I Changed The Way I Collect Reviews and It Was Worth It

0:00I recently changed the way that I collect testimonials or reviews and it is made an incredibly huge difference to my business and I want to explain why I did this. So to start, and I've talked about this on the show before, I used a company called Testimonial.TO. The reason I'm saying them out loud is because even though I don't use them anymore, I think the company and I think the product is great. However, I think it's limited to what it can do and that's why I had to switch. But if you run a business where it's not any commerce business, you're not using any sort of like Shopify type platform to sell your products. If you're selling exclusively like course products or digital products where you're not using something like Shopify, you don't care if those products are listed on your YouTube

1:03channel on Google, Merch in or anything like that. I think using Testimonial.TO is a great choice because it allows you to collect testimonials. You'll have to do this manually, of course. Not just written testimonials, but you can collect video testimonials and you can display them on your sites. This is a great tool, however, there's a reason I switched and here's the story. So I am dipping my toes into kind of another type of hobby and I'm not going to, I don't know if I've brought it up before, but I, yes, I probably have brought it up before, but I am building a little model train set in my brewery for fun for kind of almost like a bit, but I had to go buy and research model train stuff and you really, there's

2:07really like these old school websites where you can buy these, you know, this stuff and that makes sense to me because as a home brewer, which is another like older, older man hobby, the websites where you buy the ingredients and the equipment, a lot of those websites are dated because this, these hobbies have been around for a while, they don't really update their websites, they don't really have to, it's, it's a simple website, they're not trying to like hit, you know, it's a small group of people that they're advertising to, so it doesn't matter. And obviously it costs a lot of money to update the sites and a lot of these sites have like a really custom front end, meaning their sites are built custom and therefore date it, but they're pretty much all using Shopify as their back end now now. I was recently buying some model train stuff and I got an email sent to me about the, you know, the shipping details and it said, you need to download the shop app to track

3:10your shipments. So I said, okay, I've never downloaded this app before. I knew, I guess I knew what it was, it's a Shopify app and I downloaded it and I, when I was in the app, I could see all of my tracking information for all of the packages that I've purchased, not just from this one website, but from Amazon, from like I had, I have orders for record, like I pre-order a lot of records directly from the, the bands themselves or their record labels and a lot of them obviously, you know, you pre-order them so they're not shipped yet, but it'll say pending. I saw all of that and I was like, whoa, this is really cool because I can see all of the like, all of these things that I've purchased online and again, not just through Shopify, but it also connects with Amazon and what's interesting is that again, a lot of these websites use Shopify as their backend and so I'm looking

4:13at it going, well, okay, now I can track all these shipments, but then I looked and I saw there's a, you can actually do shopping on the app. It's not just a tracker and I'm sure I'm saying this to you and you've already heard of this. So I'm on this app and I see our products come up, you know, some universities products and I looked at it and I'm like, huh, I can see our books, I can see our courses and I was like, wait, where are these reviews coming from? Because I saw like our pull care handbook had like, I don't know, 25 reviews, I had five stars and I'm like, well, where's, how do, how are they getting the information? I completely did not know about this. Kind of feel like an idiot, but I'm like, I looked and I was reading these reviews that I had never seen before and I go, well, how do you find these? So I log in to Shopify and I realize there's a shop app or something sort of app you can

5:18go into and you can see your reviews. Now, you can't delete them, you can't unpublish them, you can reply to them. And I was like, oh, well, these are displaying on on the shop app, but my testimonials, the ones that I'm collecting using testimonial.to are not displaying because I'm like, well, I have more than 25 reviews for this product. I have hundreds. And so I was like, well, how do I, how do I connect these things? How do I get this all to talk to each other? And then I realized, well, those reviews that were coming in through the shop app were being displayed on our Google results. And I go, well, I need these all to work together because I need, I need, I want these reviews to be displayed on YouTube, on meta, on, on Pinterest, on every one of the TikTok even, on this shop app, if people are actually using the shop app to

6:24purchase stuff. So I'm like, I want these all to connect. And it turns out there are two apps that you can do this with. They work exclusively with Shopify. One of them is called judge.me. And the other one's called looks with an X O L O X. And after doing a bunch of research, I went with looks because they do video testimonials. And I do not believe judge.me has that also. I don't like the brand name judge.me. I didn't want anyone to see that because it, I don't know, it feels like it feels like bad branding where looks is sort of generic. And is obviously feels more mainstream and more, I guess, like more like it feels more like an app. So I ended up going what looks turns out. It's the same exact price that I was paying for this other testimonial app. The difference though is because it's built into Shopify, every review that I get

7:31will display on the shop app will display in YouTube, Google, meta, Pinterest, TikTok, everywhere. They're unified. And you get these generic stars that you can use. And also, they have a lot more widgets that you can use to on your website. So I was able to install like a carousel different. I was able to install stars. I was able to install like individual testimonials throughout our landing pages. All you can do this by the way off Shopify. If you, if your web pages are hosted off of Shopify, say on WordPress, like my some of mine are, you can actually still display those reviews from the Shopify stuff to your website. And so I was like, all right, well, this is exactly how testimonial.to works, except it's connected directly to Shopify. And it costs the same amount. And it gives me more options to display testimonials. Not only that. And this is why it completely changed the game for me.

8:39It's all it also manages the sending of reviews. And it makes the review process so much easier. Because I didn't realize how much friction I was putting in front of people to create these reviews. So here's, so just by implementing this, I saw our review count basically double in the same period of time. And here's why I think that is when I was using testimonial.to again, great company, great product, very manual. But I had to send out an email after someone purchased. So I had to set this all up in clavio or if you're using something like kit or whatever, you'd have to set this up manually where after somebody purchases, you know, you wait seven, 14 days, whatever. And then I would send them an email that said, hey, would you like to leave a review? And I would just have a button that said write a review.

9:44Well, then if no one clicked that button, I would send a follow up reminder. And that was pretty much it. Now, I was able to collect reviews that way. But I wasn't getting a lot of video reviews. Very rarely did people upload photos. They did, but they it's pretty rare. And people really didn't, they didn't add the start like an accurate star count. So if they, you know, maybe if they liked the product, but they were like, oh, it's okay. They would still give it five stars because it's kind of the default. And we, and then also like the website was just, I don't know, it's just a little old school and confusing and maybe not necessarily built for social or sorry, built for mobile. And more built for collecting testimonials over reviews. And I think there's an important

10:45difference. A testimonial is almost similar to like a case study. Whereas a review can be short and sweet. And it's obviously built for like physical products. And I think people understand the terminology review over the word testimonial. I think testimonial may be too big of a word that's not really good for marketing. And so I was very clear in using the word review as opposed to the word testimonial when I was asking for this. So the bottom line is, again, it worked the way that I did it. And then I was able to automatically display those reviews on our website. But it would only exist on the website itself in one specific box on the on the website. So I wasn't able to add like a like starred reviews like an aggregate of the starred reviews. I wasn't able to add in like I was able to add individual reviews. But I couldn't

11:51update them like it would be hard to create them. There was not many widgets that you can create with testimonial.io as opposed to looks. And so I ended up installing this. And I imported all of the reviews over. And so I took all the reviews out of testimonial.io imported them into look. So now we have like hundreds of reviews. Unfortunately, because those reviews were imported, they won't appear on these third party platforms. They will only appear on our website. Which kind of sucks. But now going forward, any new review that we get through this platform, which again, costs the same amount of money for us per month will appear on Google merchant or like our Google are actually like Google products page or our Google result, which is incredible. And I think. And so I was able to to add this. We were getting more reviews because they make the review process so easy. It's like you start with just like you can collect you can just say how many stars it is.

12:56And then it goes into another screen where it says do you want to leave a video review or a photo. And if you do, you get like a certain discount off your next purchase, which is a bigger incentive. People leave their review. They don't have to upload a photo of themselves. They don't have to choose which product they bought. It's also very specifically tied to each product they bought. So what's interesting about that versus testimonial.io is for us because we had different products. I kind of forced people to tell me which product they bought. And everything just felt generic. When we were asking them to leave a review, like leave a review for the product that you just purchased. Well, what product is that? And it's like they'd have to kind of remember what that was. Whereas this new version, because it's tied to their order, they know exactly what they're responding to. And I was able to even go back and send out an email for the people who purchased in the last 90 days to start getting new reviews. And I've just gotten so many. I'm getting like five to six

14:02close to 10 reviews a day. And it is, I think they just reduced the friction of leaving a review because that's what they're, that's what their whole company. That's what they all do. And it is just making a, what the other thing that's happening, I think, is I think we're increasing sales because people can now see the star reviews. And they're legit. The only thing I can do is they tell you you should not delete any reviews. It's like against policy. But you can unpublish a review. And you can even ask people to update a review that has so many good features about leaving a review that, and that it's all built in the app. So like, I don't have to like manually email anybody that say, Hey, you know, you left like a one word review. What the, what gives? You know what I mean? It will automatically, like if somebody leaves a review and they leave like one word, which is kind

15:05of awful, I'll keep it unpublished. And then there's a button where you can submit for them to review it and to like update their own review. And they often will do this, which is pretty cool. And you can, you can have total store reviews or individual product reviews. And I've kept it to only individual product reviews because store reviews are really not helpful for us, because we don't sell that many products. So we only have like four products that we sell. And yeah, and it gives context to what they're leaving a review for. It makes it easy for them to leave a review. And I think the biggest game changer for me is that it updates across all of these third party platforms. That one is massive. And yeah, and it's just crazy that it's taken this long to know that because I'm not a Shopify user. I don't, I'm not a power user. You know,

16:06like Shopify is just a platform that we use to sell our books because we have to. We have to have some sort of like, you know, shipping option. But I also was like, well, if we're going to use it for shipping books, you might also use it for selling courses and digital products as well. So, you know, I'm already paying for it. Might as well use it for all of the shopping carts. And because it's so easy and so mobile friendly, I think we are just getting more sales because of it. Just just being on something like Shopify other than some, you know, if we were using like, we use Podia right now for our course platform. And they have their own shopping cart system. But it's not familiar, right? It's like its own thing. And you kind of have to like, and it can be confusing, especially for our audience, which tends to skew older. And but they've almost definitely have bought something on Amazon. And they almost definitely have bought something through Shopify

17:07in some way, whether they knew it or not. And so at least it all kind of feels familiar. And they may have their, their information already added to it. So it makes it much that it reduces the friction of every single sale. Not to mention that the company looks that we're using for these reviews is also streamlining stream, streamlining that, streamlining that process. Oh my God. Because they have to do it for everybody. And that's all they do. All they do. The whole company is just like, let, how do we optimize collecting review them as many reviews as possible. And it's just, I think, I think we're just going to have, I think this alone is going to make a massive difference to our conversion rate. I really do. I feel like I'm already seeing it. I've looked at our conversion rate since I've, since I've installed this. It's only been two weeks maybe. I see it's gone up a couple points. So yeah. And I still have more things to implement. But

18:15it's pretty dialed in right now. And I think, yeah, going forward, this is going to be an absolute game changer for us, especially dude, especially people who are like searching on Google for, like, it's what's crazy is like, if you go on Google right now and you type in pool care handbook, like just one of our products, you see our search result come up. And it's got the stars built into it. Like in, in Google, no one, like, and other companies have that, or you can see like, we're now compared to Amazon books who have those star ratings, but they don't have nearly as many stars as us. So we, it just looks good in the aggregate, which is, I mean, anyway, I know that was a good giant sales pitch for looks. But if you're on Shopify, you kind of have to use it. I know there's the judge dot me as the other one, but I'm advocating for looks not to mention, by the way, their customer service is the best I've ever, I've ever used in any software product right now.

19:17Because that's hard to explain. There's no AI. You literally pull up a chatbot within Shopify, and somebody's answering you within five minutes. And you're literally having a conversation with somebody. It's crazy fast. And I even told them that because I was so impressed by it. And I hope they continue and not, I hope they continue doing that. And they don't pivot to AI because that, that alone is worth its weight in gold and worth the price of admission. So that's the whole story. Let me know what you think. Shoot me an email, mad at jivinesci.com. Just go to jivinesci.com. You can subscribe to the newsletter. And I'll talk to you next time.