Customer Reviews on Steroids

Customer Reviews On Steroids

What we're doing to boost our customer reviews

At Rugby Bricks (Rugby D2C Brand), we've been making a big push to increase our word-of-mouth marketing and this week, we're looking at customer reviews.

We want to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to make a purchase decision by showing them how much our customers love our products.

We pick the odd review here and then with our post-purchase emails, but we want to ramp this up.

If you've been reading the method for a while now, you'll know incentives influence behaviour.

We sell training tools for rugby like kicking tee's, boot bags, gripper socks, etc.

So we've updated our leave a review email with a free downloadable training program that matches the product they've just brought in exchange for a product review.

If someone buys a kicking tee - we offer a free kicking program. If they buy a rebounder ball - we provide a free passing program.

When someone leaves a review at our Shopify store, they receive the link for a free program PDF download.

Immediately we've seen the number of reviews we receive each week more than double.

Notes: Qualitrics says 93% of people read reviews before purchasing before buying a product - the more you have, the safer someone feels buying from you.

Don't Do This When You Launch A New Product

How we f*&ked up launching a new product

We tried to introduce a new membership at our gym and failed.

We launched a Pilates membership 3 months ago and only have 5 members. It's losing us ~$2,000 monthly (a lot for a small business).

We started a post-natal pilates membership to help post-partum Mums build back abdominal and pelvic floor strength.

What did we do wrong?

We didn't talk to enough of our target market to understand their problems.

The pain point is real, a weak pelvic floor and abdominals can cause women all sorts of issues, and we checked google search volumes to ensure there is demand for this type of thing.

But and it's a big but - new Mums have a wee bub to take care of, and that comes before everything else. Most don't have the time or support they'd need to shoot off for an hour or two to do some Pilates.

Because we created and launched it before talking to people or trying to sell it, we missed a rather obvious issue in hindsight.

And now we're scrambling to figure out how to make this thing work. We skipped the learning stage, and that mistake might be too expensive for us to fix.

The moral of the story is don't be like us. Talk to people first, and try to sell your idea first. Building first often doesn't work.

The silly thing is I knew all this before we did it - I've been through it before but thought I knew better this time...

Notes: Try to sell something before you build it - you'll save yourself from many expensive mistakes.

"The great thing about entrepreneurship is you get to spend your time building something you enjoy. Most people don't get to do this. They are stuck in jobs they hate. I had the time of my life." - Sam Walton

Seeking Truth - Taking Things To Their Extreme

How I find the truth.

When looking at people's theories, you can take them to their extreme to see if there is any truth in the matter.

Too often, in conversation, media or on social media, people make definitive statements with a level of confidence that makes them sound true but are either completely false or marginally true.

"Reducing work hours will improve your company productivity."

Will it?

Okay, what if everyone in my company goes on holiday for a year - will productivity really increase?

"Succesful people just get lucky."

Okay, so we can all sit on the couch and watch tv for the rest of the time, and some of us will still make our dreams come true...

Where-as you can see, there might be some truth to a statement like "increasing benefits will increase people's standard of living." Someone with $0 will be homeless, while someone receiving $1,000,000 per week - might be living the good life.

You can apply this to anything in your business.

"Facebook ads don't work" - If you spend $0 on FB ads, then no, they won't. If you spent $1,000,000 on FB ads - will your results still be zero? Most likely, something good will happen, and FB Ads do work; you just suck at them (not you, the other you).

Notes: Take statements to their extreme to find the truth.