Can your brands build loyalty through reviews On Shopify? Let’s have a look.

Product and website reviews are invaluable when it comes to growing your brand. To win new customers in an increasingly competitive online landscape, brands must create unique user-friendly experiences. Furthermore, businesses must concentrate on retention strategies.

Brands are incorporating loyalty programs into their review strategy to keep customers coming back while generating sustainable brand growth.

Let’s take a look at how incorporating loyalty into your review strategy can ultimately drive retention and accelerate brand growth.

How does consumer behavior influence retention strategies?

Direct-to-consumer eCommerce companies recognize the value of customer feedback in growing their business. According to Shopify, customers are 63% more likely to buy from brands with positive reviews.

Similarly, the novelty of strategies that rely solely on search engine reviews is fading. Alternative channels are increasingly being used to collect other types of UGC (user-generated content).

According to Statista, mobile devices accounted for 69% of all retail site visits worldwide. Global eCommerce marketing strategies that collect and display ratings and reviews online have become commonplace.

As a result, brands must consider their review strategy to be more than just a cost-cutting measure. 

The effectiveness of synchronizing loyalty and review strategies

Consumer loyalty, like ratings and reviews, is not new to eCommerce. According to recent research, loyalty programs are gaining traction in eCommerce. This is not surprising, given that brand loyalty has existed and triumphed in commerce since its inception in the 1800s, according to Martech. In today’s digital age as well where lots of new techniques like social media, online marketing, franchising, and sales enablement have become popular choices to grow business, customer loyalty has become old but gold technique.

We discovered that 64.7 percent of shoppers want to shop directly from brands they are loyal to in a 2022 study of 3,800 global consumers. 

This, combined with a 161 percent higher conversion rate for shoppers who see user-generated content and reviews on a brand’s website. This demonstrates the potential benefits that brands can gain by leveraging both loyalty and reviews.

Some of the most notable metrics that brands are improving by increasing retention such as:

• A rise in overall CLTV
• A rise in the average order value of customers
• Increased CVR across all products

3 ways brands can increase retention through Loyalty and Reviews

Brands can successfully execute retention strategies by incentivizing repeat purchases, increasing social proof, and improving community engagement through integrations between brand loyalty and review solutions.

Let’s look at how brands use feedback from their most engaged and loyal customers in exchange for perks, exclusive rewards, and other unique branded experiences to improve major metrics and, ultimately, retention.

1. Increasing repeat purchases and AOV through unified customer experiences

As online loyalty programs drive customer retention, hybrid loyalty solutions are becoming more popular. Today, roughly half of consumers want to interact with a brand’s loyalty program while shopping in-store using a mobile device. This indicates that customers are looking for loyalty solutions that integrate online and offline shopping and provide a more user-friendly customer experience.

2. Increasing CLTV by gathering more reviews

Businesses can increase CLTV by rewarding their most satisfied customers and leveraging customer data from reviews and visual-user-generated content. Businesses can encourage community engagement and strengthen brand advocacy by rewarding customers who leave detailed reviews and share VUGC, ultimately increasing retention and CLTV.

3. Increasing CVR through incentivized social proof

In addition to ratings and reviews, brands are beginning to recognize the full potential of social proof and VUGC in increasing customer satisfaction and retention. Instagram discovered that nearly 87 percent of shoppers who interact with social proof, including VUGC, through social media take a step in the consumer journey. Given that social proof influences the vast majority of online consumer behavior on social media, it’s no surprise that brands that use it can increase retention and CVR.

Final thoughts

Finally, as eCommerce grows, brands are challenged to remain relevant and current in an extremely competitive online landscape. Brands can create emotional connections and sustain brand loyalty virtually by leveraging existing loyalty customers’ feedback and incentivizing brand engagement.

The advantages of creating a unified online customer experience and a sense of community in a digital space appear to be limitless.