When you're selling a product online, it can be tempting to focus on rising above the noise and making a splash. After all, there is a lot of competition out there. So perhaps you decide to load your product detail page (PDP) with as many relevant keywords as possible to make sure people discover your listing. Or maybe you choose to fill the space with overpromising adjectives, glowing testimonials, or press accolades. Maybe all of the above. Which could be all well and good for a brand new product that has yet to reach the public. But once people are actually using your product, this is a strategy that needs to be regularly revisited. Because there are people who can describe what you're selling in a much more relatable way than you can — your customers.
The advantage of selling on a site like Amazon, other than its massive reach, is that it offers a robust environment for reviews, creating access to invaluable feedback that you can wisely put to use. While you may have been able to come up with the best way to market your product in the beginning, your customers are telling you how to improve that messaging. You just have to know how to listen.
Obviously, you could meticulously pore through every review of your product on every site where it's being sold, which, again, might work in the beginning. But when you're operating at scale, this becomes unrealistic. If there are thousands and thousands of reviews to go through, it becomes way too easy for the signals to become lost in the noise.
What those signals are, in this case, are trends. Sure, it's great to know how many people give you five stars or three stars, but there is much more useful information to be found if you know how to dive into the data. Specifically, the question isn't just about whether or not people like your product. It's about why they like it. Or why they don't. Or even why they like it, but feel it could be better — or could be represented better.
For example, this probiotic product from Nature's Bounty. From the bottle to the "About this item" section and beyond, the statement that continuously jumps out the most is "100 million (organisms/active cultures)." This was clearly determined to be a selling point that would increase customer interest. However, another product from the same company shown in this listing boasts "20 billion live cultures." Suddenly, the first number doesn't seem so impressive. And customers would seem to agree.
With a customer-feedback analysis tool like Yogi, it becomes much easier to see these things at work. Yogi aggregates all of your customer reviews across sources, then maps the results in a way that lets you visualize what people are actually talking about.
For this particular product, you can see which aspects of the product were discussed most often in the scatter plot below. Just below pricing (which will likely be a top theme for just about any product in any category), you can see that people were most likely to be discussing the probiotic quality here.
By digging a little deeper, you can see not just the most common themes, but also which direction the reviews skew for each one. The Yogi dashboard not only reveals the number of reviews for each theme and what percentage of the total it comprises, but also the average sentiment for each one. This is a crucial window into where you're doing things right — and where you're doing things wrong.
As you can see above, there are only two themes for this product that tend to skew negative in reviews, and the strongest negative sentiment comes from — surprise, surprise — packaging and labeling. (Which, at nearly ten percent, also accounts for a very significant percentage of the total reviews.)
What we can take away here is that customers are actually being turned off the very information that's being highlighted to make the product more enticing. A look into individual reviews will show people calling out the variance between "millions" and "billions" and drawing multiple conclusions — all of them negative. To some, it makes this product seem less potent than alternatives, while to others it just causes confusion about what the numbers really mean.
On the other hand, the trends also show extremely positive sentiment for "Price and Delivery" and "Product Efficacy" — which is great news. It means people are happy with the cost, the ease of getting the product, and how well it works, and they're talking about it. Which begs the question: why aren't these things being focused on in the description instead?
When you know what people love about your product — and what they take issue with — it creates an ideal opportunity to change the way you talk about it. By visualizing the customers' voice, you can learn to speak to the things they care about in a way that will resonate.
Better yet, the more you learn to incorporate these trends and think like your customers, the more all of the sentiments will shift positively, and the more people will be happy with their purchase. They'll feel more confident that the product is exactly what was promised, and that it was promoted in a way that they could connect to and comprehend.
And that, of course, leads to more happy customers, more great reviews — and even more trend data that you can then use to continue to improve your PDPs, packaging, and overall marketing.
Interested in seeing what Yogi can do for your brand? Schedule a 1:1 demo today.
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