Reviewing Amazon.in’s “Review your Product” email activity

Before I begin to tell you how the email was, let’s first try and understand why does something like a review mailer from Amazon deserve an entire post reviewing the same. Well, simply because user generated content is the holy grail for most of e-commerce websites which is primarily for three main reasons

1. Effective Marketing Strategy focussing on consumer’s ZMOT(Zero Moment of Truth)
2. Helps a lot in conversions. We as consumers primarily decide on something and then look for validation online and when we see other agreeing to our thoughts we feel safe and go ahead.
3. SEO

Read about the benefits of UGC in detail over here

To further make a case in point look at the below example, flipkart was the only e-commerce non-review or non-editorial website that came up on search when I searched for “moto g review”. Simple because it had 6951 ratings and 4106 reviews on the product while it’s competitor, Snapdeal had just 28 ratings and 6 reviews

Google likes it when you review a product

Now that we have the basics in place let’s see how Amazon was asking users, in this case, me, to review a product they bought a month ago from their website.

As always, 3 important points, very basic, hygiene factor points of any mailer activity,

• Subject Line

Amazon, terribly fails at this one.

It’s not an essay

The mailer in discussion came with the above subject line. Now experts say that your subject line should never be more than 50 characters with spaces, as they usually result in better open rates.

Now why is the number of characters important? Because this is how it looks like when you have a subject line exceeding that limit.

Should I open this mail?

I understand this one was personalized with the help of an algorithm which said Username, did ‘Product Name’ meet your expectations? Review it on Amazon.in and there is absolutely no control over the characters in ‘Product Name’ or ‘User Name’ . It still could have been, You recently bought ‘Product Name’. How’s it? Review now.’

The sender’s name has “Amazon.in Reviews” which makes it unnecessary for it to appear again on the subject line.

The personalization bit of mentioning username should be a part of email body and not the subject line.

Having said all of the above, for all you know Amazon might be getting good open rates for this particular subject line and as they say if it aint broke dont fix it.

• Email Body & CTA

The second important part of the mailer has been presented beautifully by amazon. The product picture has been showcased as the hero of the mail body. The content and copy is kept short, precise and to the point with a clear one point objective which should be the aim of any mailer.

Rate it. Review it.

However, as mentioned the mailer should have addressed me. The “how did this item meet your expectations?” line would have been perfect had they not used it in the subject line. The single objective of this mailer is to first get the person to rate and review either the current showcased purchase or past purchases. The mailer looks neat, clean, clutter free and enticing enough to click on the stars which serves as a brilliant CTA along with the other clickable parts of the mailer like product name and product picture.

• Landing Page

 You did everything right to get the user till here and your landing page should ensure that it serves the purpose of coming till here.

Amazon aces here too,

Yes, I shall review it

1. Huge gold stars which make you submit the minimum basic (ratings) to the product if not a detailed review on its performance.
2. The help text, guidelines make it even easier and not such a lengthy task to actually write something about the product. The best part about the page is the little dynamic text at the bottom which says “Title & 20 more words required”, where the number decreases as you keep writing which is brilliant and simple user experience.

What do we know? What have we learnt?

1. UGC is really important and hence reviews for e-commerce websites because it helps them in providing validation to the user and new updated content for google which helps in conversions and clicks respectively.
2. Amazon does it very smartly and aces in all departments of a mailer like CTA, landing page, content, copy and creative apart from the most not-so smart subject line which again is debatable as we dont have the statistics of it’s performance.
3. Reviews can be hilarious too because it’s UGC and people like to troll at times. Check this out for a good hearty laugh – Hilarious Reviews on Flipkart