followers on Instagram alone, which is really awesome, more sales, and a better brand-customer relationship. 

Another brand that does a great job of this too is actually Coca-Cola, and they're a huge brand so you might be familiar with the share a Coke campaign, which was hugely successful because it just made the product feel more personalized.

As people started to purchase a Coke with a friend's name on it, share it with them, and upload those pictures to social media with the hashtag #shareacoke. Why it worked is it helped them connect with consumers, again, they're such a big brand so this was a really unique way to go about doing this and just reminded customers why they love Coke so much, and that it is a social brand and it's something that you can share with friends and loved ones. What it brought them was more followers on social media accounts, it had a great buzz of fact, there was a lot of media posts about it, it had a big splash with it as well, and more sales. 

Staples is another huge brand, I think they're about the third-largest e-commerce business right now, and they use reviews in their overall rating and a variety of different email campaigns.They put it in their email marketing, on their website, and Google shopping and Facebook, so definitely leveraged customer advocacy across multiple channels. It worked because they used the reviews to drive engagement and again, used that third-party validation to ultimately drive more conversions, more click-through rates on their email, more traffic and engagement from social media, and more sales from Google shopping. 
So all around they did a really great job of incorporating these reviews through multiple channels to ultimately drive more sales. 

Then, Ikea... Another great brand that did a good job at having people post images of their products on social media, and then had the cool concept of creating a catalogue just from pictures from their customers. How it worked, again, they encouraged people to share these posts on social media, like Twitter and Instagram, and chose one winner each week. They saw a huge increase in social media following, got a lot of great word of mouth strategy from this too, and some more traffic coming to their website in the end, which drove more sales. 

### Get to know your customers

So we have a couple of tips here, the most important one is to get to know your customers to build a customer relationship, that is absolutely necessary before customers can really advocate for you. The most important thing, which we'll get into in a little bit, is also the fact that this customer relationship and continued engagement really drives business insights for you to be better as a business for your customers, which will kind of have its own snowball effect and improve your business overall. So, that's why you'd want to involve the whole company, everybody in most of the departments have a touchpoint with a customer, whether that's customer marketing, sales, customer support, customer success.

So, really make sure you're incorporating them in a customer advocacy strategy because they will be able to provide specific perspective and will be able to help you encompass customer advocacy in a more holistic way. Lastly, you need to make it fun, as you saw from the other examples, many of these campaigns and strategies kind of played into the motivations of customers already. For Lululemon, working out, being healthy, and exercising has its own inherent motivation, so Lululemon really just capitalized on that. For Ikea, people really wanted to showcase how beautiful their homes were using that Ikea furniture, so they were motivated to send a picture of themselves.

So, you really need to think about what's in the customer's best interest and how you can make it not only fun but easy for them when implementing a customer advocacy strategy. 

### Learning from customer feedback

Now, a big part of customer advocacy is actually managing customer feedback. You really want to leverage your best reviews, your best social media posts, but in reality, you might not always get completely happy posts or reviews. So here are a couple of tips to really manage them, make sure you're paying attention to all your social media channels, and really listening to your customers. Three out of four consumers consult social media before buying, so it's really important whether or not a consumer is happy, and you're really paying attention to what they're saying and what is being displayed on the social media platform. 

### Using customer feedback to stand out from the competition

If somebody's leaving a review about your company on your social media channel, that review only pertains to your company, so it's nothing any competitor can say. Managing customer feedback and reviews is also a way to engage with your customers, 95% of unhappy customers return if their issue is resolved quickly and efficiently. We've seen that in our own examples, we had ThriftBooks a client, they responded to an unhappy customer and really changed around their opinion to the point that that unhappy customer changed their review, went from one-star to five-star. It really exemplified why you should be replying to your customers, but also taking care of what their issue is and what their concern is, and that is really showing transparency.

If a potential customer is seeing on a social media channel or on a review platform that this company is replying to unhappy reviews and really trying to resolve issues quickly, that will make that potential customer really trust in that company and see, "Oh, this company really values what we're saying." Once you get all that working, you really have essentially a mini-marketing team where you're really taking advantage of actual customers saying good things about you and leveraging that across social media channels, email platforms, even digital marketing, and it really helps in boosting your overall digital marketing performance. So on responding to customer views, make sure you're accentuating any positives, you may have one, two, or three-star reviews that say something like, "The delivery was quick, but ..." Or they can say something like, "The product was great, but ... " So make sure you are highlighting the positive things they say.

Always apologize for anything that may have gone wrong, whether or not it was your fault, or whether or not you were responsible you never want to place the blame on the customer, you always really just want to listen to them and understand why it is that they had a problem. 

### Trustpilot success stories

Our first customer success story is JustFab, and this is one of my favorite stories. It's all about their surprise and delight program, and the mission of this program is to get customers talking about their positive customer experiences on social media and using the hashtag #xofab and #xoshoedazzle.  They leverage their customer reviews to identify both happy and unhappy customers in order to learn, improve, innovate and turn happy customers into advocates, and equally important, by identifying these unhappy customers, turn them into happy customers. The best part about it, of course, is getting a lot of this great content on social media to just extend their reach, drive more traffic to their site and just improve their overall brand reputation.

So another really awesome example is a company called Upad, and what they do is they basically connect landlords with renters, so think like Airbnb, but for longer-term renting arrangements. What they did was they collected reviews with Trustpilot and they put these throughout multiple marketing channels, an ad here shows just an example of that. What it did was it drove a 10% increase in conversion rates, and they also started to do a survey afterwards, too, to figure out how people were finding out about them. They said that 60% of new customers ended up reading a Trustpilot review before using the service. So that's what actually encouraged them to start to put reviews on their website and their different advertising, and just make sure that they were anywhere where people were looking for information about them. 

### Let your customers do the talking

As we've been saying, you should let your customers kind of do the selling for you. By incorporating some reviews from Trustpilot throughout the buying journey, you're showing potential new customers just how trustworthy you are, and how much you care about your customers' satisfaction and feedback.

If you'd like to learn more about the importance of customer advocacy, check out the piece of content below!

Why reputation marketing via customer advocacy is essential for your business

Leveraging your best marketers: Implementing a customer advocacy strategy

behavioral marketing and social proof

In this Trustpilot x BounceX webinar, we discuss social proof, behavioral marketing, and the importance of finding the right points and times to leverage social proof to maximize its effectiveness.

1. Personalization is everything
2. You have to map your marketing to the customer funnel
3. Customize your CTA based on your visitors’ intent.

And we can go on...

Sometimes we get a little ahead of ourselves and are so focused on the ‘what’ without giving you information about the 'how’. That’s all going to change today.

We partnered with BounceX, a behavioral marketing company (to say the least) for a great conversation about social proof, behavioral marketing, and finding the right points and times to leverage social proof to maximize its effectiveness.

Don’t worry, we don’t just talk about what you should be doing, we give you specific examples and offer real tips on getting it done. Ready to check out the presentation?

Watch the webinar recording below:



### The rise of social proof

When we're talking about social proof strategy, I just want to see how we're currently utilizing it. So just very broadly, how are brands currently utilizing social proof like in broad strokes?

The advent of all these different kinds of social media platforms have really put social-proof on a pedestal that we haven't seen in a long time. Prior to social media platforms like Instagram, like Facebook, like Twitter, really the majority of advertising and marketing was relegated to display ads. But right now people are really utilizing the voice of their customers in their social media. They're retweeting people, they're reposting, they're interacting with their customers. And then they're taking whatever is seen over there and putting that on their website, on their landing pages, on their advertisements. And that's actually starting to, I'd say creep into other different platforms that aren't necessarily social media platforms, but they're more of community platforms, and that's something we're seeing on Trustpilot. Trustpilot.com is a consumer site where people can view and leave reviews, and a lot of the content that's being left there are clients in our companies are actually using them. 

They're taking reviews that they really enjoy and they're putting them on their website, they're posting them on Twitter, they're posting them on Facebook, and they're posting them on ads, which I think has been a really cool use of our site.

### Where to place social proof

Is there a place where people may not be placing a lot of that social-proof that could be like one of those high octane moments of like high success? Or just keeping it in that broad web of social proof? Is that just the best strategy to look into so far?

There are so many different kinds of social proof. You have reviews, you have testimonials, you have things like usage metrics, how many followers you have, or how many people have bought a certain product or used your company. Different kinds of social-proof are best utilized at different moments. 

For example, if you're selling a product and your audience or website visitor is on a checkout page, you really want to put a product review right there because it really will give the buyer that extra nudge, or maybe that extra point of confidence that says, "Oh, this piece of product works exactly the way we want it."

But if you are, for example, wanting to capture a broader audience in more top of the funnel channels such as social media, you might want to just highlight your ratings. So if you have a 4.8 or 4.4, you just want to highlight that and get some interest going from whoever's checking out your website or checking out your social media.

### Utilizing social proof

How are businesses utilizing social proof? Is there any sort of real estate people may not be realizing? What are you seeing in terms of that broad social proof web, those reviews, those images, what are you seeing in terms of success there?

There is a lot of room to leverage social proof at all different points of the funnel. Like what we do, how we measure different points of the funnel... We're looking at low intent, medium intent and high intent visitors very simply. And so from very high level, the way that we are measuring those different levels of intent or one way that we measure those different levels of intent for say a standard eCommerce business is different pages on site.

So if somebody is on either a homepage or a category page, they haven't shown a lot of affinity for a specific product. So at this point, we really want to establish trust as a brand, and to establish that trust as a brand, we want to leverage social-proof on the global level for that brand. For example, this can be anything from as seen in the New York Times or as trusted by one million customers to date, something that's a little bit more broad or a little bit more general.

Then as somebody gets a little bit deeper into the funnel, say, they are on a specific product page, they're showing really some intent for that product, but maybe they need a little bit more nudging or a little bit more nurturing before they actually make that purchase. So if somebody is reviewing a product, or looking at a product, and engaging in a product by clicking on different product images, you know they're interested in the product, you know that they're considering whether or not they want to actually purchase that product. 

That's a really great moment to leverage different reviews that somebody has left on that specific product, assuming that the product obviously has high reviews.  

### What are the main opportunities from leveraging social proof?

What are the main opportunities we're seeing in terms of utilizing social-proof both on-site and in an acquisition strategy? 

Trust is definitely the biggest one. Trust is a really big topic right now, and we're seeing that there's like a crisis in trust right now. There was an Edelman study that really took a global view on trust and it seems like trust is way down on everything from governments to businesses, to people and even experts. And I really think that's going to start showing its ugly head very soon. 

Some businesses, at least the ones we work with, have really taken a proactive approach to that. Fabletics, I don't know if people are familiar with that brand, but they're a lifestyle apparel brand. They have an entire section of their website dedicated to reviews, and they really run the gamut of the kind of social-proof that all companies can take advantage of. So at the top of their website, they actually show what their aggregated reviews are, and I think they're probably, I think 4.6 across several different measurement or metrics. 

Then they go a little deeper, they highlight a couple of key reviews from some choice customers, and then even below that, they really take a top to bottom funnel strategy with this webpage. Below that they have more in-depth client's story, so for whoever wants to really see, okay, how are people really interacting with Fabletics? What do people really feel about Fabletics? They have that covered from everywhere, from a rating, to reviews, to actual client stories. So I think that's one of the main opportunities that brands have. 

I'd say another opportunity is really using social-proof as an extension of customer engagement and customer advocacy. With things like referral marketing, with things like customer advocacy, those strategies when implemented well can be so, so valuable to a company from an ROI perspective in terms of increasing retention rates, in terms of increasing order values and lifetime values of customers, just because a referral, or a recommendation, or a review from an existing customer is so valuable because it's really authentic, it's genuine.

If used properly, it just can provide enormous benefits, and I think the earlier in the funnel that companies can use that or utilize that, the better. Again, we talked about social media, social-proof, it's right there in the name, definitely companies should be using their own customer's voice, their own customer stories as part of their brand. 

Then I would say that the third opportunity is actually something that something I just mentioned, is really taking advantage of social-proof as part of your brand. I think for a lot of eCommerce companies who may sell products, it's a little harder to differentiate themselves, I think with service companies where really you make it or break it on the back of your own service. Your reputation, and your brand, and your credibility matters so much. 

The digital environment is essentially mature enough for a lot of industries, including eCommerce industries, the competition is higher than it's ever been. So what's actually going to differentiate companies from each other? I think it's their brand, I think it's the reputation, and that's really one of the biggest opportunities where social-proof can make a difference.

### How to ask for social proof

So what are the main ways you ask for those moments of social proof? How do you ask for reviews in a way that's respectful of the time of those clients and of those high LTV customers? What's the game you see play here? I know you can talk about that all day, but let's see if we can boil it down to a couple of minutes.

First things first is companies need to ask. We've been talking to a lot of different clients and prospects, they're scared to ask for reviews. They think, oh, well, they're going to give me a bad review or they're not going to say anything good, but really it's the opposite. In what we've seen, we have over 100 million reviews on trustpilot.com. We've seen that the companies that aren't asking for reviews often have the most negative reviews, and the companies that do ask for reviews often have very high ratings.

Because honestly, if you're a company that cares about its customers, that cares about its products, and cares about its services, for the most part, you're going to do a good job and you're going to get those high marks from other customers. And if you do get some bad reviews, you should pay attention to that and shore up some of your weaknesses. So definitely first step to getting reviews is to ask for reviews. Email works best. The way our service actually works is we have an automatic feedback service function, which asks for review as soon as the purchase is complete.

And we also actively encourage our companies to ask for reviews and remind consumers to leave a review. So this is a reminder service that you can set either like a week after your first review invitation or a month after, and usually you need to tailor the review solicitation by purchase. If you are, for example selling a washer dryer, a big ticket item that has a lot of life in it, you may ask for a reminder six months later after purchase, because that purchase is still very relevant. But if you're selling something like an iPhone case, you might just want to send a reminder a week after that. 

Constantly engaging with your customers by reminding them, by sending them those emails, that actually gets those response rates pretty high. Overall, when it comes to asking for reviews, it really needs to be integrated as part of a customer engagement strategy, which is something that I mentioned in the past. Really reviews are a two-way street; it's a reflection of companies, but it's also a way to collect feedback from your customers and for your customers, because you should be utilizing that feedback in the form of reviews to improve your business and improve your company.

By interacting and engaging with your customers, whether you're sending them review emails, whether you're asking for reviews via social media, or even sending out surveys, maybe putting a way to collect a review on your website, those are all different touch points, where you're interacting with your customer and you're telling them, "Hey, we value your opinion and we want to be better for you."

And there's a lot more to discuss there as well in terms of like how to ask for these reviews and how to make that sort of a respectful relationship. But I want to make sure that as we cross the halfway mark here, that we're also talking about how to leverage all this amazing social-proof, all these amazing reviews that you've been generating, because most of our eCommerce brands here have a lot of great reviews right now. It's just right now, we're not super sure where to utilize them in the funnel. 

Danielle, you already really set up this conversation super well in terms of like where in the funnel are we going to use that great social-proof. We talked about low, medium and high intent users. I feel like we already have low intent pretty well covered in terms of, hey, like you put reviews on Facebook or on Instagram. I don't think in your Google, that would make too much sense in terms of your ad sense strategy. I think we have it... There as like an acquisition channel, it's one of those trust-building things.

### Using social proof to retain and acquire customers

When you have that high level moment, people have abandoned their cart and you have that ability to send them a cart amendment email, or try to them somehow, maybe through Facebook retargeting. Where do you see reviews play in there? Would they be more of a distraction or would they be more of something that's valuable for that real estate? And how can we navigate that strategy there as well?

Cart abandonment emails are actually some of the most successful ones to place reviews on. One of our clients, NewYorkDress actually was in an experiment and added reviews to their cart abandonment emails, and they saw their click through rates skyrocket, I think 220% in one month. And we had to double-check their math because we almost didn't believe how successful that was. And we've since then encouraged a lot of other companies to do the same thing and they've really experienced a lot of success in terms of comparing cart abandonment emails without reviews, and then cart abandonment emails with reviews.

When I say reviews, I'd say, it could either be reviews or it could be ratings. I'd say, really pay attention to the way you're formatting your emails and the way your emails look. If there is space or it makes sense for you to add a review, put that in there. But I think if it feels a little wedged in, just put in your rating. Sometimes a 4.8 out of five is just as strong as a single person's review. So I think that's one of the best examples that we have.

I think another great example, and this is a little less for eCommerce, but definitely for digital marketers, but on key landing pages, I think on your most high traffic landing pages, you definitely want reviews on that and there are two reasons why. One, we have, I think hundreds of case studies at this point really highlighting how reviews on landing pages have increased conversion rates and really increased revenue. We definitely have some hard numbers on that.

But also they show up on your Google advertisement and your paid ad search. They show up as rich snippets stars, and rich snippets stars in Google's own words increase CTR on those results by 10%, and ConversionXL just recently, came out with an article where they were looking at the effectiveness of those rich snippets stars on those paid searches, and they saw that they increased on average click through rates by 35%. So there's definitely a two-prong benefit to adding reviews on your key landing pages, as well as everywhere else throughout the buying journey, in order to convert more browsers into buyers.

If you'd like to find out more social proof, what it is and why you need it, check out the article below!

Social Proof 101: What is it, and why is it important for eCommerce?

Build a Trusted Brand

Trustpilot tips and tricks: leveraging reviews to build a trusted brand

Marketing & reviews 101: Leveraging your reviews across channels

How reviews in offline advertising impact consumers and brands

Leveraging your best marketers: Implementing a customer advocacy strategy

Behavioral marketing and social proof: Finding the right customer touchpoints