It’s a situation we all hope will never occur: The Facebook reviews for your eCommerce product are bad. When someone clicks a Facebook ad and buys your product, Facebook sometimes follows up with that person weeks or months later asking them how their experience was. The customer has a chance to provide feedback directly to Facebook. If you are experiencing an issue with your product or customer service, this can mean bad reviews.
Okay, so what? Not only do these reviews hurt your brand’s credibility, but they also affect your ad performance. If your reviews are bad enough, Facebook will shut your ad account down permanently. Yikes.
If you notice your star rating slipping, act fast! Here are our recommended steps:
- Pause Your Ads: This may sound obvious, but if you have an issue with your customer experience, fix it before putting more customers in the pipeline. Selling more on Facebook will only reduce your star rating further and dig you into a hole with Facebook that you may never climb out of. And, if your reviews are poor enough, your ad performance will also likely be terrible. Turn off the campaigns, and do whatever internal work is necessary.
- Communicate with the Customer: People are usually only upset with a purchase if their expectations do not meet reality. Review the language in your ads, on your landing page, and in your follow up communications. Do you need to clarify shipping time? Do you need to email your customers letting them know you are experiencing longer-than-usual customer service response times? Should you update your ads to include an important detail about the product? Make sure your customers are crystal clear on what experience they are buying into.
- Survey Them First: People are less likely to submit feedback to Facebook if they have already been surveyed. Send out an email survey to your customers asking for feedback, or even run an ad asking for feedback to your customer list. Make sure to respond to their feedback. Once people feel that they are being heard, they will feel less of a need to respond to Facebook’s survey.
- Communicate with Facebook: If Facebook shuts your ads down, request a review and more information. Sometimes, they are willing to re-enable the account if you demonstrate that you are taking action to improve the customer experience. At the very least, you may get some insights about how to enable your account in the future.
Chin up! We have had clients face this issue in the past only to fix the issue, improve their reviews, and run successful ad campaigns. Taking these steps can help ensure a fast recovery and minimize damage.
