A very important aspect of any Amazon marketing strategy is collecting as many reviews as possible for your products.
In this article you’ll learn how to gain reviews, and learn our top secret evergreen Amazon review acquisition strategy, you’ll also learn how to bury the dreaded low or bad reviews!
Why Reviews Are Vitally Important
Reviews are vitally important to your product on Amazon, and we still see a ‘sales tipping point’ which is kind of like this magical point where when you’ve got 10 or 15 reviews, product sales really start to take off and a lot of it is to do with social proof.
Your prospects like to see that other people have given your product a good ranking, and you want to have a five star ranking.
If you’ve got 4.6/4.7 ranking, it should show up as a 5 star ranking so that’s what you want to be aiming for.
The lowest ranking that you want is a 4.5 review.
Having a really good review, allows you to eventually charge more, and when you’ve got lots and lots of reviews that can help you charge more for your products as well.
TIP: Race to 15 reviews ASAP and your product sales will really start to take off 🙂
The Old Way Of Getting Reviews
The old way of getting reviews was to use things like review clubs.
Review clubs are where you’d simply pay for reviews which is actually a black-hat technique where you’d just join some club, you’d promote your product and pay some fee and then like magic you’d have a whole bunch of people reviewing your product.
Amazon is now very savy to that, they know exactly what’s going on and they don’t like people gaming the system, they also don’t like the following:
- Unverified reviews
- Incentivised reviews
- Discounts off heavily discounted products
- Free giveaways
Amazon has had a major crackdown in 2016 and a lot of sellers were stripped of all their incentivised and/or manipulated reviews.
The BEST Ways To Get Reviews
There are three main ways you want to use to get the best reviews which are as follows:
- Friends and family
- BlackBird software
- VIP club
Let’s look at them in more detail…
1. Friends and Family
This is really good, reach out to your network, get them to pay full price, then reimburse them. You can get them to give the product back to you if you want, and then you can sell it again.
What you want them to do is search for your product using your keyword, so ask them to go into Amazon, search for the product, buy it and then you can reimburse them if you want to.
After they get the product, they can leave a review and if you want to you could ask them to give the product back to you and you can resell it.
So let’s have a look at an example of how to do this!
If the keyword you want to get ranking for is ‘lawn darts for kids’ go ahead and ask your family to type this into the Amazon search bar:
Ask them to scroll through the results until they find your product:
Once they’ve found the product, ask them to buy at full price and then you can reimburse them if you want to:
2. Customer emails via BlackBird Suite
After each person buys your product, you can automatically send them an email using BlackBird Suite, and you can ask them to leave you a review, this works really really well 🙂
BlackBird Suite is 100% automated and has been our biggest source of reviews, you can literally leave it running in the background so absolutely check BlackBird out from the following link:
3. Your VIP Club / Loyalty Program
This is for people that have purchased your product and have signed up at your website for example to your buyer email list, and then you can send out an email to them anytime you want.
If you’ve got a new product, or even an established product but you need reviews then you can send out an email, get people to buy and then ask for reviews because you control that VIP club, that’s your own little sphere of influence outside of the Amazon echo system.
You can send them as many emails as you want 🙂
How You Can Hide Bad Reviews
If you receive a low or bad review, at it’s showing at the top of your reviews, this could essentially kill your product.
The good news is there is a workaround, where you simply get more reviews, so you bury the bad review until it’s low down in the results.
TIP: Keeping getting more reviews to bury any bad ones!
Thinking Long Term
Essentially you should be thinking long term, it’s tempting to cut corners, but eventually black-hat tactics will catch up with you.
Remember Amazon have closed down accounts before because people have been using black-hat tactics and getting reviews in ways that Amazon doesn’t approve of.
TIP: Our advice? Play if safe! It’s better to get your reviews slower but keep your Amazon account open!
BlackBird Suite= Our SECRET Weapon
As we’ve mentioned earlier, BlackBird is 100% automated and has been our biggest source of reviews, emailing your customers to generate five-star reviews has never been easier.
Not only that but BlackBird is the ultimate tool for tracking your key metrics, and providing you with cutting edge Amazon seller training.
BlackBird gives you the ability to easily:
- Track your products, sales, reviews, pricing, and ranking
- Search the Amazon marketplace for the best new opportunities
- Analyze monthly earning of ANY product on Amazon
- Spy on your competition
- Analyze on-page performance metrics
- Alert you to problems related to your products
- Send emails to your customers (to generates reviews and more sales)
- Learn ALL the secrets to selling on Amazon (via 71 training videos)
- To ask Steve, me, Matt Carter (partner), and our team of ‘Gurus’ ANY Amazon selling related question ANY TIME you want to using our unique ‘Grab A Guru’ strategic support system.
Tehmina Zamir is a Content Manager at Blackbird Suite. With 5+ years experience in the multiple-niche industry, she writes action driven marketing sales copy to help millions of Amazon sellers grow their business at a rapid rate. She is also an author of Global Patient Transfer, Gooline Space, Healthwiz360 etc.