An In-Depth Guide on How to Get Amazon Reviews

You’ve been working with Amazon selling for a little bit now. You’ve discovered that verified Amazon reviews are worth their weight in gold for your product rank. Unless you are exceedingly lucky, you will have to perform multiple steps to get Amazon reviews.

Convincing people to leave a review takes time and dedication. It also means approaching each customer from multiple avenues, some of them unconventional. Over time, you will find yourself gaining reviews without adding more effort or money.

So as an Amazon seller, putting a system in place is vital to avoiding burnout. In this tutorial, we’ll work through an example system so your Amazon products have the best opportunity to gain reviews.

For the purposes of this tutorial, you’ll need to have an Amazon seller account. You’ll also need a product listing you would like to get more reviews on to increase its competitiveness. In addition, you’ll need:

As with most items, processes take time to set up. In this case, the time splits into two distinct categories. The first category is single commitments. During these, you will set up processes that continue automatically. Taking the time to automate parts of the customer experience raises the overall level of your brand.

The second time allotment is for ongoing promotion. Some of the steps for securing reviews need you to build and maintain a presence. The maintenance shouldn’t take more than a few hours a week, but it’s something to be aware of.

When you started building your Amazon account, you got ahold of a logo and some graphics of your products. Whether you made those yourself or hired it out, it works well when showing your brand.

 As you go through the steps to obtain better Amazon reviews, some of them will require graphic design work. Whether it’s creating something clever so that users want to reward you with a review or just keeping your branding, these skills are a necessity.

To be able to talk to our customers freely, we need to be able to communicate with them. An email management system holds the details of people who have joined, along with specific descriptors for them called tags. This allows us to talk to the people who need our products without annoying the ones who already bought it.

Many email management systems let us use their software for free. In some cases, this is only on a time-based trial. For others, it’s based on how many people are on the list. The latter possibility is excellent if you’re unsure about the method. 

When we look at our Amazon product listing and how to convince people to leave us a review, we need to provide Amazon customers with as many opportunities as possible. If we only ask for Amazon reviews once, not everyone will see the request. People might even outright discard it. That certainly won’t help us in our quest to improve product ranking.

Amazon sends out follow up emails with each order. These typically include an initial shipping notification, delivery notification, feedback request, and review request. You’ve probably heard that not all the emails turn up for all Amazon buyers. Unfortunately, sellers have abused the Amazon buyer-seller communication system before, so email spam filters catch Amazon messages now.

Amazon has been clamping down on buyer-seller communication in response to customer complaints, so digital communication is more difficult. That leaves us with an easy, non-digital option. Adding a package insert is a wonderful way to ask for Amazon reviews without being invasive.

The best package insert is straightforward and welcoming. If we push the customer, they may leave us a negative review. Instead, talk about how much feedback would mean, how to contact you with questions, and so on. Make sure to include your branding elements when designing your insert.

Once you’ve created an insert you’re happy with, try it out. It may take some variation to get the response you would like in terms of Amazon reviews.

Your customers are always on the hunt for the best deal. Often, customers pass over higher ranked products if they feel they’re not getting what they’re paying for. As an Amazon seller, there are two options for how to use this bargain hunting to your advantage.

The first choice is to bundle your products into similar groups. This presents to your customer as getting more at a reasonable price, even if you as the seller account for costs when pricing the listing. This idea of throwing in useful “bonus” items may be just the thing to secure solid Amazon reviews.

The second option is to include some form of free content. Even for physical products, you can offer eBooks or online materials that cost you nothing. You can create an online community for the users of your product. You can even include the free materials in your shipping package. All these options convince the customer they’re getting more, and therefore they view you in a more favorable light when it comes time to review.

So, we know Amazon likes to keep a tight hold on their customer’s contact details. We also know that if we could get ahold of them, we could persuade them to buy more of the same products. The question then becomes how to get ahold of those details.

Since we’ve already discussed a packaging insert asking for reviews, another item you can add to it is an invitation to a mailing list. If people love the product, they will be happy to know more about the company in general and other products. If not, no harm done.

Now, one of the reasons we build out these email lists is so that there are no limits on what we can say. On our own email list, we can ask people to leave complimentary reviews or consider getting another product. Plus, it’s a terrific opportunity to connect with customers on a more personal level.

We can all agree that there are a lot of connection opportunities online. If we find where people are who would love our product, then we can target them before and after they buy. You will probably want to start on a platform you’re familiar with for this one.

Let’s look at an example of how this would work. If we’re selling a fire starter kit, the people most likely to buy it are campers and survivalists. If we can find a popular Forums and Facebook Groups where they hang out, we can engage with this audience on their home ground.

Amazon has some stringent rules on reviews. If you violate the rules, not only will the reviews be removed, your seller account may be suspended. It’s therefore essential to have read the Amazon Terms of Service (TOS) and keep on top of current changes.

Amazon has implemented rules banning buying reviews. This can be anything from paying someone to write the review to offering a free product in exchange for a review. While there are a lot of sneaky options around this, eventually Amazon tends to find out.

The other big issue is targeting Amazon customers off the platform. Since big data collection has become more available, third-party services have popped up to help sellers reach buyers without the buyer soliciting the contact. The punishment should Amazon find you doing this is account suspension.

We as Amazon sellers need to put time and consideration into our products to increase their ranks. Reviews are a critical factor in where our products list in a search. Developing a reliable system that works for your products will save a lot of time in this endeavor.

It’s vital for you to pick the steps that work best for your business to focus on first. Over time, you can build a stellar system that brings in excellent Amazon reviews without overextending you and your time. After all, you got into selling on Amazon for the freedom, not to be tied down to your account dashboard every day hunting for reviews.

This post is brought to you by our friends at Zon.Tools. Zon.Tools automates Amazon Sponsored Products best practices and allows you to manage your Campaigns in an unprecedented way. Its Smart Engines are extremely flexible and can adapt to any Amazon advertising strategy or goal.