Rep with Yotpo: Social Proof in Voice Commerce

E-commerce merchants cannot underestimate the importance of customer reviews. Online product and service reviews drive your business; they are indicative of your company’s reputation in the online market space. Whether they are good or bad, just the mere presence of a product review fosters consumer trust and increases the likelihood of making a sale. According to Website Builder, 92% of online shoppers won’t make a purchase if there are no customer reviews associated with the item. Even negative reviews matter with 82% of consumers purposely seeking them out for an unbiased point of view regarding the product’s merits. As a whole, reviews help drive sales and can increase conversion rates by up to 270%.

There’s one other key metric of note from Website Builder’s study: only a small percentage of customers bother to leave reviews in the first place, somewhere between 5 and 10%, yet that demographic is responsible for generating more than $400 billion in revenue per year. That’s why it’s so incredibly beneficial for online vendors to be able to easily aggregate their reviews, putting them directly within their customers’ reach. Rep with Yotpo integration can help your e-commerce business leverage the value of social proof by providing the emerging world of voice commerce with customer reviews.

What is Yotpo?

Yotpo is an e-commerce marketing platform that helps your business harness the full power of customer reviews. That may seem like a simple proposition when taken at face value, but under the hood Yotpo does a number of unique things that help you realize —and utilize— customer data more effectively.

First and foremost, Yotpo collects and aggregates product reviews for you, using its smart algorithm to draw them from various sources, especially leveraging millions of data points from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to put the concept of social proof to work in your marketing. Social proof is the idea that people will adapt their behavior, including shopping and purchasing trends, to conform with other people and society as a whole. Talking about a product on social media is powerful word-of-mouth marketing, and the Yotpo platform puts that social proof to good use.

The Yotpo platform also helps you provide a more user-friendly way for customers to leave a review. The platform gives a wide range of customization options, including on-site widgets and scheduled email reminders, that help reach out to your customer when it matters most —directly following the point of purchase.  

Yotpo’s customization options are more extensive than a simple request for customers to leave a review though. They also allow you to create custom surveys in place of a simplistic review format in order to obtain more actionable customer data. Through the loyalty program, Yotpo allows you to attach offers and discounts to reviews fostering long-term brand loyalty for participating customers. As an added benefit, reviews through the Yotpo platform serve as a QA forum, allowing customers to interact with one another sharing their experience with your product and service in greater detail.

On the back end, Yotpo helps the merchant to make better sense of customer reviews and sales data. With advanced analytics, you can see the tangible effect that customer reviews have on your business.  

How Rep Leverages the Power of Yotpo

According to the Pew Research Center, 81% of all Americans own a smartphone. Approximately 20% of that group exclusively uses a mobile device to access the internet. More and more, those devices come with some form of voice assistant such as Alexa, Siri, or Google. Giving your customers options that are directly tailored to devices featuring a voice assistant use has become essential. That’s where Rep’s partnership with Yotpo comes into play.

Rep specifically channels Yotpo’s ability to aggregate review information and presents it in a format that’s easy to use with both mobile voice assistants and in-home solutions. With more than 100 million voice assistant users in the US already, voice searches have become an ubiquitous part of the e-commerce landscape. The hands-free shopping experience, aided by Rep, is augmented by our partnership with Yotpo. Now, millions of voice assistant users can use solutions like Alexa to listen to your product reviews in the same way they would listen to product descriptions using the platform.

How Does it Work?

Here’s how the process works. The customer asks Alexa to open their favorite e-commerce store and find a specific item. Alexa offers an item that matches their query, but the customer has never purchased that specific product and requests more information by asking something like “Is it good?” or “What do other people think about this?”  

Using Rep with Yotpo integration, the merchant can easily return a wide range of product reviews to help the customer make up their mind. Rep with Yotpo can tell you the item’s aggregated score on a five-point quality scale, and it can read out individual positive and negative reviews upon request. This lets you harness the power of the review and use it to help convert sales for the hands-free customer demographic. Our Yotpo integration lets customers obtain social proof without manually sitting through online sources. Rep with Yotpo keeps your e-commerce business from missing out on that critical 270% conversion rate we mentioned above.  

Harness the Power of Customer Reviews

Customer feedback is essential in order for a company to grow and offer better products and services, but it’s also essential from a customer’s standpoint. The average customer relies on opinion to help drive their purchasing behavior. They view a high amount of positive reviews as the proof of a quality product. Interestingly, negative reviews offer just as much valuable information and can help convert a shopper to a paying customer regardless of content. Even online, the customer journey doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We invite merchants to take advantage of the partnership between Rep and Yotpo to help drive revenue in the new and emerging market of voice shopping. Sign up and create an account with Rep to unlock the potential of having a voice store and selling to customers via voice assistants (Alexa) while providing them with a customer service channel on the voice platform.

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