Red Kite Creative

reviews

Weekly Links Roundup – Testimonials, Product Reviews, GDPR, Analytics Alternatives

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

I always encourage clients to display testimonials on their site, if their industry allows them. Testimonials are a great way to influence prospective customers toward purchasing your products or services. And reviews let your customers speak – even if they are not always positive, how you handle negative reviews is important, too. Letting prospects see how you take care of problems is at least as important as the glowing testimonials! Learn more about why you should add testimonials and reviews to your site.

…And along that vein here’s a great guide to adding product reviews to your WordPress site. This is a comprehensive overview with a good selection of recommended plugins, and why you might want to use one of them even if you’re running an ecommerce site with WooCommerce which already has built-in reviews.

If you were in a tizzy trying to get your site into compliance with GDPR last week, you were far from alone. Read this opinion post  on GDPR from the New York Times – it might make you feel better.

Finally… if you collect traffic data for your website, did you know that Google Analytics is not the only option? That’s what I said. Learn about Kissmetrics, Matomo (formerly Piwik) and AFS Analytics. All except Kissmetrics offer a free plan as well as commercial pricing.

 

A Few Surprising Facts About Modern Online Shoppers

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Some things that may be a bit troubling if you run an online shop…

44% of buyers now expect to receive an email if they left items in their shopping cart without purchasing, says a study from Bronto Software. There may be an ulterior motive to this behavior – almost 40% of these people expect to get a coupon in that reminder email, either for a discount or for free shipping. The problem is that another 32% of them find those reminders very annoying and it’s likely to make them less likely to return to the website in the future… It’s a balancing act, apparently.

Also, it seems that more than 70% of shoppers use online shopping carts like a wish list – storing items for later view or purchase as they shop around at multiple websites when making buying decisions.

You can get a copy of the white paper from Bronto Software here.

Another study by PowerReviews showed that over half of online shoppers needed some kind of reward or recognition to write a product review. Interestingly, the biggest users of reviews are Millenials – and they are also the least likely to write them.

Personally, I tend to write them because I’ve found the previous reviews left about what I bought to be really helpful – particularly on a site like Amazon. How about you?

Adding Simple User Reviews to Your WordPress Website

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Need to add some very simple reviews to your website – like reviews for a service or product, or even testimonials – but are not using a shopping cart that will make it easy for you? You can create a form for visitors to add reviews or testimonials and display them throughout your site – no coding required!

This tutorial uses no coding – just the popular Gravity Forms plugin (a commercial one, but the best forms plugin you can buy IMO) and a custom post type plugin.

I’ll walk you through the process step by step, showing you how to create a custom post type, create and add your reviews form, then display the new reviews in a widget on your site.

This article was originally published in Tuts+ so head over there to read the rest.