Why reviews are important for your business
Whether you run an online business or a local store, customer reviews are a crucial part of it.
For most consumers, reviews are a focal point for their purchasing decisions.
Moreover, In today’s digital world, where one can know all about your brand and products through social media and online forums, good customer reviews are your biggest leverage.
Often, reviews are the only thing that influences the customer to choose your brand, it is what makes your brand stand out from the crowd.
Provide credibility to your business
It’s no secret that people want to know about the history and experience of the company (especially newer ones) they are buying from and what better way to do that than checking out its reviews.
Reviews and ratings are some of the quickest ways to establish your rapport in the market. With such high levels of saturation concerning every product/service, if you (as a customer) are given a choice to pick a brand to buy from, it’s a no-brainer who you would choose.
Besides using marketing techniques to reach new audiences, it’s also crucial to focus on building existing customer relations. Incorporating their reviews into your marketing strategies could prove to be a great tactic.
People may not trust your company just by marketing campaigns, many of them won’t even have assurance about these marketing tactics, but people do trust other genuine people. So if your business has authentic reviews, it’ll have a positive influence on the potential customers.
Show customers that you do a good job
Customer reviews show how a customer feels about your product/service. They act as a metric to gauge customer satisfaction.
Customers would take out time to write a review only if you met their expectations (or exceeded them). So, having a lot of positive reviews would imply that you do a good job of understanding what customers need.
It is safe to say that one of the factors ensuring the success of your marketing campaigns is your existing reviews because they tell the customers if you deliver what you promise.
Aside from this, having negative reviews will help you see your product’s shortcomings and improve upon them. If you act on a negative review as soon as possible and pose a solution to the user, chances of you retaining that customer become sky-high.
Showing people that their opinions matter is one of the best ways to build customer loyalty.
How to generate reviews for your business
Now that you know the “why”, it’s important to figure out the “how”. In most cases, only 10% of the total customers leave a review. The primary question is how to get most of your users to leave a review?
Here are a few techniques you can try out:
Build them naturally
In the past, it was difficult to collect reviews but today, the majority of businesses have an online presence and there are a lot of sites where customers can post their opinions. Moreover, A 2016 study shows that when asked, over 70% of customers are willing to leave a review.
It is evident that people like voicing their opinions about a brand but lack a medium. The major mistake businesses make is not giving their users a Call To Action (CTA).
A CTA is a link or button or icon through which the customers are sent to one of these forms. For e-commerce sites, a CTA is usually best placed on a thank you page.
Another good example of indicating that your business collect reviews are by showcasing them on your website. These UK land auctioneers do a great job at highlighting their best reviews directly on their key landing pages.
Ask your pre-existing customers
Asking your pre-existing customers for a review could feel awkward at first but if they had a good experience working with you in the past, they won’t hesitate to provide you with one.
A major tip to speed up this process would be to write the review yourself and send it to them. This way they can just copy the format and if need be, edit it accordingly.
You could even template the request to ask for review too by sending out the same request to all your pre-existing customers, below is an example you could use:
Dear valued customer,
We are glad we could meet your expectations and provide you with the results you’d hoped for.
If you wouldn’t mind posting a quick review on {your-review-platform-here}, we’d really appreciate it. This type of feedbacks allows other potential customers to understand us better.
Thanks
What platforms to use to generate reviews
Alternatively, You can also use certain google chrome extensions/plugins and apps to make this process automatic, meaning these apps could be linked as CTAs to take users to the review page.
Trustpilot
Founded in 2007, Trustpilot is an open and free platform wherein customers can share their experience regarding a specific brand. Anyone can post a free review simply by creating an account.
The reviews generally consist of a 1 to 5-star rating, where 1 being “bad” and 5 being “excellent”
Trustpilot offers premium services like Automated Feedbacks, wherein you can place a link in an email or invoice. This link will take consumers to Trustpilot’s site where they can leave a review.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a free business directory, meaning brands can use it to upload important information about their business (like location, contact and reviews) to the internet.
A major advantage of having your business listed on google’s directory is its effect on google rankings, if you have a lot of positive reviews on your listing, Google will rank your website higher as compared to others.
Niche review sites
Unlike the first two platforms, niche review sites are specifically designed to register reviews pertaining to a specific niche (i.e.repairs, design, etc.)
Whether you are an established company or just starting, collecting customer reviews is a great way to acquire and retain customers. It is crucial to form and maintain customer relations.