Review Incentives on Magento: How to Get Discounts for Reviews?

Customer reviews are one of the primary factors that influence shoppers’ decision-making. The purchase likelihood will decrease by an overall 80% for an item with zero reviews, says the statistics from Power Reviews.

According to Moz, review signals contribute to over 15% of Google search ranking factors. So the higher number of customer testimonials helps your pages rank higher in the SERPs.

Assuming that you already have a Magento Reviews and Reminders extension to showcase and collect customer feedback more effectively in your online store, this article focuses on the means to incentivize your buyers to write a review, leave a review and get a discount.

(Not bribing the shopper with free staff or a 30% coupon code for leaving a positive testimonial.)

We will cover how not to get out of line with reviews incentivization.

So this begs the question:

How to Ethically Encourage Buyers to Leave a Review?

Although the “write a review and get a discount” incentives are quite common, merchants often forget about transparency, encouraging negative and positive feedback similarly, and disclosing openly what rewards the buyers will receive for reviewing products.

So when considering offering an incentive, think about:

Where,

You are planning to collect feedback. And there can be several options, such as:

• First-party reviews. This is the feedback that the shoppers share on your site. Here, you can use various tactics to generate more user-generated content (UGC), e.g., offer the shoppers to get discounts for reviews, access products for free, share promo codes, auto-generated coupon codes, or even offer to enter an elite deal club.
• Third-party reviews. These are testimonials that you ask the shoppers to leave on external review platforms, such as Trustpilot, Yelp, Google, and even social media. Commonly, such platforms have advanced fake review detection functionality and combat fake reviews in all manners.

What,

Country you operate in. Legal requirements differ from state to state. While in some countries merchants can offer the shoppers to get discounted products for reviews without any constraints, other countries require a disclosure.

Let’s take the USA as an example and quote Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides:

Should you require to assign specific price cart rules to specific customers, navigate to Personal Customer Discount Suite for Magento 2.

In what manner,

You want to collect customer testimonials.

Are you sending out company review emails to get the best discounts? Are you displaying popup review reminders? Are you connecting with the customers via live chats or support tickets to ask for feedback? Are you sending a variety of products for free?

Transparency is vital here. You will need to clarify what the shoppers will get for investing time in sharing feedback and ensure there is no pressure for the customer to cover the positive sides only.

The Pros & Cons sections could be of help here and demonstrate that you value the customer’s time no matter what their take is.

Offering Review Incentives: Advantages & Disadvantages

Although review incentives are not something you must offer, if you do settle on offering encouragement to the shoppers, there are its pros and cons:

Advantages of incentives for leaving a review:

Basically, freebies and discounts have a positive effect on the brand image. If the shoppers are offered a reward for investing time and effort to share a word about your business and vendibles, getting something in return should positively affect their loyalty.

Briefly, rewards for sharing feedback allow you to:

• Improve a review’s overall rating
• Collect more UGC
• Improve customer loyalty
• Incentivize specific types of reviews
• Enjoy a higher response rate

Disadvantages of incentives for leaving a review:

The absence of negative reviews is actually a disadvantage. Surprised? According to Vendesta, 30% of shoppers believe that feedback is fake if there are no negative reviews. Thus, if you offer to leave a review and get a discount for positive reviews only, please do not.

Say, a shopper sees 5.0 discount tire reviews only. How doubtful would such a rating look?

Other downfalls of rewarding customer testimonials are:

• Possibly tainted brand reputation
• Penalties as a result of failing to comply with the country's regulations

What You Can Offer For Writing a Review

Now that you know what, where, and how to incentivize the customers to share their take on your products, let’s take a look at how you can actually reward the buyers for investing time to make your brand and products more competitive and lovable.

Reward Points

Businesses widely use reward point systems to thank their customers for completing specific on-site and offsite activities.

And leaving a review is one of those activities.

Commonly, shoppers will see a notification in their account dashboard notifying them about the possibility of earning loyalty points for sharing feedback.

Coupon Codes

Saying that the buyer can get discounts for reviews won’t surprise any shopper nowadays. The question is, what amount is reasonable to offer not to make your request sound too desperate or pushy?

Freebies

Some vendors choose to add free goods when shipping the orders to incentivize the buyers’ feedback. Alternatively, it can be a freebie available for selection with the next order or offering free stuff using a giveaway service.

Sweepstakes

“Write a review, and win $500!” That’s basically it.

To grow the number of reviews, some online retailers offer to enter sweepstakes. And it’s a tried and tested means to achieve the goal (especially when worded and run correctly).

Image credit: Nordstrom

As you can see, there is a host of incentives available. Notably, they all require the customer to return to your store to access the benefits with the next purchase.

Which incentive should you opt for?

The answer is: it depends.

• On your marketing goals and campaigns
• On the Product Reviews Magento 2 extension you have installed in your store
• On your willingness to add more extensions (or hire a developer) to introduce a specific incentive

Should You Offer Incentives for Product Reviews on Magento?

We’d like to say: absolutely! However, it depends. (And we did touch on this above in this post).

However, if you’ve done your research and studied how your customer base interacts with the incentives in mind, go ahead and give it a try.

The only thing left is a reliable Magento 2 extension to let you achieve that.

Let’s use Mageworx’s Advanced Product Reviews & Reminders extension for Magento 2 as an example.

Besides letting Magento-based merchants send automatic emails and/or display popup review reminders following specific conditions, the module allows rewarding the shoppers with points for sharing feedback and stating the conditions transparently:

Conclusion

Receiving an honest review from the customer is the most rewarding experience a merchant could ever have (despite a review being positive or negative). User-generated content remains a treasure trove that helps businesses move forward.

We hope this article has managed to answer the question: how get discounts for reviews on Magento 2 and will let you keep reviews flowing to your store continuously.

FAQ: How to Get Discount for Reviews the Right Way