A little while ago our office pup, Dwight, strained his hind leg chasing a ball (he actually ran into the wall!) and was
super uncomfortable. He was limping, kind of freaked out and definitely not his puppy self. We took him to the doctor, but after X-rays and exams they couldn’t really diagnose anything. So we did a little research and bought him a drug called Joint Healthcare for Dogs from an Amazon store. The product & store had great reviews. It’s supposed to relieve joint and soft tissue pain. OK, we’ll stop w/ the medical details, this isn’t WebMD!
Ok that was the set up, now it’ll get relevant: After buying the stuff, the owner of K9 Care Labs, Erin, reached out via email with a big thanks and offering up some additional info (like Dwight might fart a little bit the first week or so, thanks for that heads up!) A couple weeks later, Erin asked how Dwight was coming along. We responded back, Dwight was doing better! A couple weeks after that, she followed up again about Dwight’s condition and asked if I’d submit a product review. Gotta tell you, she caught us on a very busy day. We almost ignored it, but after her thoughtful messages, and the fact Dwight was rebounding nicely decided to take the few minutes and post a positive review. Done! And probably forgotten. Until the other day.
A couple days ago, we received this email from Amazon:
“Awesome results!” was the headline of our review. Why did we think this was cool? Well, many times when you post product or service reviews you don’t really know the impact it might have. And that’s why you really do it in the first place, you want to know that the time you put into it helped. That’s first, but secondly this reinforcement actually built on our positive sentiment about this store. We’ll talk about the drug and her store more!
Do you have mechanisms in place at your business to leverage reviews and testimonials like this? Of course Facebook and Twitter are great channels for leveraging word of mouth, but this more traditional product review, right near the listing, is a great sales tool, and it’s not used that much these days.
At Dasheroo, we’re very active on social media. We post frequently, listen constantly and analyze all the time. But this reminded us that at we need to consider adding in reviews and testimonials in our sign-up and conversion process. In the app, within our pipeline emails, everywhere where a 3rd party word or two can add value.
You can take this a step further with refer-a-friend apps, which we are also digging into. These both automate and reward folks for their positive recommendations. We’ve used these in the past, and will discuss those in an upcoming post!
Based on our purchase and this great word of mouth reminder, we’re also looking into the Amazon Web Store API to build some great business dashboards!