REVIEWS.io partners with Bold Commerce to empower ecommerce brands with strong social proof

One of the leaders of establishing social proof in ecommerce, REVIEWS.io is joining forces with Bold Commerce to develop even deeper relationships with D2C brands seeking to boost conversions and retain customers.

REVIEWS.io’s solutions allow ecommerce brands to showcase online reviews on their websites in order to enhance the shopping experience and help customers choose the right products for their needs. Customers can review the entire brand or individual products. Working with more 10,000 brands, UK-based REVIEWS.io has processed more than 25 million reviews to date.

The fast-growing company helps “harness the power of customers to highlight how great a brand and its product are in the eyes of those who purchased from them,” says Joe Fox, VP of partnerships at REVIEWS.io.

Brands need a streamlined solution when collecting business reviews and getting them shown across Google and the web. Brands leveraging REVIEWS.io can display star ratings for, say, their latest products showing customers that they are trustworthy even before the customer reaches your website, Fox adds. “Reviews are online word-of-mouth, and every retailer knows the power of social proof can empower sales and convert site visitors,” he notes.

Establishing trust in a brand is the foundation of social proof and online reviews. A survey by Podium suggests that 93% of online customers say online reviews do impact their purchasing decisions, and according to research compiled by Invesp, 90% of consumers read online reviews before they make a purchase and 88% trust those reviews as much as they would a personal recommendation.

Essentially, with online reviews, customers can do some of the marketing for subscription brands.

Subscription brands seeking to highlight customer opinions via REVIEWS.io can rest easy knowing that the company is officially a Licensed Partner with Google, which allows them push reviews into Google Search, Google Ads & Google Shopping. Those stars on Google Reviews matter immensely, the company website stresses: According to Google, displaying stars next to ads can increase CTR by as much as 17%.

REVIEWS.io has also baked powerful AI tech within their solutions. Their developers have built a powerful integration with OpenAI that applies ChatGPT as a review response tool. A free upgrade to all REVIEWS.io customers, this layer of generative AI allows brands to use ChatGPT to auto-generate review replies, which can be a time-saver for companies that are particularly overwhelmed by waves of reviews.

The REVIEWS.io and Bold Commerce integration is complementary for both brands, Fox says, as future-thinking retailers in the subscriptions space can realize immense value from taking advantage of reviews. Because customers purchasing from subscription brands are often sticking with the business over consecutive months and years, the REVIEWS.io system allows brands to trigger the call for reviews at, say, the three-month mark.

A review coming from a subscriber can also add more weight behind it. After all, these are customers who are deeply familiar with a subscription brand’s offering, having used the products or services for several weeks and maybe months. One-off customers may not have the same kind of relationship to a brand as returning customers.

“Asking for reviews can come in a variety of formats”, Fox notes. It can be nestled within an email post-purchase, via SMS, or within a bricks-and-mortar store if the subscription brand has a physical presence.

One of the more exciting methods to cull reviews is via user-generated content, Fox adds. “We’ve seen this a lot in fashion, where brands will encourage someone to take video of themselves in a purchased dress, which will include a review. That makes the review more engaging and gives the brand an opportunity to use those videos in marketing and promotional materials.”

Shoppable galleries is one of the potential opportunities for brands using UGC reviews. As a REVIEW.io blog post notes, their UGC Gallery and Publishing feature lets brands turn Instagram posts and UGC from reviews into shoppable galleries, publishable to their own Instagram feed, website and within email campaigns via their Klaviyo integration. With Bold Subscriptions in the tech stack, brands can also add a ‘Subscribe’ button to shoppable content, moving customers from product discovery to a subscription offering.

That post also offers other tips for brands bringing REVIEWS.io content onto their ecommerce platform:

• Creating unique Flows for subscribers opens the door to crafting custom email journeys based on certain sending conditions and user interactions. When approaching subscribers with review requests, REVIEWS.io highly recommends doing so with flows built to suit the subscription journey. That may look like triggering a company review after the first delivery, and a product review after the third or fourth delivery once the customer has had time to fully experience the product. If the subscription introduces new products each month, brands might choose to trigger a new request per each delivery.
• Enable tagging for reviews can lead to stronger email segmentation. As reviews come in brands can choose to tag them as being from a subscriber, as well as tagging how many subscription items they’ve received.
• Asking questions when triggering reviews can allow brands to collect data on how to improve their subscription models. Questions around increasing delivery schedules or removing packaging or offering more customization options are examples of the kinds of questions subscription brands can ask to increase customer data that can better fuel improvements around their solutions.

What Fox and the REVIEWS.io team found attractive about partnering with Bold is the passion ribboning throughout the company. “We’ve seen such an aligned focus between Bold and REVIEWS.IO to deliver high-quality products to customers, so it’s a great fit,” he says.

Together, Bold Commerce and REVIEWS.io are ready to engage with enterprise brands to achieve success.