The emails are particularly well-done and incoporate a number of ratings and reviews best practices. First and foremost, the emails are dynamically populated with images and links to each individual product page. This attention to detail makes for a seamless transition between email and eCommerce sites. It also helps the user save time by not having to search the Crate & Barrel site for products that they’ve already bought, or spend time racking their brain to remember every item they purchased.

Equally impressive, Crate’s sister brand, CB2, drives traffic to ratings and reviews using offline methods of communication. As you can see from the accompanying photo, each order from CB2 comes with a little printed postcard informing customers where and how they can review their new products online. It’s a simple, clear and friendly way of driving customer response across channels.

I learned just how effective ratings and reviews can be when I attended the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit earlier this year. According to the folks at Bazaarvoice, placing customer ratings into promotional email can increase clickthrough rates by 5X compared to standard promotional messaging. Seeing how smoothly Crate & Barrel is using user-generated content, I wouldn’t be surprised if their email campaigns were performing at a similar clip, if not better.

Bazaarvoice is a partner of ours and has helped a number of our clients combine the power of user-generated content with email marketing. As I told a number of colleagues at the event, the real beauty of combining email marketing with ratings and reviews is that the numbers speak for themselves – according to a recent article by Mary Wagner of Internet Retailer, fifty-three percent of shoppers “prefer to see recommendations based on top ratings by other consumers” compared to only twenty percent who prefer to see best sellers. Likewise, Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research recently stated that “two in five online shoppers are partial to retail sites that offer customer ratings and reviews,” and that “tactics like adding a link to write a customer review in the order confirmation email are the new standard.”

A few high-level takeaways I gathered from the event include:

• Product review submission/confirmation emails perform exceptionally well across the board, especially when it comes to open and clickthrough rates.
• User-generated content (UGC) not only drives sales, but also functions as a product development and inventory tool for some of today’s biggest brands, including Dell and Sephora.
• While it is difficult to predict which content will become truly “viral,” marketers can help guarantee ROI by ensuring that viral campaigns are initially distributed to a large enough group of people. That way, even if the campaign is only forwarded at a 50% rate of decay, the campaign reaches close to double the size of the initial recipients — half of which were essentially sent for free.

And if you’re looking for some cool examples of our clients putting word-of-mouth marketing to good use, I’d highly recommend having a look at these links:

• Zales Love Stories – a slick micro-site dedicated to user-generated engagement and jewelry gift stories, with links to purchase online.
• Aveda Top Rated Winter Essentials – an elegant email promotion featuring top-rated products from Winter 2008 with actual reviews from real customers.
• Urban Outfitters 5-Star Reviewers – a slick email campaign highlighting the reviewers themselves (lifestyle branding using social media) in addition to their reviewed items.

With all of this being said, why wouldn’t a marketer want to elevate the customer voice and include top rated picks or UGC in their email programs?