Sam Decker is chief marketing officer of Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales. You can follow him on Twitter @SamDecker.  By now, most companies realize their customers are their most valuable advocates – and when their customers share their credible opinions via reviews, it increases sales of their products and services and deepens brand engagement. The majority of large brands now offer some type or ratings and review system on their sites, because consumers now expect to be able to read and contribute peer reviews before making purchase decisions – so much so that some 82% of consumers say they find reviews “extremely valuable or valuable,” according to a recent survey. If all you’re doing is offering rating or review functionality, you’re likely not getting the maximum benefit.  If you already have a ratings and reviews system in place – or if you haven’t yet taken the plunge – there are several steps you can take to improve the effectiveness of your consumer reviews programs.  Done correctly, ratings and reviews deliver a significant increase in sales; one third of retailers reported an 11-20% overall increase in conversions as a result of adding reviews to their sites, while consumers are willing to pay up to 99% more for a 5-star rated product than for a 4-star rated product.  But engaging in a conversation with your customers isn’t just a way to generate sales; having reviews on your site also boosts SEO traffic and page views, increases average order value, lowers returns, reduces customer service calls, and results in more satisfied customers overall. What’s more, companies can analyze ratings and review trends to improve overall marketing strategies, improve customer service, and fine-tune merchandising.  Ask people to register or log in to post a review. While some companies see this as a barrier to generating a critical mass of reviews, we’ve found that requiring registration does not have a significant impact on the number of reviews created (though it does tend to improve the overall quality of reviews), and the value of linking reviews to a customer profile is enormous. When you know who is writing reviews, what they are saying, what products they’ve reviewed, what products they’ve purchased, etc, you can use this information to segment messages to that person and to see overall trends that will lead to better marketing decisions. What’s more, when you require registration to write reviews, you can see who is writing the most reviews and reward frequent reviewers with badges, discounts, and other incentives.  You can tell a lot about your business by reading and analyzing reviews. In fact, review content can positively impact every function of a business if you collect data in the right way. Analyze the content of reviews, ratings and opinion trends, and the number of reviews for certain products, then compare this data to web analytics, CRM, and purchase data to get a complete picture of how your merchandising mix and overall marketing programs are performing. Make sure multiple teams – technology, product design, marketing, sales, management – have access to this data, so they can use it to improve their business results.  Don’t just leave ratings and reviews on your website, put them to use in all of your marketing materials. You can include top-rated products and snippets from positive reviews in search ads, e-mail campaigns, circulars and catalogues, and on in-store banners. Integrate with FacebookFacebook and TwitterTwitter, allowing reviewers to automatically share their reviews to these and other social networking platforms, virally spreading your brand’s review content across the web. One of our customers, Office Depot, included top-rated products in its paid search campaigns and saw a 156% increase in ROI on that campaign vs. its traditional paid search ads.  Research has shown that even one review on a website will instantly drive up conversion on that product. But, of course, the more reviews your site has, the bigger the impact. To encourage people to post ratings and reviews, offer sweepstakes and prizes to reviewers, give badges to top reviews or list their names on a leader board, and promote participation in the review program on all of your marketing materials. You can also implement Ask & Answer type services, where people ask each other for purchase advice, or invite people to discuss their personal stories with your brand, products and services. The more content your customers create about your brand, the more your sales will increase.  You want to encourage people to be open and honest in their reviews – a good mix of positive and negative reviews is credible and authentic – but you don’t want to leave rants and irrelevant reviews up on your site. Make sure you work with a reviews provider that offers full moderation (using humans to scan reviews, not just fallible natural language technologies), or task people in-house to moderate reviews.  If someone writes a flamingly negative review, perhaps due to a customer service mishap or a defective product, you don’t have to leave that review on your site – but make sure to reach out to that person offering customer support, as well as with a mitigating gesture like a discount.  While it’s the review content that really counts – some 80% of people value the narrative review content more than the star-rating in making purchase decisions – ratings are still crucial. We’ve found that products with star ratings receive on average a 120% higher click-through than those that don’t have ratings, which means ratings are the “eye candy” that pull people in to seek more information on a product.  You need to keep people engaged with your brand over the long term, so encourage participation in your reviews platform by promoting the program through social channels like Facebook and Twitter. Think in terms of building a “participation chain” that cultivates user involvement, where each action builds upon the one before through sharing. By lengthening and deepening customers’ participation on your brand site, participation chains improve brand opinion, increase sales, and make customers more likely to recommend a brand to their friends.  By seeing ratings and reviews for what they really are – an integral part of your entire business strategy, and not just a widget on your site – you’ll be well on your way to attaining maximum value from consumer-generated content.  - Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Small Businesses - 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business - HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business - 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses - 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy - 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business  Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, Barghest
Studies show that adding product ratings to your site can have a big impact on sales. Here are 7 best practices for integrating your customers' reviews for maximum ROI.