Get Better Sales with WooCommerce Product Reviews & Automator

If you’re running a WooCommerce business, you could be sitting on a treasure trove of free and highly effective advertising. No, we’re not talking about starting a podcast. We’re talking about product reviews.

In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how you can use Uncanny Automator to turn your customers’ feedback into repeat business.

Encourage your customers to leave a review with tantalizing offers and share your highest ratings with the whole world. It won’t cost you anything to get started so let’s dive in!

Why Product Reviews Matter

Product reviews are a great way to build on your previous successes and improve upon your past missteps. Most importantly, they’re crucial for bolstering your bottom line!

Product Reviews Improve SEO

Search engines such as Google consider a number of factors when indexing search results. Word counts, keyword density and content updates are just some of the variables that figure into search engine algorithms. Product reviews boost your keyword density, keep your product pages updated and lively and improve your word count. It’s like free, consumer-generated content!

Product Reviews Build Trust & Credibility

If you’re like most small business owners, word-of-mouth and referrals are probably your most powerful marketing tools. It’s how you build trust within your community and grow your customer base. You can think of product reviews as a digital expansion of this organic marketing strategy. Collect more reviews to generate credibility and engage with your customers’ reviews to gain their trust.

Product Reviews Reduce Returns

More often than not, customer returns aren’t reflective of a bad product—it simply wasn’t what the customer was looking for. While product descriptions are great for giving customers the information they need to find what they’re looking for, reviews add invaluable context. Having your customers share their experiences through product reviews can reduce the chances of the right product ending up in the wrong hands.

Product Reviews Make Better Products

Negative reviews aren’t bad—they’re opportunities! Show your customers that you’re listening to their feedback by incorporating it into future product and service releases. It’s a great way to keep your existing customers coming back and new ones lining up, regardless of whether or not you wowed them the first time around. Not to mention, paradoxically, a few negative reviews sprinkled between the good ones lends more credibility to your business.

Product Reviews Increase Conversions

WooCommerce store owners know that every little bit counts. A tiny increase in conversion rates can be the difference between a decent month and a record-breaking month. With better product reviews, you’ll be doing a lot of record-breaking. Forbes magazine cited a Northwestern University study that suggested that having as little as five product reviews could increase conversion rates by up to 270%! Sounds too good to be true? Read it here yourself!

Now that we’ve detailed some of the reasons—270 reasons to be exact—why quality product reviews are essential for your WooCommerce store’s success, the question still remains: “How do I get more product reviews?” With Uncanny Automator, it’s easier—and freer—than you’d think.

How to Get More Reviews with Automator

In this section, we’re going to provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to get more quality reviews for your WooCommerce products using Uncanny Automator. Before we dive into the details, however, let’s get to know the plugins we’ll be using a little better. Don’t worry—they’re FREE!

An Introduction to Automator

Uncanny Automator is the #1 WordPress automation plugin. Create seamless workflows, smooth your operations and save yourself time and money—without writing a single line of code! With Automator, you can connect your favorite apps and plugins with an easy-to-use and intuitive interface.

As promised, it’s free to get started with Automator. But free doesn’t mean feeble! When you sign up with Automator, you’ll get 250 app credits on the house so that you can try out some apps and get a feel for automating—the Uncanny way. Click here to download the free plugin.

An Introduction to Groundhogg

Groundhogg is a customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation plugin for WordPress. With Groundhogg, you can segment your contact list to create immersive email campaigns, irresistible marketing funnels and special broadcasts.

Groundhogg offers a 14-day, $1 trial so you can try out Pro features like lead scoring, content restriction and premium integrations. And while we’re on the topic of reviews, check out Groundhogg’s stellar user ratings to find out how others are using this powerful platform. Click here to download the free plugin or start marketing like a professional for just $1 by clicking here.

Now that you have everything all set up, it’s time to rack up reviews!

Recipe 1: Get More Quality Reviews

The likeliest people to write favorable and detailed reviews for your products are the ones who buy them all the time—i.e., your most loyal customers. With this recipe, you can automatically identify those customers using Automator and solicit their valued feedback with a Groundhogg email campaign.

Step 1: Set Up Your Groundhogg Email Campaign

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Groundhogg > Funnels and click Add New. Groundhogg has a template called Feedback Request that you can use or you can build your own from scratch. Click Start Building.

If you selected the Feedback Request template, in the funnel builder, delete the User Created step then click Add Step. In the pop-up window that appears, under Benchmarks, click Tag Applied then drag and drop the new step to the top of the funnel.

Select the tag you’ve designated for loyal customers—we named this tag Repeat Customer—then finish configuring the details of your email campaign including setting the wait times between emails and designing the emails you want to send out. When you’re finished, click Save in the upper right-hand corner and toggle your new funnel from Inactive to Active.

Step 2: Create a New Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

Step 3: Name Your Recipe

Create a name for your recipe that makes it easy to recognize at a glance. We’ve named this recipe WooCommerce-Groundhogg: Loyal Customer Review so that we know the integrations involved and the purpose.

Step 4: Configure Your Trigger

In the Triggers panel, select WooCommerce.

From the drop-down list that appears, select A user completes, pays for, lands on a thank you page for an order with a product.

In the Trigger condition field, select pays for then click Save.

In the next field, you can select a specific product if you want to garner reviews for that product from customers who purchased it (Groundhogg has a fantastic WooCommerce integration for instances like these).

But for the purposes of this recipe, however, we’re trying to identify loyal customers, regardless of which products they purchased, so we selected Any product.

Once you’ve made your selection in the Product field, click Save. Next, click 1 in the integer field and type whatever number of transactions constitutes a loyal customer for your business. If you enter “3” as we did in the Number of times field, this recipe will run only when a customer has made three separate and independent purchases on your site. That’s pretty loyal!

After you click Save your trigger should look something like this:

Step 5: Configure Your Action

In the Actions panel, click Add action and select Groundhogg.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Add a tag to the user, then select the tag you’ve designated for your loyal customers. When you’re finished, click Save. Your action should look something like this:

Step 6: Go Live!

Your recipe’s trigger and action are all ready. In the Recipe panel in the upper right-hand corner, toggle your recipe from Draft to Live. The finished recipe should look something like this:

Now that your recipe is up and running, Automator will add the tag Repeat Customer to any of your users who completes three separate transactions. Once Automator adds the tag, Groundhogg will initiate your email campaign and you’ll start to see the reviews rolling in!

Automator has plenty of integrations so you can use this same recipe with other CRM and marketing automation tools such as ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp—whichever you prefer.

Recipe 2: Offer Coupons for Reviews

If you really want to boost your engagement with your customers and get even more reviews, you’re going to need to offer them something in exchange for their time. When you’re ready to upgrade to Automator Pro, you can send your customers personalized coupons in exchange for their honest feedback.

Step 1: Create a New Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

Step 2: Name Your Recipe

We’ve named this recipe WooCommerce Review: Coupon so we know the integrations involved and the purpose.

Step 3: Configure Your Trigger

In the Triggers panel, select WooCommerce then select A user reviews a product. If you want to solicit higher ratings or compensate customers who gave lower ratings, select A user reviews a product with a rating greater than, less than or equal to an amount. For this example, however, we selected A user reviews a product.

From the drop-down list, select Any product and click Save. Your trigger should look like this:

Step 4: Configure Your Action

In the Actions panel, click Add action then select WooCommerce. From the drop-down list, select Generate and email a coupon code to the user.

Automator will present you with an editor where you can configure the coupon as you’d like including setting the value, limiting the products on which your customers can use it and minimum/maximum spending limits.

At the bottom of the editor, you can draft your email and include tokens to create a personalized message. You can write it to look something like this:

When you’re finished setting up your coupon and email, click Save. Your action should look like this:

Step 5: Go Live!

With a recipe this flavorful, your users will be writing reviews faster than you can read them! All you have to do is toggle your recipe from Draft to Live. It should look like this:

If you prefer to reward your customers with store credit, you can download the Advanced Coupons plugin for WooCommerce for free and make small adjustments to this recipe. With Advanced Coupons and store credit, it would look like this:

Recipes like these will definitely get you more sales-boosting product reviews. But our next recipe dials up the heat even more!

Recipe 3: Share Your Reviews with the World

We mentioned previously that customer reviews are a digital extension of your word-of-mouth advertising. And what is social media if not a megaphone! With Automator Pro, you can automatically share your most glowing reviews to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to amplify your organic advertising strategy.

Step 1: Connect Your Social Media Accounts to Automator

We have a detailed, step-by-step guide for connecting each of your social media accounts to Automator but we’ll provide abridged versions below:

Facebook Pages & Instagram (click here for the detailed guide)

1. From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Settings.
2. Under App Integrations select Facebook Pages and click Connect Facebook account.
3. Follow the prompts as they appear. If you have an Instagram business account attached to a Facebook Pages account, Automator will ask if you would like to connect it.

Twitter (click here for the detailed guide)

1. From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Settings.
2. Under App Integrations select Twitter and click Connect Twitter account.
3. Follow the prompts as they appear.

Step 2: Create Your Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

Step 3: Configure Your Trigger

In the Triggers panel, select WooCommerce then A user reviews a product with a rating greater than, less than or equal to an amount.

Automator will prompt you to fill out Product, Condition and Product rating fields in that order. Make the selections based on what types of reviews you want to share to Instagram, When you’re finished, click Save. Your action should look something like this:

Step 4: Configure Your Action(s)

In the Actions panel, select Instagram then Publish an image to an Instagram Business account.

In the editor, you can select the image that you would like to publish to Instagram. This could be the product’s featured image or an image that you have stored in your media library.

In the caption editor, you have the opportunity to personalize your Instagram posts. You can even use tokens to tag your users if you have their social media handles stored on your website!

When you’re finished, click Save. Your action should look like this:

Publish to multiple social media platforms by clicking Add another action.

Step 5: Go Live!

Review your messages before you share them with the world then toggle your recipe from Draft to Live.

Augment Your Automations

These are just some of the ways that you can improve your product reviews with Uncanny Automator. Want to receive Slack notifications when you receive less than favorable feedback on a new product? No problem. Want to suggest an advanced LearnDash course after a user leaves a positive review for one of its prerequisites? Automator can do that too.

At Uncanny Automator, we love product reviews! We’re always adding new integrations and useful new triggers and actions based on the feedback that we get from our users. Let us know how we’re doing in the comments section below.