Picture this: You’re walking through the store, your stomach is growling, and you’re looking for the perfect thing to eat. Then, out of nowhere, a person shouts, “Free samples!” and hands you a hot bite of pizza just oozing with melted mozzarella cheese. And hey, it’s dinner time…you want more! *Add to cart.*

Now, replace that pizza with anything else — wine, ice cream, a handheld vacuum. Once customers try it, they’re more likely to talk about it, buy it, and share it. That’s why, despite the costs, product sampling marketing is one of the most effective ways of collecting authentic content and increasing conversions on your e-commerce site, social pages, and beyond.

Chapters:

1. What is product sampling?
2. When should you launch a product sampling campaign?
3. Why you should launch a product sampling campaign
4. Product sampling strategies
5. Get started with product sampling

What is product sampling?

It’s the practice of offering goods or services to your audience in exchange for increased brand awareness, brand loyalty, reviews, feedback, and other revenue-boosting user-generated content (UGC). This is a form of experiential marketing because consumers are able to completely absorb and engage with the product prior to buying it.

Quick history lesson: Product sampling is a tried-and-true marketing strategy dating back to the 1850s. Benjamin T. Babbitt, a soap manufacturer, was one of the first people to hand out samples to his fan base. As time passed, the power of this marketing strategy was realized by others and has since become popular in a variety of industries.

Today, there’s several different product sampling methods:

• Traditional sampling means giving away free product samples to customers, so they will feel more confident buying the product
• Digital product sampling is a sustainable sampling method, where customers buy a product in a store or online with a provided coupon, or receive money back after uploading the receipt — no samples need to be shipped meaning no unnecessary packaging waste
• Sampler packs include small or trial-size products. If the customer likes the sample, they are more likely to buy the product at full size
• Mail drops are when you mail free samples directly to customers’ homes
• Limited time samples are free only for a specific amount of time, such as three days, a week, etc. This adds excitement and plays to the psychological fear of missing out (FOMO!)
• Virtual sampling is when consumers are able to try out a product online without visiting a store or receiving something in the mail. This type of product sampling campaign relies on technology like an app or artificial intelligence

When should you launch a product sampling campaign?

You should launch a product sampling campaign when you need to boost word of mouth or get feedback on a new product.

• You have a high-quality, effective product ready for people to test. It’s important to make sure you’re delivering something genuinely good before people’s opinions start flying. A bad product will be all the more maligned by product sampling
• Your budget can handle sampling costs. This includes the cost of the samples as well as shipping, handling, staffing, and marketing. Note: Digital product sampling alleviates a lot of fulfillment costs!
• You need increased brand awareness for an existing product. If your brand isn’t well-known but you have a great product, you need positive word of mouth to increase brand awareness and fill your sales funnel. Just make sure expansion is feasible for you based on your current business model
• You have a new product to launch. Product sampling will help with product development, as well as create some additional buzz. People who sample your product and love it are more likely to buy it, tell their friends, and even create shareable content about it

Why you should launch a product sampling campaign

Product sampling marketing helps brands boost feedback, conversion rates, positive reviews, and social content for both small and enterprise brands alike.

Get valuable product feedback

Product sampling is a way to connect with and get feedback from your audience.

According to Ryan Stewart, a marketing expert and the managing partner of WEBRIS, “We normally ask them questions about their experiences with our services, show how they use them, or even invite them to take part in an online contest that involves using our services.”

You can also use surveys to collect quantitative and qualitative data. This feedback can help you further develop the product into something your audience will love.

Boost sales and conversion rates

Sampling a product makes customers want to buy it. It’s wired into our psychology. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, knows samples create desire. “If I gave you a tiny bit of chocolate,” he says, “all of a sudden it would remind you about the exact taste of chocolate and would increase your craving.”

Take Costco, for example. An oft-cited study about Costco revealed the grocery store saw a significant boost in revenue thanks to its free food samples. And Stewart confirms sampling is a solid way to increase sales. He asserts, “People who feel like we value their opinions are more likely to buy from us when they need something similar in the future.”

Gathering UGC and reviews from shoppers also gives brands a significant boost in sales. Absolution Cosmetics wanted to support product launches, build brand awareness around their healthy skin care messaging, and boost customer loyalty and engagement to ultimately increase sales. The brand implemented a dual review collection strategy, combining an evergreen sweepstakes on their website, ensuring a constant influx of fresh UGC and reviews, and targeted product sampling campaigns to support new product launches.

As a result, in just a six-month period, Absolution increased its revenue per visitor from 14% to 123%, customer engagement from 28% to 61%, and earned $107K directly attributed to ratings and reviews.

Encourage positive reviews due to a sense of reciprocity

Free samples encourage potential customers to play into the idea of reciprocity. In other words, people who receive the sample want to do something for your brand in return — like posting a positive review on social media.

This by no means every review is going to be positive of course. Neither should that be expected. Product sampling isn’t “we’ll send you a product sample in return for a positive review.” By contrast, reviews should be honest regardless of the sentiment. And even negative reviews provide added authenticity for your brand.

But one of the reasons sampling does yield such positive results is because the right provider (like Bazaarvoice ) can create campaigns for a hyper-targeted audience across demographics, behaviors, preferences, and more. When the recipient is the exact target audience the product is for, the review is much more likely to be positive. Just make sure your sampling provider can accommodate this.

“Product sampling allows us to get our audience involved in the creation of our content, which gives them a sense of ownership over what we’re sharing,” says Stewart.

For instance, after TTI Floor Care North America allowed top brand loyalists to sample Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners for free, they saw an 86% response rate and more than 700 reviews full of positive, authentic UGC. As a result, Dirt Devil product reviews went from 2.8 to 4.5 stars. These reviews not only filled TTI’s own webpage but were also syndicated on major retailers’ sites.

Supercharging brand awareness with social content

You probably already know that social content is an important way to reach consumers. Combining the reach of social media with the effectiveness of sampling gives you a unique marketing campaign powerhouse.

Most Bazaarvoice Sampling customers are brand managers who use sampling to generate and feature content on social media.

“Linking sampling to social is a core tenant of any e-commerce plan,” says Kerry Bridge, Global Director of Advocacy at Bazaarvoice. “You need to be able to collect that great content from social in order to populate your product pages. Plus build your community.”

We’ve pinpointed a few different reasons why social content and sampling go hand-in-hand:

1. New product launches benefit greatly from large amounts of recent UGC. 89% of shoppers check reviews before making a purchase, and 60% of shoppers feel more comfortable making a purchase if they can see product images or videos first. A great way to collect this valuable UGC is to employ sampling
2. Entering new markets helps you expand your reach. Each demographic is different, and over 70% of shoppers are looking for perspectives that reflect their own. Product sampling can help you get your foot in the door and provide UGC that speaks to these new markets in a relatable way
3. Supporting your core SKUs with product sampling allows you to collect quality content at scale. Your core products are hot sellers for a reason — get them in your fans’ hands through a sampling campaign and encourage them to create content. Data from our Bazaarvoice Network of over 12,500 brands and retailers found a 135% increase in conversion rate and a 164% increase in revenue per visitor when shoppers engaged with social content from their peers
4. Working with the right content creators can help you skyrocket your brand awareness and success. Creator collaborations add to your content volume, and by sharing with their own engaged audiences, they also extend your reach

Relaunch your products

There may be times when you want to shift your brand strategy and reformulate or reinvent your product. With the introduction of the FTC’s 2023 review hijacking legislation, reformulating your product isn’t just about tweaking its features — it’s about ushering it into the market as if it’s an entirely new line. It’s a unique challenge, with the daunting task of resetting your review count and content collection to zero. But sampling can help you rapidly rebuild from this new starting line.

• Relaunch your product with fresh advocacy: Successfully relaunch your reformulated product by targeting the right audience, providing an experience, driving UGC from day one, and gaining actionable insights from product samplers
• Combat misleading reviews with authentic content: If the reformulation means the product is “substantially different” in “one or more material attributes” from the prior version (as per the FTC), it would be deceptive to continue using existing reviews. A sampling campaign can generate fresh reviews and customer photos quickly and effectively so you have an arsenal of new social proof you can show off to shoppers

Product sampling strategies

Ultimately, all sampling campaigns help your potential customers get a preview of what you’re selling while helping you get more visibility for your product and brand overall. The individual strategies can take several different forms, from in-store food samples (Costco) or mailed glasses to try on (Warby Parker). The details depend on your business model and campaign goals.

Here’s seven examples from the masters that you can imitate when you craft your own campaign, including the relevant sampling program they used.

Costco nails the traditional sampling strategy

Costco is famous for the traditional, in-store, free sample method. People have gone so far as to tour the sample tables at various Costco stores. The more samples people try, the closer they get to a free lunch. Personal finance and food bloggers have picked up on this idea as well and have even written articles encouraging the practice.

Costco’s store sampling draws people to its stores, thanks to one key message: Going to Costco is fun (and yummy!)

While you might be nervous about handing out “freebies,” the benefits far outweigh the costs. In fact, according to the College Marketing Group, “Interactions — the company that handles Costco’s sampling — found that their efforts led to a 71% increase in sales of beer and a 600% increase in frozen pizza.”

Traditional sampling works especially well for supermarkets like Costco, as well as other brick-and-mortar stores like makeup counters. Just remember that the goal for this type of sampling is to increase sales and positive word of mouth. You probably won’t get a lot of usable content out of it.

L’Oréal gets personal with virtual sampling

Since its target market is focused primarily on beauty, personalization and creativity are everything for L’Oréal. That’s why L’Oréal’s special offers and promotions are tailored to this demographic’s specific preferences and needs in the form of virtual sampling.

Customers simply select a product like hair dye or blush. Once they grant L’Oréal access to their camera, a small window shows them what they would look like wearing that product. It’s kind of like Zoom + the Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap Visualizer. But instead of paint, it’s a beauty product.

Virtual sampling is attractive because it’s incredibly scalable, not to mention germ-free. Brands aren’t limited by physical space in stores or the cost of making or shipping the product. Instead, consumers are able to instantly get a good idea of what the product would be like for them without the hassle of applying the sample color to their wrist (eww), applying to a program, handing over their personal info, or potentially wasting a product if they don’t like it.

This technique is also sometimes more helpful and realistic than physical store samples because the tool takes into account different product combinations and how they affect each other. For example, if I dyed my hair bright red, would that red lipstick look good? Hmm… maybe a more subtle shade would be better.

Brands can use virtual try-ons to fill their social media calendars. If you have a tool like this, inspire your customers to post a photo of themselves on social media “trying on” your product. Then collect, store, and track that content using Bazaarvoice’s AI-powered Media Library.

Warby Parker masters the mail drop

Warby Parker prides itself on its choice selection when it comes to new, stylish, and comfortable eyeglass frames. It provides a quiz to help customers determine exactly what type of frames will best suit them and then a personalized selection based on their responses.

After completing the quiz, customers can choose up to five frames that are delivered right to their homes, where they can test them for five days. After finding that perfect pair, customers can buy what they want and ship the rest back. The return shipping is free with Warby Parker’s return label.

For something you have to wear all the time (like glasses), comfort and style are paramount. Warby Parker helps customers feel assured that both needs will be met because customers can literally see the results for themselves at home before buying.

For brands that want a turnkey sampler program, Bazaarvoice offers a white-labeled sampling program to help retailers get their product samples directly into the hands of their community and start generating UGC.

Neuro optimizes product development

Sampling isn’t just to market and sell existing products. Kent Yoshimura and Ryan Chen, co-founders of wellness company Neuro, explain in this podcast one of the key ways they achieved their success: making sure Neuro Gum was as perfect as possible before they jumped into product activation. They gave out free samples of the gum to family, friends, and co-workers to test a variety of key details such as:

• Different ingredients (20 milligrams of caffeine to 80 milligrams of caffeine)
• New flavors
• Different sweeteners
• Hard chews vs. soft chews

After perfecting the product, Yoshimura and Chen surpassed their crowdfunding goal in just three days and ended up selling over 12 million pieces of Neuro Gum. And those people who sample the product became loyal customers.

“Once we introduce that product to somebody, the repeat purchase rate can be up to about 40, 45%,” said Chen. “Our challenge is getting people to try the product. Sampling is a really big opportunity for us.”

Neuro ensured it had a good, high-quality product and an active community of fans, thanks to product sampling. According to Chen, “We’ve grown such a loyal group of customers that they give us feedback all the time. It’s built a community which has been inspiring for us and has given us the motivation to keep going.”

After their initial success, they continued sampling with specific cohorts like the CrossFit community. They’ve also shipped product samples to new distributors to explore a potential new market in Africa.

Using samples and collecting customer responses is the most effective way to get meaningful feedback about your product, so you can improve it and launch with confidence.

Bazaarvoice’s sampling programs can help you learn from sampler feedback and expand into new markets via our robust, global Influenster community.

Home Depot doubles conversion rates with Managed Sampling

Home Depot Canada wanted to increase the volume of UGC, particularly reviews, its brands get on its product pages. So they partnered with bazaarvoice to create the Home Depot Seeds Sampling program.

“UGC is becoming increasingly important. It’s no longer a ‘nice to have.’ It’s a necessity. We see our site as a research tool, so even if people come into the store, they still use their phones to see ratings and reviews and make a final decision.”

Gabriela da Silva, Senior Brand Advocate Analyst, Home Depot Canada

Seeds Sampling is a review-seeding program that puts a brand’s highest priority products into the hands of its shoppers, in exchange for honest reviews on HomeDepot.ca. Since the program’s inception, it’s already led to some brands doubling their conversion rates on HomeDepot.ca.

It’s not just legacy products either. WiZ, a brand featured on HomeDepot.ca, used Seeds Sampling to generate buzz for new products and earn that UGC before they’d even launched. 

It worked, too. The conversion rate for the products used in Seeds Sampling was 68% higher than products not part of the program. Not bad at all.

Home Depot isn’t the first retailer to turn to Bazaarvoice for a Managed Sampling program. We’ve built sampling programs for Walmart, Target, and Sam’sClub, to name a few. And you could be next.

Get started with product sampling

Ready to experience the power of product sampling marketing in your own business? Bazaarvoice makes it easier than ever to get your products into the hands of the perfect customers, leading to a surge in reviews, social media buzz, authentic word-of-mouth, and sales.

You can learn more about Bazaarvoice Sampling here, or get started directly below.

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Buyer’s guide: Find the perfect product sampling partner

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Chances are you’ve most likely been to a Home Depot or ordered from them online. Need a new drill? Repainting your living room? Updating your lighting? Bored on a Sunday? It’s off to Home Depot. 

The home improvement retailer has 2,200 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and offers more than one million products for its shoppers. They serve DIY customers, professional contractors, and installation businesses across North America. 

For brands that sell their products on HomeDepot.ca, figuring out how to maximize channel sales is critical for business. Brands can of course come to HomeDepot.ca with their own user-generated content (UGC) — like reviews, Q&As, and social posts — but the retail chain partners with Bazaarvoice specifically to provide robust UGC collection tools for brands. 

A UGC strategy done right increases the discoverability of products, boosts sales, and creates a valuable dialogue with customers and new shoppers. It also informs SEO benefits, provides insights for product innovation, reduces return rates, and ensures shoppers have a positive experience with your brand. The impact of reviews by numbers:

Customers who interact with UGC are 2x more likely to convert, according to Bazaarvoice research. Reviews help customers validate their purchasing decisions and feel more confident about the products they buy. 

Home Depot Canada has launched several Bazaarvoice solutions and features that improve the customer experience and help suppliers optimize UGC. One of its most successful solutions is its sampling program, the Home Depot Seeds Program. 

What is the Home Depot Seeds Program?

The Home Depot Seeds Program is a product sampling program that puts a brand’s high-priority products in the hands of Home Depot Canada’s most loyal shoppers, in exchange for honest reviews on HomeDepot.ca.

Bazaarvoice and Home Depot partnered to help brands select which key items to sample, identify Home Depot Canada audiences within the sampling community, and guide brands through fulfillment. 

How to leverage the Home Depot Seeds Program

Home Depot encourages its brands to enlist the Seeds Program for seasonal, exclusive, and new products. Or even any products that just need a fresh crop of reviews:

• New products: Brands can collect authentic UGC for products ahead of a new launch. Insights found within reviews ensure your products launch with a bang, and will help future shoppers feel confident about purchasing your new products
• Seasonal items: Optimize seasonal item product pages with UGC to boost discoverability and increase conversions during their limited time
• Home Depot exclusives: If your brand sells products exclusively through Home Depot, then HomeDepot.ca is the only place where shoppers can see that valuable UGC
• Products with outdated reviews: Search engines like Google favor pages with fresh content, so a a continuous flow of review content means more traffic to your product pages, which means more sales

Getting started with Bazaarvoice + Home Depot

The Home Depot Seeds Program has already helped some brands on HomeDepot.ca more than double their conversion rates. In addition, the program has been so successful that Home Depot vendors in the United States are now interested in using it to collect reviews for their Canadian exclusive items and product launches. 

Learn more about the Bazaarvoice + Home Depot partnership and more ways you can utilize strategies to increase channel sales over on our partnership page. Or get in touch directly below to get started.

Stock images and catalog-esque product descriptions used to be the way to win over Sam’s Club members shopping online. But today they crave more inspiring, authentic content. Most notably, they crave the opinions of fellow Sam’s Club members. User-generated content (UGC), including ratings, reviews, and member questions and answers, is the prime way to connect and engage with them. 

UGC builds trust, inspires loyalty, and has a significant impact on product discoverability and purchase decisions. It’s a key conversion driver on SamsClub.com product pages, so brands that sell products on the site must focus their UGC strategies to stay highly competitive. UGC can’t be an afterthought. 

Our research shows that just one customer review on a product page can increase purchase likelihood by 10%. Plus, 88% of shoppers rely on reviews to discover and evaluate products and 89% always consult them before making a purchase. Shoppers pay attention to the quality, volume, and recency of reviews, so keeping reviews flowing and fresh will help your products stand out. 

Bazaarvoice, Sam’s Club’s preferred ratings and reviews partner, leads the industry with best-in-class UGC solutions and services. Not to mention unparalleled review content authenticity and moderation standards. Bazaarvoice offers a range of solutions to help Sam’s Club suppliers optimize their product pages with content to boost discoverability when shoppers search and drive revenue. 

What is Sam’s Club Star Reviewer sampling program?

The newest solution in this realm is Sam’s Club Star Reviewer, a turnkey sampling program developed with the aim of helping brands big and small collect more written and visual product reviews on SamsClub.com. Check out the video below to learn more about how the sampling program works: 

4 reasons every Sam’s Club supplier needs the Star Reviewer sampling program

There’s multiple benefits to uitilizing Sam’s Club Star Reviewer and these are just the top four. But they all have one thing in common: helping you stand out and drive sales on Samsclub.com.

1. Boost sales of your seasonal products 

Whether it’s Halloween costumes, patio furniture, or winter apparel, there’s often a short window to drive sales for seasonal products. Star Reviewer helps Sam’s Club suppliers get ahead of the peak sales curve. Collecting reviews before seasonal shopping begins aids consumers in making quick decisions once they’re ready to shop. Especially when the UGC includes written and visual reviews. 

About half of shoppers want more photos in the reviews they consult. Visuals offer a real-world glimpse into how a product looks or works. This lends more authenticity to the shopping experience, and persuades your customers to click add to cart.

2. Market new items and collect reviews prior to product launches

Shoppers are often very wary of purchasing new items with zero reviews. Running a pre-launch promotion using Star Reviewer helps suppliers to boost review volume quickly, in turn increasing conversions at a faster pace once these products are available on SamsClub.com.

Gathering reviews from Sam’s Club members before a product launch also provides Sam’s Club suppliers with valuable intel. You’ll gain insights into how shoppers actually use the products, and it can reveal use cases that you haven’t thought of. Is a line of clothing running too small? Would a product suit a different color better? Customer frequently leave these details in their product reviews.

Reviews also identify problems or issues with a product and inspire new product innovations. Consumers appreciate brands that listen to their feedback and actually make product improvements based on their reviews.  

3. To highlight Sam’s Club exclusives

The ability to drum up excitement for products available exclusively at Sam’s Club is key to a product’s success. And the best way to drive visibility, discoverability, and sales is by increasing a product’s review volume. Brands can see a 138% lift in conversions when shoppers engage with reviews on best-in-class Bazaarvoice sites (such as SamsClub.com!) 

Quality reviews build trust and exude authenticity. And you shouldn’t worry if reviews aren’t all positive. 71% of consumers say that negative reviews are as important as positive reviews in their purchasing decisions, according to a Bazaarvoice study. Most shoppers feel that negative reviews actually contain more details about a product’s best and worst attributes. 

4. Freshen up reviews for legacy products 

To keep tried-and-true products relevant in shoppers’ minds and keep sales up, make sure that you have a fresh crop of new reviews coming in. Star Reviewer helps identify a brand’s loyal shoppers or those who’ve purchased similar items to sample your core products and review them. 

Review recency matters to shoppers. 85% of shoppers look at when a review was written before they buy an item, a Bazaarvoice study found. Shoppers are turned off when products have no recent reviews, as they think the item isn’t popular. Many consider reviews written within the past three months to be most reliable.

Boost sales with Bazaarvoice + Sam’s Club

Increasing the number of product reviews you have, ensuring review content is authentic, and keeping reviews fresh builds trust with Sam’s Club members and will help you stand out among competing products/brands.

Ready to sign up with Star Reviewer? You can learn more on our Sam’s Club + Bazaarvoice brand invite page. Or get in touch directly below to get started.

Bazaarvoice recently met with Oliver Richard, Senior Manager of Site Merchandising Operations at Samsclub.com, to learn first-hand how brands can win at SEO, prepare for large promo events, and become best-in-class using Sam’s Club new vendor scorecard. You can watch the full on-demand conversation below.

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The Walmart seller Marketplace is an online platform that allows third-party sellers to list their products on Walmart.com. Selling on Walmart Marketplace lets you tap into the retailer’s massive customer base and reputation as a well-known, trusted source for high-quality items. It will also help you grow your audience, build a following of your own, and drive sales.

Walmart.com sees 100 million unique visitors each month, and it keeps growing. Recently, Walmart CEO, C. Douglas McMillion, said that online sales during the pandemic accelerated by “two to three years in some cases,” and he expects that growth to continue. 

First steps for selling on Walmart Marketplace

1. Begin the application process, where you tell Walmart about your business and the kinds of products you sell (that can be found here) 
2. Wait for approval
3. Once approved, register and create an account on the platform 
4. Set up your profile for shoppers to see 
5. It’s time to list your products! 

Now that you have your product pages up, there’s several ways to optimize your Walmart Marketplace listings.

4 ways to sell on Walmart Marketplace

As a business that partners with Walmart, we’re well positioned to guide you on how to sell on Walmart Marketplace. Here’s our best practices to follow.

1. An SEO strategy ensures your products get noticed

To increase sales, your products need to show up in a shopper’s search results. So, you need to optimize your product pages for SEO. Walmart uses algorithms to rank products based on the number of sales and views, and how your page displays the product name, images, features, description, and attributes. 

Product names should be 50 to 75 characters and clearly state exactly what you’re selling. The suggested naming structure includes the brand name, size specs, a defining quality, the item’s name and style, and quantity. 

Getting more reviews is one way brands can improve where their products show up, giving them more clicks to their products

Shariq Hasan, Associate Manager, E-commerce Merchandising Operations at Walmart Canada

Include multiple high-quality, professional images on each product page and consider adding a video showing the product in action to increase traffic. In the product descriptions, add several relevant keywords. You may need to do a little research — such as checking out your competitors’ product pages— to find which keywords will work best. 

Using the right keywords to highlight a few product features also helps shoppers browse easier. Adding the relevant Walmart Marketplace built-in product attributes, such as clothing size groups or colors, helps your items stand out when consumers search. 

The higher you appear in search results, the more products you will sell on Walmart Marketplace.

2. Use user-generated content to enhance product discovery 

Ensuring that your product pages feature user-generated content (UGC) offers a wealth of benefits. For one, it enhances the discoverability of your products and boosts sales. 

For two, UGC helps brands boost their SEO traffic. Encouraging UGC and customer reviews keeps your product pages fresh with new content, and websites with regularly updated content that’s rich in keywords rank higher. 

Customer ratings, reviews, and social content also let you foster a dialogue with shoppers and reduce return rates. 78% of shoppers worldwide trust online product reviews, and nearly 40% rely on reviews to inform purchase decisions, according to Bazaarvoice research. And using data from the Bazaarvoice Network, we found when shoppers engage with UGC on best-in-class sites, brands and retailers experience a 144% lift in conversions.

Shoppers also respond to visual content from their fellow consumers, as they consider photos and videos as authentic and helpful in their shopping journey. Visuals, combined with detailed product descriptions and reviews, provide a more engaging shopping experience.  

3. Increasing your review volume on Walmart Marketplace drives purchases

The more reviews your products have, the better. Getting just one review can increase purchases by 10%, according to Bazaarvoice research. A hundred reviews can bring a 37% purchase increase, along with insights into consumer sentiment about your products. Increasing your review volume helps grow your Walmart seller marketplace presence. 

One of the best ways to increase your Walmart Marketplace reviews is through Managed Sampling, by Bazaarvoice. The sampling program gives brands access to a vast community of loyal shoppers, who receive a product sample and provide an honest review in exchange. 

Bazaarvoice helps brands choose items to sample — whether it’s a new, seasonal, or exclusive product — and the audience segments best suited to sample and review the product. Within just three weeks, you can see authentic reviews and images start flowing in. And then your revenue increasing.

4. Optimizing reviews helps brands succeed on Walmart Marketplace

Collecting a trove of Walmart Marketplace reviews is just the start. You need to optimize your reviews, too. Bazaarvoice offers several products to help. 

Collect + Distribute equips brands with tools to collect reviews from customers who make a purchase and share those reviews across different retailer websites, like Walmart.com. For Walmart Marketplace sellers, this boosts sales, expands the impact of each review collected, and enables you to connect with consumers. 

Engaging directly with shoppers through reviews lets them know that you’re listening and care about their feedback. Answering questions and responding to reviews on the Walmart seller marketplace helps you build relationships and deepen connections with your most loyal shoppers. Brands that interact via Questions & Answers see a 150% increase in conversion. 

Brands can also tap into the more than 7 million members of the Influenster community, who can be engaged to create content about the products they love. 

Start selling on Walmart Marketplace

Selling on Walmart Marketplace gives brands an opportunity to engage with a huge group of shoppers and link up with one of the most recognizable retailers in the world. The key to getting noticed, driving sales, and building a following is increasing and optimizing Walmart Marketplace reviews.

Getting started with Walmart and Bazaarvoice

Now you know how to sell on Walmart Marketplace, all that’s left to do is get started. Walmart partnered with Bazaarvoice so we could help brands build UGC programs on Walmart, through Sampling, Questions & Answers, and our Influenster community. That means we’re best positioned to help you succeed.

Learn more ways to drive Walmart sales on our co-marketing page. Or get in touch below to get started.

Unlock the power of user-generated content to stand out on Walmart.com

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Luckily, we’re going to show you how. And why. And possibly even when. Using global brands, and Bazaarvoice’s own client success stories, we explain exactly how you can rock customer centricity.

Chapters:

1. What is a customer-centric selling approach?
2. Benefits of customer centricity
3. How brands use data to implement customer centricity
4. Use UGC to enable the right strategy

Imagine you’re shopping online for a new social media management tool. You’re checking your LinkedIn account, scrolling through your feed, or listening to your favorite podcast at the same time. Suddenly, you get a DM from a salesperson crowing about their platform. You need to sign up right now! Quick! This is a one-time deal! Aaaand… Close browser.

The truth is, most people prefer to buy from salespeople who first establish a friendly connection and then take the time to personalize their pitch to you and your needs. That’s customer-centric selling at its core.

Most e-commerce managers know customer centricity will help them grow revenue and foster customer loyalty. In fact, a Vantage Partners study suggests that companies that adopt a mature customer-centric approach realize 2.5x revenue growth compared with the average company. But in practice, many brands still end up fumbling around in the dark and not really harnessing the data to make this happen.

Here’s how top e-commerce brands use UGC about real customer challenges to inform their customer-centric strategy.

What is a customer-centric selling approach?

Customer-centric selling is a sales methodology that puts customer needs first to establish a successful, mutually beneficial relationship. Engaging in a customer-centric approach relies on empathy and nurturing a two-way dialogue with customers. It’s the approach that actually provides the best customer experience.

Customer centricity also allows brands to modify their processes, product, messaging, and sales timeline to fit customer needs. A brand that adopts a customer-centric selling strategy becomes its customers’ best problem-solving ally because it approaches customers in a way that benefits the customers.

For a successful customer-centric selling approach, salespeople (and marketers, too!) should engage prospects and customers with key behaviors. In the influential book “CustomerCentric Selling,” co-writers Michael Bosworth, John Holland, and Frank Visgatis break down those behaviors into eight basic tenets, which I’ve adapted and simplified below:

• Actively listen with curiosity — not assumptions.
• Ask curious, open-ended questions that give them the freedom to express themselves in a non-pressured environment.
• Focus on helping them overcome a challenge, solve a problem, or satisfy a need.
• Align with their values.

Here’s a great visual that defines customer centricity on four different levels of maturity:

Customer-centric vs consumer-centric

Customer-centric selling is an empathetic, inside-out approach in which all teams — R&D, product management, marketing, sales, support — seek to learn and understand what your customer’s needs truly are.

Compare this to the more traditional consumer-centric selling, which is a product-focused, outside-in approach. Rather than asking questions, consumer-centric selling seeks to make a sale by judging and assuming what the customer’s needs truly are.

The table below offers an easy way to compare the two approaches, adapted from the book “CustomerCentric Selling” and an article published in California Management Review:

A recent example of assumptions gone wrong comes from the wonderful world of Disney. Taking a consumer-centric approach to marketing Encanto, Disney assumed people would love the character of Isabela. She’s classically beautiful, has that perfect Disney princess singing voice, and so on. So, Disney made tons of Isabela merchandise.

Except… Little girls actually loved Luisa. A character whose signature muscles the film’s development team had to fight with Disney executives to keep. Following the film’s release, Disney has had to scramble to meet customer demand for Luisa merchandise.

Had Disney taken a customer-centric approach, it may have been less shocked by changing tastes and trends for women. And maybe Luisa’s beloved, fan-favorite muscles could have been helping Disney generate even more revenue.

In contrast, Blue Bottle Coffee has taken a customer-centric approach by allowing newsletter subscribers to opt out of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day marketing messages.

The company realized that many people struggle with the constant barrage of messages surrounding those holidays. So instead of assuming that their audience relates positively to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and pushing marketing on them, the company listened to what their audience wanted and took action based on that insight.

Benefits of customer centricity

A customer-centric selling approach is more successful because it’s focused on building a sustainable, trusting relationship. According to Nielsen’s 2021 Trust in Advertising Study, most people place the most trust in recommendations that come from people they know.

Sales and marketing reps obviously can’t be a friend or family member to every customer. But, they can strive to do the next best thing — “put the consumer first in every strategy, plan and execution.” In doing so, brands will earn the trust of customers and foster positive word of mouth.

The goal isn’t to become better sellers but rather “buyer facilitators,” said Chris Sargent, senior director of Global Sales Enablement at NICE inContact, during his discussion on sales training.

If employed correctly and combined with the right data-collection tools, a customer-centric selling strategy will help your brand better resonate with customers and bolster both customer success and customer support. It will target their specific needs and pain points.

Your customers will be better served because your brand will be providing a better overall value.

As a result, loyalty and trust will grow. Loyal customers will transform into full-fledged ambassadors who will help positively characterize your brand by word-of-mouth. Your entire company will better understand and empathize with its audience. This will promote more innovative product development and an elevated cycle of inspired, engaged employees.

The more engaged your employees are, the better the customer experience will be. And the better the customer’s experience is, the more customer loyalty and retention will increase — not to mention your revenue.

How brands use data to implement customer centricity

The best customer centricity strategies rely on asking the right questions and actually listening to customer responses. Traditionally, brands hired consumer psychologists to design focus groups and surveys. But this process is long and arduous, not to mention expensive.

Today, brands can utilize sophisticated software to source and use first-party data and user-generated content (UGC) in their marketing and sales efforts.

Enventys

According to Roy Morejon, President and Co-founder of Enventys Partners — a B2B product development, launch, and marketing firm — customer-centric data is often found through interactive data tracking. This involves tracking data such as the number of confirmed purchases, abandoned carts, and returns.

Brands can also collect quantitative first-party data through recurring email subscriptions, Morejon explained, by analyzing open rates and measuring how many customers click the links within the emails they received.

“Analyzing this data in comparison to other user details,” said Morejon, “such as general internet behavior, job, lifestyle, and other personal data (age, gender, etc.), provides insights that you can use to optimize customer-centric selling.”

Morejon mentioned Pardot as a specific tool to help harness this data.

“Pardot is a great feature integrated with Salesforce. This app tracks how customers move through the sales funnel, tracking purchases, abandonments, and returns. It provides data on how customers interact with digital marketing assets, such as social media ads and emails, and even offline interactions. It gathers data submitted through user forms, Salesforce, and other integrable platforms.” — Roy Morejon.

Unilever

UGC, like reviews, and questions and answers, is a common method to bolster customer centricity. Unilever set out to get more user reviews, which it then used as a marketing tool to improve revenue. In doing this, it also improved customer loyalty and satisfaction, and increased organic search traffic and engagement.

This success was facilitated by Bazaarvoice-powered sampling campaigns. Unilever saw a massive increase in customer reviews across all its brands, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. This, in turn, gave Unilever additional leveraging power.

“When we include reviews in social ads and display ads,” said Jenna Spivak Evans, Innovation and Digital Capabilities Manager at Unilever, “we see about a 20–30% improvement in performance.”

“Because UGC delivers such rich content, you can see increases in search traffic of 15–25% as a result of using customer-generated content,” said Evans. “You will also see increases in website engagement metrics such as product page views per visit, average time spent onsite, and return-visitor rate.”

Unilever also cross-referenced the people leaving reviews with the customer data it has about those people in its CRM. Doing this not only helped collect UGC and demographic data, but it helped increase personalization as well.

According to Evans, “Integration of UGC into CRM will give us deeper demographic information and provide an incremental way to understand different customers’ needs.”

For a closer look at Unilever’s path to success, check out the Bazaarvoice case study.

Kärcher

Kärcher, a global cleaning technology company, uses UGC to collect customer insights, drive conversions, and strengthen its relationships with retail partners. By monitoring customer feedback and reviews throughout the sales process, the brand was not only able to create new products customers would love, but also improve pre-existing products and set a company-wide quality standard.

“Having reviews in place just before the retailer releases our products gives consumers the confidence to try our new products right from the start,” said Kevin Wiredu, Senior E-Commerce Specialist at Kärcher. “It’s a key to our success.”

In Kärcher’s first sampling campaign, 98% of sample recipients responded with a review. The brand received hundreds of high-quality product reviews, videos, and images. Currently, it’s collected over 280K reviews across 73 retail sites.

With new valuable UGC data at its disposal, Kärcher was able to jumpstart its latest sales cycle and product launch by having numerous, high-quality reviews ready and available the moment new products went live.

Even better, leveraging UGC data helped Kärcher address some issues with product messaging. After reading some customer reviews, the brand realized that many customers didn’t understand the purpose of one of their products — or even how to use it. So, the company was able to tweak the product messaging and packaging to better communicate the product’s intended use.

This is a key example of customer-centric selling because the brand listened to customers and made relevant changes to address their needs.

You can read Bazaarvoice’s full Kärcher case study here.

Nestlé Canada

By leveraging UGC data, Nestlé Canada improved both its overall performance and its relationship with customers. The types of UGC that proved most beneficial were customer reviews and insights, customer feedback, and customer questions.

Thanks to Nestlé’s broad reach, it receives thousands of reviews on a constant basis. But all that data can be difficult to manage. So the company used Bazaarvoice Insights and Reports to make sense of the flood — and, more importantly, to inform business decisions.

Other helpful solutions Nestlé Canada leveraged were Bazaarvoice-powered focus groups and Questions & Answers. In fact, within three months of enabling Bazaarvoice Questions & Answers, Nestlé Canada received over 700 questions from its customers.

The driving force behind Nestlé Canada’s focus on reviews is that the company wants to listen to customers and solve their needs. “Consumers do the talking for us,” said Lee Beech, Director of Consumer Experience at Nestlé Canada. “They speak, and we listen and take action. ”

By leveraging all these solutions, the Nestlé sales team observed that many of its neutral product reviews contained customer questions. In response, Nestlé implemented Bazaarvoice Salesforce Connector and began devoting time each day to provide responses, enhancing customer support all from a single tool.

“It saves, on average, eight minutes to code a case,” according to Kristina Rapljenovic, Website Manager at Nestlé Canada. “We previously didn’t have the capacity and had to let go of engaging with as many of the reviews as we wanted. It would have taken eight minutes to open a case and transfer all of that content. Now, it’s all automated.”

For a more in-depth look, check out the Bazaarvoice’s Nestlé Canada case study.

KidKraft

Like Nestlé Canada and Kärcher, KidKraft uses data from UGC to make product changes. It’s been able to fine-tune its product positioning and fuel its marketing messaging due to the automated ways it can now collect customer feedback, reviews, and customer-shared product photos.

As a mark of its success, KidKraft has collected over 100,000 reviews across the Bazaarvoice Network and achieved 100% review coverage on retail sites as a result of syndication.

“We work really closely with the product development team,” said Heather Stables, the Director of Consumer Engagement at KidKraft, “to make sure that if we see consistent issues or questions being raised by consumers, we can go back and address that by making changes to the actual product.”

One example of this comes from KidKraft’s playhouses. Using Bazaarvoice Insights, KidKraft was able to quickly observe that many customers were DIYing one of the playhouses to have a white, more modern appearance. Recognizing the need, KidKraft released their own white, modern-style playhouse and saw a huge uptick in sales as a result.

Check out Bazaarvoice’s KidKraft case study to learn more.

Adeo

Adeo, a French home improvement retail company, launched a successful UGC program across all its brands. It also implemented strategies to handle fake reviews by collecting UGC data directly after a sale and including a verified purchase badge. Even more, it accessed new markets that, until recently, had low brand awareness. Its latest goal is to reach an overall customer satisfaction rating of four stars.

To begin implementing its customer-centric selling approach, Adeo began collecting UGC data such as customer reviews and ratings. Similar to Nestlé Canada, it also took into account customer questions. And like KidKraft and Kärcher, it utilized customer product photos.

UGC was particularly important to Adeo because its products are often used to complete technical projects like plumbing and electricity that require a degree of expertise. UGC helps to solve a common customer problem — confidence.

“Incorporating reviews, photos and questions by our customers on our products and services pages provides this reassurance and complements the expertise of our sellers,” said Nicolas Fillat, Marketing Business Leader, Customer Care and Feedback at Adeo.

Adeo also places a high value on reviews written in a language that customers can read. With the Bazaarvoice Translated Reviews feature, Adeo has been able to ensure both ratings and reviews are always presented in the customer’s preferred language. This way, customers benefit from reading insights from other customers.

“Bazaarvoice, with its strong global network, allows us to support our customers regardless of country or language,” said Fillat. “This has allowed us to collect, moderate, and display product reviews throughout ten group business to date.”

Check out Bazaarvoice’s Adeo case study for more info.

Wayfair

Wayfair stands out as another example of successful customer centricity. For its UGC campaigns, Wayfair encourages customers to share their design ideas using the branded hashtag #WayfairAtHome.

By measuring both demographic and UGC data, Wayfair has been able to deepen its understanding of its audience and deliver a hyper-personalized experience. It’s achieved this through analytics and predictive AI. Wayfair creates a detailed buyer persona through this AI system. This helps to show customers only the products most relevant to them. Wayfair simply has too much content not to do this.

Customer centricity isn’t just a choice for Wayfair. It’s a necessity.

“On average, we capture and store four terabytes of data every day and over the course of a year, we track approximately 40 billion customer actions on our site. Data has been democratized across the organization — it can be accessed and used regardless of whether an employee works in marketing, logistics, or engineering. Data has allowed the company to better execute on its strategy through improved personalization.” — Steven Conine, Wayfair Co-founder

By focusing on customer centricity, Wayfair has avoided the problem of customer experience becoming overwhelming and time consuming, which would certainly hurt sales metrics and decrease Wayfair’s overall revenue.

Instead, Wayfair has successfully streamlined the buyer process, thanks to its machine learning technology.

Use UGC to enable a customer-centric selling strategy

Customer centricity is a better approach to selling. To do it well, you need the right data and tools to collect it:

• Sampling campaigns
• Focus groups
• Insights and Reports solutions
• Questions & Answers
• (Translated) Ratings & Reviews
• Integrated reviews with CRMs

Now that you know how and why to put the customer first in sales, enable customers to make those sales for you by using product sampling and user-generated content. Or get in touch directly below to request a free demo.

You can check out more of our Long Read content here for more marketing strategies, tips, and insights.

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We explored Walmart’s top e-commerce priorities headed into the new fiscal year, shopper behavior trends shaping the future product page experience on Walmart.com, and insights into how brands can win at retail. Here’s our key takeaways.

1. Focusing on the growth of online shopping

Online shopping was already a growth area for most retailers pre-pandemic. Walmart, for example, was seeing consistent growth in online grocery shopping, mainly because of the convenience it brought to people’s lives. Busy Mom or Dad who doesn’t have time for a grocery shop after the school run? No problem — just order online.

Walmart predicted exponential growth in this area for the next three to five years. And then the pandemic hit. As a direct result of that, Walmart’s growth predictions occurred within a month’s time frame. So it’s safe to assume this growth is here to stay.

With this increased adoption in online shopping, customers are increasingly relying on social proof, aka the opinions of other customers, to filter through the millions of items available and to make confident buying decisions. Which brings us to trend number two.

2. Leaning into social commerce

E-commerce is great at selling you products, but social commerce is great at inspiring you to purchase products you never knew existed. Customers spend 3.7 hours a day on their phone, most of which in what Thomas likes to call the “infinite scroll.” Aka, content that is constantly being refreshed. These are apps that provide an endless stream of new content at your fingertips, with TikTok being the latest and fastest growing. Consumers scroll an average of 300 feet per day, in fact.

Because of this, Walmart is looking at how to meet the customer and allow social content to seamlessly integrate with the shopping experience. Walmart knows user-generated content (UGC) has a strong impact on shopping experience and purchase intent. That’s why ensuring all SKUs on Walmart.com have an abundance of UGC is top-of-mind for the leading retailer in the new fiscal year.

Brands will soon be able to display social UGC on Walmart.com to inspire Walmart shoppers like never before.

3. Keeping breadth, depth, and authenticity top of mind

Getting more reviews on more products across the entire e-commerce site is a priority for Walmart, so Walmart has focused on continuing to build programs that drive authentic reviews. “Authentic reviews” is key here. This is by no means a quantity over quality situation. It’s quantity and quality. According to our own consumer survey, once a customer suspects a product has fake reviews, 36% wouldn’t buy the product and 47% wouldn’t trust any other reviews on the site.

When it comes to ratings and reviews, one aspect that can’t ever be overlooked is review quality. Because once you lose that authenticity you lose consumer trust, which defeats the purpose of UGC in the first place. As Thomas puts it, “…we’ll continue to build our breadth and depth across our catalogue, one of the things that we are not willing to sacrifice is authenticity.”

Individual brands also play a key role in Walmart’s UGC success. While Walmart has its own strategies to collect UGC, brands with their own UGC strategies set themselves ahead of the rest. 

4. Ongoing approach of testing and learning

It’s not enough to just have “UGC.” As in, “we use lots of UGC on our site.” Walmart understands it needs to incorporate multiple types of UGC — ratings and reviews, visual content, and social content, etc — on multiple channels. Knowing the impact of all types of UGC and tapping into the highest opportunities is essential for a positive shopper experience on Walmart.com. 

For example, it knows that often it’s easier to look at a photo to get a sense of an item, rather than read 500 reviews. So consistently testing the effect of different types of UGC is important. Walmart will never make an update just for the sake of it — decisions are based on data.

To upkeep a high shopper experience, Walmart rigorously tests all forms of written and visual UGC to gain a deep understanding of the real-time impact on conversion, basket-size, in-store and online purchases, loyalty, engagement, and SEO.

Watch our full conversation with Alyssa below to learn more.

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It’s a proven strategy for generating reviews, creating social buzz around products, helping products sell faster, and providing greater shopper confidence. In fact, we surveyed 6,000 samplers in the Influenster community and found that 63% of them purchased a product they’ve sampled and 87% recommended the product/brand to friends and family. 

McPherson’s, a B2B company serving customers across Australasia, recently saw how successful product sampling can be for their brands. When they were building their new e-commerce platform a few years ago, they knew they would need a robust ratings and reviews program. They partnered with Bazaarvoice to develop sampling campaigns and boost UGC on their sites. Today, McPherson’s estimates that about 20% of their new ratings and reviews come from sampling.

Sampling brings success 

McPherson’s worked with the Bazaarvoice team to populate their e-commerce site with reviews and syndicate those reviews to their market-leading retail partners.

Once these reviews were on the site, McPherson’s next challenge centered around creating UGC for products that were about to launch. That’s when they started using sampling to get new products into the hands of engaged, loyal customers in exchange for ratings and reviews. 

They started sampling with a new face massager from Manicare called Nova Fit. The campaign was so successful that the brand currently has about two sampling campaigns running at any given time. 

Our new case study explores how McPherson’s created a successful sampling and UGC program for their brand and their associated retailers. They have also found ways to incorporate UGC into their landing pages and social media campaigns. Plus, the product development team uses ratings and reviews to learn more about what customers like and don’t like about current items so they can continuously improve. 

Learn more about how McPherson’s continues to succeed with sampling and UGC in our case study here.

NYX Cosmetics, Travelpro, Coach, and Kiehls are four brands on Macy’s website that understand the gravity of that metric and have leveraged a range of Bazaarvoice solutions to drive user-generated content (UGC) to Macys.com. 

From syndication to utilizing Macy’s retail managed sampling and VoxBox sampling campaigns, each of these brands has cultivated an ideal UGC strategy that helps them stand out on Macys.com and win at retail. 

NYX Cosmetics uses VoxBox Sampling to boost review volume

NYX Cosmetics supercharged their products to 87% coverage with sampling and syndication. 

The cosmetics company worked with Bazaarvoice to customize its own VoxBox sampling program for the NYX Professional Makeup Epic Wear Liquid Liner. Using Bazaarvoice’s product discovery platform Influenster, NYX Cosmetics sent out 500 boxes to a qualified audience: Aged 18-36, interested in trend-driven eye makeup looks, and who have previously used Maybelline, Morphe, Kat Von D, and L’Oréal Paris products. 

The results were no joke: NYX Cosmetics collected 420+ reviews from the campaign, giving its product an average star rating of 4.1 out of 5. They then syndicated these reviews, as well as other reviews collected from its own website and other retailers where it’s products are sold, to Macys.com. 

Travelpro successfully releases Macy’s-exclusive products using Review Squad

Travelpro has a jaw-dropping 90% product coverage with reviews, because they have a strong UGC strategy on at Macy’s. How do they do it? They’ve leveraged Review Squad, Macy’s retail managed sampling (RMS) program, to collect more reviews.

ICYMI: RMS programs allow retailers to build their own user communities of brand advocates that are rewarded with samples, which in-turn provides the retailer with UGC that is native and exclusive to its website.  

To date, Travelpro has collected 585 reviews across 26 products with Review Squad. In 2019, Travelpro used Review Squad to trial a Macy’s Exclusive Item and collect authentic reviews. Together they sent samples to 20 shoppers within Macy’s Review Squad sampling community—and 100% of the consumers left a review.  

Travelpro definitely covers all its bases. On top of partnering with Macys to collect native UGC, Travelpro also syndicates reviews from its own website and other retailers to supercharge its product coverage. 

Coach uses Review Squad to fill its product display pages with visual UGC 

Coach is another brand that leverages a syndication and sampling strategy to boast a 60% product reviews coverage on Macys.com. 

Since March 2020, Coach has used Review Squad to collect over 340 authentic and honest reviews across a range of products. For example, Coach sampled its Leather Shay Shoulder Bag to generate honest customer reviews — including the all-important visual UGC that consumers crave to see on PDPs. 

In fact, out of 555 sampling Review Squad reviews, 137 of them contained photos (nearly 25%!) In total, 321 photos have been collected for Coach via Macy’s Review Squad.

Kiehls collected targeted reviews with VoxBox sampling  

Kiehls boasts 80% product review coverage thanks to syndication and VoxBox sampling. 

They used VoxBox sampling to promote their Hydro-Plumping Serum Concentrate. Influenster sent 250 boxes to community members who identified as women aged 30-55, who said they had dry skin and/or fine line concerns, wanted to improve their skin, regularly used serums, and had previously tried either this product, or First Aid, Beauty, Drunk Elephant, the Inkey List, Innisfree, or Mario Badescu. 

The VoxBox sampling resulted in 210+ reviews that were then syndicated to retailers where the product is sold, including Macys.com. 

Win your Macy’s strategy with Bazaarvoice

Collectively, these brands show that when brands leverage a good UGC strategy—such as VoxBox sampling, RMS programs and syndication—they can supercharge authentic review collection and, in turn, drive greater content coverage to retailers. 

Start optimizing your UGC strategy on Macys.com by visiting www.bazaarvoice.com/macys.

That’s why the home improvement giant partners with Bazaarvoice to get more high quality reviews onto its website. Home Depot Canada launched several solutions and features that improve customer experience and help its suppliers optimize their user-generated content (UGC) on the Home Depot Canada website. 

It’s a win-win situation for everyone, creating a better experience for customers and boosting sales for both Home Depot Canada and its vendors. From launching its own tailored sampling program to syndicating visual UGC, here’s how Home Depot Canada successfully injected thousands of quality reviews and photos into its website. 

1. Home Depot Canada inspired more confident purchases by increasing UGC with Home Depot Seeds 

Bazaarvoice and Home Depot Canada partnered to help brands get more UGC with its Home Depot Seeds sampling program. The sampling program puts products in the hands of Home Depot Canada shoppers who are eager to try new products, in exchange for providing honest product reviews on the Home Depot Canada website.

Home Depot Canada vendors are encouraged to use the review-seeding sampling program strategically throughout the year for seasonal, exclusive, and new products, or any products that need new reviews, as reviews recency matters. Bazaarvoice helps Home Depot Canada vendors decide which products to sample, identify the perfect audience for your product, and guide the brand throughout fulfilment. 

Home Depot Canada invested in reviews collection because UGC drives sales. Customers who interact with UGC are 2X more likely to convert and 93% of consumers say online reviews do impact their purchasing decisions. Reviews help customers validate their purchasing decisions and feel more confident in products. 

The sampling program is a relatively low-cost, tangible solution that allows Home Depot Canada vendors to easily get feedback, and increase their ratings and reviews coverage on Homedepot.ca. It’s been so successful in fact, that Home Depot US vendor partners are now interested in using it to collect reviews for their Canadian exclusive items and new product launches. 

Click to watch Home Depot Seeds 101

2. Home Depot Canada expanded its reach with French translations 

Almost a quarter of Canadians (22.8%) speak French as their first official language, but 92% of Home Depot’s reviews are in English. As many as 40% of customers won’t buy if they can’t read content in their language, so it was imperative for Home Depot Canada to enable French translations on its site to make its UGC more accessible for its French-speaking customers.

Luckily, turning on Bazaarvoice’s Review Translations feature was a quick way to expand Home Depot’s reach to French users and allow shoppers to translate UGC into their native language on-demand.

3. Home Depot Canada invested in more visual content on its site

Another simple and fast way Home Depot Canada enabled more engagement on its website was by launching photo syndication. 

Photo syndication is the collection and distribution of visual UGC for a brand to the websites of retail partners who sell the brand’s products. Brands, or third-party providers on their behalf, collect photos taken by customers using a variety of methods, including post-interaction emails, sweepstakes, social media, and sampling programs. For our clients, Bazaarvoice authenticates the collected photos and then matches brand content to the product catalogs on retailer websites. 

Photo syndication helps retailers deliver an exceptional shopping experience by showcasing plenty of content on all of their products. But it doesn’t just help retailers. Brands can leverage photo syndication to ensure their most inspirational content is available wherever consumers are shopping. 

A majority of consumers (62%) are more likely to buy a product if they can see photos taken by other customers, according to Search Engine Journal. The surveyed consumers said photos help them make purchasing decisions for a myriad of reasons, including helping them see the quality of a product and seeing the product in action. 

After enabling photo syndication, Home Depot Canada saw a big return: there were over 900,000 photos available within the Bazaarvoice Network to instantly syndicate to Home Depot Canada. Now, 937,472 syndicated reviews have photos attached, 1,398,076 total photos have been syndicated, and 109,481 products have syndicated reviews with photos.

Home Depot Canada made a name for itself in the retail industry with its innovative—yet simple—approach to collecting more UGC for its vendors on Homedepot.ca. 

Get in touch with us here to learn more