More Reviews, More Buyer Confidence
As customer traffic to its ecommerce site grows, Rack Room Shoes has seen first hand how user generated content (UGC) both inspires customers with new ways to style their products and also increases consumer confidence. Additionally, customer testimonials are helping fuel its Buy Online, Pick Up in Store business through helping inspire customer confidence to add products to their shopping cart that they then can pick up later.
PowerReviews has been Rack Room Shoes’ trusted partner in developing a best-in-class ratings and reviews program that has yielded substantial rewards. Notably, the retailer has experienced a significant surge in ratings and review volume in recent years—shooting up from over 700,000 reviews in 2020 to more than 3.6 million in 2023, showcasing a remarkable 43% increase in both native and inbound syndicated review volume from brands.
“In the online space it’s important to provide as much information so customers can build confidence in their purchase decisions,” said Megan Volk, Ecommerce Specialist, Rack Room Shoes. “Making reviews and user generated content from other customers available helps bridge that gap for our shoppers and makes a huge difference in conversion if they can’t stop into one of our stores and interact with the product in person.
“To put it simply, the more reviews, the more confidence we can provide to our shoppers that they are buying a quality popular product,” she said.
Relying on PowerReviews Content Moderation, Analytics and Insights
Rack Room Shoes leverages PowerReviews’ content moderation services to ensure credibility and authenticity.
“The PowerReviews moderation program and the platform user experience really helps simplify, streamline and optimize the process of collecting and displaying user generated content. We can easily find, moderate, and analyze all in the same place,” said Megan Volk, Ecommerce Specialist at Rack Room Shoes.
When the Rack Room Shoes team logs into the platform, they can see the moderated reviews needing to be published and can use analytics to understand the products where review volume is growing, or alternatively, where it needs to grow. Review moderation also catches and filters out Personally Identifiable Information (PII), for best-practice regulatory compliance.
“Our partnership continues to grow and we love how PowerReviews has expanded its analytics and reporting over the years, giving us more ways to surface Voice of the Customer insights,” said Preston Munger, Ecommerce Sales Director, for Rack Room Shoes.
“PowerReviews isn’t just a platform to house reviews for us, it’s a tool that helps harness customer feedback about our products,” he added. “Reviews give us insightful information that we use to help address product issues, enhance the customer experience, and help guide our buyers with purchasing.
“I use so many different applications that require a lot of manual digging to find what I need. The PowerReviews platform is very straightforward and easy to use and find information, with all the work needing to be completed all in one place,” he said.
Revving Up Review Syndication by 354% Year-Over-Year
A key focus for Rack Room Shoes is increasing inbound review syndication from brands using RackRoomShoes.com as a key retail sales channel. In one year’s time, the total number of syndication partners has grown from 28 to 73 – an incredible 160% increase. Moreover, the total volume of review syndication has increased by 419,000 in a six-month period, and 354% year-over-year.
“We recognized there was a huge syndication opportunity to increase our overall review volume beyond native review collection,” said Volk. “PowerReviews really makes review syndication easy. We’re able to send and receive product reviews from multiple partners no matter what reviews platform they are using.”
Recommendations Amplify Ratings & Review Program Results
Rack Room Shoes has adopted several recommendations and best practices from the PowerReviews team to help improve its ratings & reviews program. These include updating the format for ratings & reviews email requests and sending a second follow up email after 10 days to any emails that are unopened. These efforts resulted in an over 50% improvement in native review response rates. Additionally, incorporating a character count meter to the Write-A-Review form resulted in a 3.5% increase in review length in only a 90-day period.
“We’ve had a really good relationship with PowerReviews; they respond quickly and are very helpful with best practices and recommendations. The analytics are very easy to digest and helpful for me to share in our Voice of the Customer team meetings.”
Empowering Customers on the Path to Purchase with User-Generated Content
While Rack Room Shoes boasts a successful ratings and reviews program, the company remains committed to innovation, seeking novel ways to leverage user-generated content to educate customers and unify their digital and brick & mortar channels.
“Nothing is really off the table,” said Munger. “We’ve talked about incorporating more user generated content in our store environment such as QR codes that could lead to reviews or putting the star rating on our shelves and using it in our email and digital advertising.”
One thing is for certain: The Rack Room Shoes team will continue to innovate on leveraging the crucial Voice of the Customer to continue to pave the path to purchase for its valued customers.
Results
ROI Delivered
