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This is a recent case study undertaken by SALT.agency on their experience of working with REVIEWS.io. This report was not altered in any way by REVIEWS.io.
The Pen Company started using REVIEWS.io in 2014 as recommended by SALT.agency. They used custom integration using the excellent API and trusted 3rd party reviews are a key part of the client’s integrated marketing strategy. Soon after implementation during the first Christmas period, the client received a dramatic increase in its conversion rate — from an already respectable 2.55% to 4.48% on commercial traffic.
As an SEO agency, SALT understands the technical and business marketing advantages of a company that listens to its customer base.
We were approached by The Pen Company, a specialist independent online stationer, to help it with search marketing way back in 2013.
Like many retailers, the company is an expert in its field, and while this was obvious to us from the very first of our conversations, it can be difficult to convey online to potential customers.
The UK is very competitive when it comes to ecommerce, and with more and more people opting for grey imports, or preferring to use marketplaces, we needed a way to sing the praises of The Pen Company as a knowledgeable online retailer, offering great service and value.
We chose to recommend REVIEWS.io based on previous projects, and have been delighted with the results over the past few years.
Search engines (as well as users) value and trust REVIEWS.io’s consumer reviews, with trusted reviews being showcased in Google and Bing organic search results — as well as paid ads. When marked up as structured data, these reviews can also increase the click-through rate to the website, and the trust level of the company within the search results.
When REVIEWS.io was integrated with The Pen Company's website, the results were far better than expected, with some product lines converting in excess of 7% across paid and organic search channels!
-Martin Woods, SEO consultant & Co-founder
SALT.agency
Integrating REVIEWS.io was part of a larger overall project to increase the conversion rate of the website.
With the help of reviews in 2015, we improved an already respectable average of 2.55%, to a very impressive 4.48% — representing a 75% increase in conversion!
Enabling us to constantly monitor customer experience has, as part of the SEO growth campaign enabled The Pen Company to continue growing from strength to strength as shown below.
As a small family-run business, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the ubiquity of the big players online.
REVIEWS.io was an opportunity to level the playing field and let our customers do the talking for us.
We knew that we were offering excellent products at competitive prices backed by good availability and excellent customer service, but we needed to let potential customers know this too.
We started looking at independent review providers and soon found that the cost varied hugely and it also appeared that some of the sites were quite open and easy to ‘spam’; people with no connection to, or experience of your business could post random reviews, both good and bad.
After this research, we decided upon REVIEWS.io. It was a no-brainer really. Their system seemed water-tight and immune from spamming, it was truly independent, and they offered us everything we were looking for — including a right to reply.
Most importantly, their star ratings were adopted by Google; shown both in search results and in PPC advertising, and their costs were very competitive too!
One aspect of using reviews hadn’t really occurred to us until we actually started and began reading them; it really is very useful to know what customers think and feel about their experience using our business.
The proportion of customers who respond to a request for a review will always be small, but you can be assured that those with a problem will almost certainly let you know about it.
As well as encouraging potential customers to click on our search result rather than someone else’s, they now land on our site with a positive expectation and this has led to a healthy increase in our conversion rate.
I am told by people that know about these things that our conversion rate is “astronomical”! We like to think that we have a well-designed and attractive site, but we are convinced that REVIEWS.io has had no small part in this improvement.
We have had REVIEWS.io integrated for almost a decade now with no issues, and always received a first class service. As we have scaled our business over the years, REVIEWS.io has scaled with us; we have invested in a new custom website, centric to our business, and REVIEWS.io has continued to look after our reviews in parallel as a trusted partner.
From analytics data, we can see that our reviews are some of the most clicked-on features by users, which is testament to how important the 3rd party review process is to prospective customers.
Integration of both review collection and adding the review widget to our website was extremely easy. The support provided by REVIEWS.io both during set-up and as an established customer has always been excellent — the email support is virtually instant and comprehensive and on the rare occasion we have needed to phone the team there has always been an answer from a knowledgeable member of staff who has instantly resolved any query we have had.
We have been using REVIEWS.io since 2013 and have found the conversion of review requests from our customers, through REVIEWS.io, has exceeded those quoted to us as "typical" by the representatives of other review collection agencies. Furthermore, in the first year we used REVIEWS.io, our ecommerce conversion rate increased to over 6.5%!
The combination of high conversion rates, price, excellent support and Google Partner status has proved a winning formula and we would recommend REVIEWS.io to any business looking to collect genuine impartial customer reviews.
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