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| Bonjour Millionaire, What’s in a review? Everything. Who sees reviews? Everyone important (your customers). Who controls what is published? That depends how you play it… Was this email forwarded to you? ON THIS EPISODE OF GO-TO-MILLIONS How to work your reviewsThe best performing ads you should run use your customer’s own words to tell your story. That’s true of any ad account and any brand I’ve ever run or come across. You take their words, you use their colloquial language, and they sell for you. How do you stumble upon said reviews? By taking a very manual approach to this very important thing. By putting review approvals and sorting into very capable hands. And, by logging the best reviews you’ve received so that there are many, many choices to pull from as you test your way into new angles, new stories, new personas, and new funnels. Sounds tedious! It is! Your reviews are powerful. Everyone knows they’re the only words on your site out of your control. You can control them, on your own site. But not too much. Because unless you sell only on your own site, or unless your customer is very easily persuaded (rare these days), the truth of your products and the real market sentiment available is published in full on Amazon and wherever else you sell. But a stranger saying you’re great will always beat you saying the same thing. They’re pulling double-duty now, because they both inform the individual consumer staring at your PDP, but they ALSO inform the robots reading them & deciding whether to recommend you at all. Agentic is here. Have you heard? In the age of agentic where the robots will crawl your site but also Reddit, you can’t outrun your reviews or true customer reaction. If your reviews don’t match your marketing, you lose the sale AND the algorithm. Love that for us. TLDR yes, you should be watching them like a hawk. Auditing them is a real job, and doing it wrong (or worse, ignoring altogether) gets expensive in more ways than 1. 🦅 OUR GOLDEN REVIEW RULES⚖️: Don’t touch anything without knowing the rules. No hack for this 1, because this is where people get cute & get burned. What you CAN do: moderate for policy, like spam, profanity, obvious fakeness. But what you CANNOT legally do is bury your negative reviews and pretend they don’t exist. The FTC’s review rule has been in effect since 2024, and can run you 50k PER violation. As of last December, they started sending letters. 🚪: Let the bad 1s in. On purpose! Wall-to-wall perfect 5.0s are suspect, to shoppers and to AI. Those 5 stars don’t mean much without a few honest 3s & 4s. And P.S. answering a rough 1 in public builds more trust than deleting it ever could. Speaking of which… 👨❤️👨: Respond like a human, on a schedule. Replying to reviews, good AND bad, is another powerful signal - a positive 1! Reply to the angry ones quickly, before they get to rotting on your PDP & scaring everyone off. Same thing for ad comments. Leave unattended and you lose $. 🌟: Reward the review instead of the rating. More reviews are always a good thing. You can toss loyalty points or other incentives at shoppers for leaving them (extra for photos/video IMO). But tread carefully: the second you start giving out points for positive reviews, congrats, you’re back in the “that’s illegal” penalty box! Pay for effort, and keep it moving. Also, I don’t love to use real dollars to get job the done of smartly controlled automations and copywriting. IF YOU CAN SAVE LOYALTY POINTS AND CREDITS FOR REVENUE-DRIVEN ACTIONS (customer places an order), do that. I do that. 👯: Make your reviews match everywhere you exist. Yes, you have control over the reviews on your site. But if your site shows flawless 5-star averages, but your Sephora/Amazon/Credo/TikTok etc reviews tell a different story, that’s another demerit on your trustworthiness. 1 method: syndicate your real reviews out to Google Shopping, Meta, and retail partners, so the story is consistent everywhere someone (or some bot) goes looking. : Mine your reviews for real person language. I mentioned this last week, but if you aren’t stealing language from your reviews, you’re basically refusing to use free market research. These are the things people type into google and ChatGPT. Make sure you speak the same language. 🌱: Seed a new launch the right way. The hardest reviews to get are the first 5, but a PDP with 0 reviews is like an empty restaurant during dinner rush (nobody wants to be the 1st one in). Make sure collecting early reviews is part of your launch plan. And, with peace and love, if a product is new and has no reviews, hide the review widget. Nothing makes me cringe more than a gorg, perfect PDP with 3 reviews showing on a site that has thousands and thousands of orders a day. Doesn’t show off your scale. Looks amature. Again, with peace and love. Bring the widget on site after 100 reviews are collected. Sponsored by Audiense 📕: 91% of Americans will delay purchase to wait for a discount.  GO-TO-MEME  In summary: reviews are the most powerful thing on your site. It’s good to audit them like an asset, and if you work this right you will be rewarded. That’s all for today. Would love to know if you disagree with any of these/how you handle reviews! Also, I have something for us that my team and I think really captures the energy and essence of what we’re all about here in these halls. Yours, | |||||||
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