Holistic Insights: Why Every Feedback Channel Matters at Elf Cosmetics

Purpose of Analysis

When it comes to getting ahold of customer feedback, the first few channels that come to mind are usually surveys or even just product review pages. But it’s impossible for these two outlets alone to offer a holistic view of what ALL customers think — here’s what I mean.

Reviews on companies' product pages won’t usually include feedback about customer experience, while review sites like Trustpilot will focus almost solely on customer experience.

On social media, it’s difficult to filter for comments that are actually relevant, but when you do, it offers up pretty candid thoughts from people who otherwise wouldn’t have left a review or gave an opinion of any sort.

The point is, every feedback channel is different. And this makes understanding the full scope of your customers pretty tough. But if you can find a way to look at feedback from every channel using one unified view, it makes this task a whole lot easier. So let’s do exactly this for Elf Cosmetics.

The Analysis

To run this analysis, we decided to analyze and compare sentiment across reviews from 3 channels in particular: Elf’s website, Trustpilot, and Instagram.

First, we scraped product reviews for Elf’s Power Grip Setting Spray and ran it through Cotera’s sentiment analysis program. Interestingly enough, 92% of reviews were positive (an overwhelming majority) and were nearly all focused on the effectiveness of the product itself.

We did the same for Elf’s Trustpilot page, where the distribution of sentiment ended up being the exact opposite. Over 70% of reviews were negative, but an overwhelming majority of negative sentiment actually revolved around customer experience (namely customer service, delivery, refunds, prices, etc.). In fact, many of these overall negative reviews actually mentioned loving the actual Elf products but being frustrated with Elf’s customer service.

And finally, we took one of Elf’s Instagram reels on their Power Grip Setting Spray and ran all the comments through our program. Social media is a bit more difficult to analyze overall simply because 1) not all commenters are actual customers, and 2) not every comment actually talks about the product.

But after filtering out the irrelevant comments from the relevant ones, we found that there was an overwhelming amount of positive sentiment (78%) as compared to negative sentiment (4%).

The majority of positive comments expressed excitement about the product and an intent to purchase it, rather than actually reviewing the product. But although they aren't necessarily reviews for the product, this information still tells Elf whether or not there’s demand for it and if they did a good job packaging it/explaining the benefits.

Overall, we can see that reviews found on Elf’s website and Instagram tended to be more positive, while reviews found on Trustpilot were significantly more negative.

Meaningfulness of Results

As we proved to be true from our analysis, formal product reviews on Yelp, Google reviews, or sites like Trustpilot are almost always slightly skewed toward negative sentiment to begin with. Evidence suggests that 1 in 10 happy customers leaves a review, while unhappy customers are way more likely to write one.

Product reviews on the company’s site are supposedly more accurate — but they also normally exclude feedback about customer experience and focus solely on the product. It’s still helpful, but just not comprehensive.

Millennials (ages 25-40) are also typically more likely to leave formal reviews than other age groups. This again, skews the feedback so that it’s less representative of a company’s full customer base.

Social media, on the other hand, has become more and more popular for product reviews over time. Lots of people have begun to make videos or short-form content reviewing different products, and tons of viewers also write comments in response to these videos to share their experiences or thoughts as well. In Elf’s case, their own social media comments can tell them if they’ve done a good job creating a product that’s high in demand and interesting enough to potential customers for them to lock in the purchase.

It’s becoming clearer that on social media, it’s typically younger generations (like Gen Z) that do these kinds of product reviews or write these kinds of comments — so feedback found on social media can also be pretty easily biased and incomplete.

But this is exactly why having a unified view of everything is so important. If you only look at your own company’s product reviews, you’ll be blind to the negative feedback and won’t know how to improve your customer experience. If you only search a site like Trustpilot for reviews, you won’t know anything about the honest quality of your products.

In other words, every review matters.

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