Ask Owners lets shoppers on your site ask questions of people who really bought the items they are considering and reliably delivers multiple, fast, highly-credible answers. Other social Q&A tools for shopping are more like bulletin boards – a question is posted, and then it waits for someone who knows about that item to find it and reply, often a long, long time. But with TurnTo, you email shopper questions to a selection of customers who actually bought the item.
The Ask Owners Widget
Not only does this ensure questions get social answers quickly – often within minutes – but because answers come from people who actually bought the item (not just people who proved they have an email address), the answers are highly-credible and high-quality. Then, the responses are emailed to the asker, providing multiple reminders of the item they were considering, with links back to the product page to make it easy for the shopper to complete her purchase.
Ask Owners has other benefits, too:
- By bringing past customers back to the store to answer, it acts as a powerful retention marketing tool. With an average response rate on question emails of 6% (!), TurnTo does better than most loyalty campaigns.
- Ask Owners makes all the Q&A dialog visible on the relevant product pages as a resource for future visitors. Often shoppers have similar questions, so this visibility provides the equivalent of instant answers.
- All the user-generated dialog from Ask Owners is indexable by search engines, providing significant SEO benefits.
The Ask Owners in-page button
Of course, Ask Owners is backed up by a sophisticated moderation system. This not only ensures inappropriate comments are removed and service issues are addressed, it makes it easy for your staff to engage with prospects directly to help make the sale.
Ask Owners also delivers product and merchandising insights that often can’t be learned from customer reviews.
- One store saw a number of questions asking for prices. They quickly learned they needed to redesign their pages to make the price more visible.
- A jewelry site got questions about whether an earing was for pieced ears and so redid the photography to show the earing post.
- A furniture merchant saw questions about whether a sofa could be used at a dining table. The answers said the style was just right but it was a bit too low and deep. The store decided to produce a new model sized and marketed for the dining room.
