Introducing Influenster’s ReviewSource

Influenster, the digital destination where millions of consumers read and write reviews, is already known by brands to be the go-to resource for seeding product trials. But a little-known fact is that Influenster.com houses the highest number of online reviews (outside of Amazon) written by consumers who have purchased products in-store or online. In fact, Influenster has more beauty reviews than Ulta Beauty and Sephora. Similar to a Yelp or TripAdvisor for products, Influenster has more than 24 million reviews on 2.5 million products, growing by one million new organic reviews each month. This presents the opportunity for brand marketers to leverage thousands of non-incentivized reviews their products are already generating on a regular basis.

Influenster is making noise with a new service called ReviewSource. It is the always-on service that continuously supplies organic, non-incentivized reviews that consumers leave on Influenster.com, to brand and retailer websites.

With ReviewSource, a brand can instantly populate chatter relating to an entire product portfolio of hundreds of SKUs through an automatic, seamless integration and one-time setup process. And, very importantly, since consumers like quick answers and often look for recent reviews for validation before making purchase decisions, ReviewSource enhances your product’s placement on Google and retailer searches.

Why Recent Reviews Are Important: The Power of Persuasion

Everyone knows that reviews matter. But fewer marketers realize that it’s recent reviews that are the driver in consumers’ purchase considerations. Consider this: 77 percent of consumers think that reviews older than three months aren’t relevant, according to a BrightLocal study. The study further reveals that 18 percent of consumers only care about reviews submitted within the last two weeks, and only 4 percent of consumers pay attention to reviews submitted over a year ago.

With that in mind, Influenster built an app and website where consumers can have peer to peer discussions about products all the time. They use Influenster in their everyday lives as a resource to see what they should–and shouldn’t–buy. Because of their enthusiasm in sharing opinions, the number of reviews on Influenster has doubled over the past year from 12 million to 24 million, where 98 percent of these reviews are written organically, outside of sampling campaigns. With ReviewSource, brands can tackle the problem of stale reviews by getting fresh, new monthly reviews from the leading destination for product discovery, directly added to their product pages on brand and retail sites.

Q&A with Emre Yenilmis, Chief Product Officer of Influenster, and Jack Lipman, Product Lead on ReviewSource

CEW: What prompted you to launch ReviewSource?
Emre Yenilmis: We built Influenster as a review platform for products, just like Yelp or TripAdvisor. Consumers see Influenster as a source for unbiased, organic product reviews. And in turn, having a wealth of first-party data on our members, we know everything about a brand’s customers and potential customers—from what they’re talking about, to what and where they’re buying.

That prompted us to develop ReviewSource to allow brands to make full use of these reviews on their own sites and retailer sites to increase sales conversions. We are the only review website that has a substantial number of reviews and are willing to share our reviews with brands. Retailers, for example, rarely send reviews to brands for use on their own ecommerce sites.

CEW: How does ReviewSource integrate with a brand’s existing review syndication solution, such as PowerReviews or Bazaarvoice?
Jack Lipman: ReviewSource seamlessly integrates with a brand’s review syndication solutions provider. With ReviewSource, we share reviews with brands who can then use their review software of choice to display reviews on their site. That means sending reviews directly to the brand, or to the brand’s review software of choice (like Bazaarvoice or PowerReviews) to be moderated to the brand’s standards and then pushed to retailer sites such as Walmart, CVS and Nordstrom.

CEW: How do you differ from software providers? What about working with Google?
EY: Think of Influenster as a user hub where reviews are generated, so review software providers and Influenster complement each other. More than four million Influenster members generate the reviews, and we communicate them to software providers that choose to either syndicate and/or display these reviews. We are constantly working on integrating review software providers into our platform so that reviews can flow more easily from us to them.

For Google Shopping, we provide all of our reviews to them automatically to help inform their product ratings, which are used for Google Shopping and Google Express, and in other areas such as Product Listing Ads.

CEW: How can brands and retailers get involved with ReviewSource?
JL: We encourage brands to go to Influenster.com and search their brand pages to see how many total reviews we already have for their products to date. If a brand wants to learn how many reviews they receive per month and take advantage of future reviews, they can reach out to us at marketing@influenster.com.

For more information on Influenster or ReviewSource contact Jack at marketing@influenster.com.