LeTAO uses customer reviews to increase online success

LeTAO, a brand of KCC that makes and sells sweets and breads in its own stores, department stores, and in cafes across Japan, uses customer reviews across its products to increase the number of online orders. To do this, the company turned to Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews on its site to acquire new customers, increase conversion rate, engage with customers, and improve products and services.

The more than 45,000 reviews help LeTAO win new customers by increasing search traffic and bringing in more visitors to its ecommerce site. Bazaarvoice’s solution supports Search Engine Optimization (SEO) using technology to ensure search engines can find and index all the customer reviews on the site. The fresh content across the product pages increases search engine visibility, which ultimately helps LeTAO rank higher.

After implementing Bazaarvoice’s SEO solution (BV SEO) on the site, the company began tracking the effect of reviews on the site. Within a year, LeTAO brought in 27,000 visitors to product pages with reviews, and most of the online shoppers were new users. These first-time visitors were high quality, viewing an average of 10.5 pages per session (282% higher than average) and spending an average of six minutes longer on the site.

Also, the conversion rate of users coming from BV SEO is 5.9% compared to 3.1% among visitors who come to the site in other ways. This means visitors from BV SEO are 190% more likely to buy.

“The additional, high-quality traffic we get by using Bazaarvoice is clearly impacting our online business in a significant way,” said Yusuke Nishio, Direct Marketing Manager at KCC.

LeTAO also uses the reviews as a way to engage with customers by featuring reviews in marketing material, such as newsletters, across social networks, press releases, and email communications. Emails that contain actual reviews outperform emails that do not use them. For example, the conversion rate for LeTAO’s emails with reviews is 12.4% compared to a 10.5% conversion rate among emails without reviews. The email marketing also includes the post-interaction email, which asks customers to write a review after buying products.

“Consumers consider the voice of the customer to be extremely trustworthy, and using the reviews in our marketing content is an impactful way to showcase the value of our products,” said Nishio.

The product development team at LeTAO also benefits from the reviews by gaining valuable product insights. The feedback in the reviews lets the company know what customers like and dislike about the products and gives the company ideas for new products to produce.

By incorporating the voice of the customer in so many ways, LeTAO continues to be a leader in its industry and is in position to continue having more and more success online.