Trustpilot & cleverbridge: Harness the Power of Social Proof to Boost Conversion

Looking for ways to increase sales? Let your existing customers do the talking and selling for you! 

It’s not easy to sell a SaaS product in today’s ultra-competitive and alternative-filled environment. We get it, it’s hard to stand out, it’s a dilemma we help our clients overcome every day.  

“User-generated content,” more specifically leveraging social reviews within the buying process, is a trend that has firmly established itself over the last couple of years. Research shows that 92% of consumers consult one or more social reviews before purchasing a product or service.

Checking review platforms has become an ingrained part of the SaaS buying experience. With companies like Trustpilot leading the way in this field. And the numbers indicate that their reach is growing by the day. Trustpilot has: 

• 144+ million reviews as of June 2021 
• Top 1% of most visited websites globally as of September 2021 
• 7.4+ Billion monthly TrustBox impressions 

These numbers underpin the reality that consumers want the ability to consult independent social reviews from places like Trustpilot as part of their decision-making process. It’s time to wake up to this reality and give your customers what they want. Doing so will, in turn, benefit both you and your recurring revenue.   

So, the question is: “How can I harness social reviews in my digital buying experience?”  

Good news! Cleverbridge has partnered with Trustpilot, allowing online businesses to harness their review platform to increase recurring revenue. Some of our clever friends on our technical team have integrated Trustpilot’s widget into our ecosystem, allowing all our clients to integrate Trustpilot reviews directly into their checkout. This lets your reviews do the talking for your sales team.  

How does it work? Well essentially, it’s a small piece of code that displays the widget in the checkout, showing:  

• Brand or product ratings 

• Quotes from existing customers 
• Invitations to review your product-post-purchase  

This widget helps close out that final step in the buying process, completely independent from any human interaction, by simply gathering input from a Trustpilot page and displaying it in the checkout.  

This feature is in its pilot stage, we are looking forward to onboarding this feature with more of our clients to support them in their growth journey. We are confident that this feature can drive success with our clients, especially given that consumer reviews are shown to be 12x more trusted than manufacturer descriptions, and 63% of consumers are likely to make a purchase from a site that contains consumer reviews vs one that doesn’t.  

There are a couple of points I think you should consider before starting to use social reviews to augment your checkout process, namely:  

• Recency – gathering recent reviews will be fundamental to your success. Bright Local points out that 84% of consumers see reviews older than three months as being outdated. Particularly in the SaaS space, things move quickly, so it’s important to keep your reviews up to date, and ensure customers are reviewing your latest and greatest product.  

• Authenticity – it is vital that your reviews can be traced back to a real person. This rules out any foul play, on both sides. The good news is, most social review platforms such as Trustpilot help you take care of this, and you can report any “fraudulent” or non-genuine reviews.  

• Negative Reviews – hear me out here, things will go wrong at some stage in the purchasing process for someone, and they may leave a negative review. This does, however, provide you with a couple of opportunities. First, you can demonstrate your excellent customer service by responding to the review. Second, you can gather valuable product or process feedback. Finally, you can build trust with potential buyers, as they can see how you deal with things when they do go wrong – in some cases, it has been shown to boost customer advocacy by up to 16%.  

Want to see more of our teams’ innovative ideas? We help over 300 clients grow their online recurring revenue daily. Get in touch, and we’ll be happy to show you more.