In the age of information, it’s no secret that consumer reviews have an enormous amount of value in the opinion of their peers.
In 2017, there was a study that showed that 97% of people look for online reviews before they decide to make a business decision- whether to purchase from you, to work with you, or just engage in a business relationship with you.
Of course, your business is unique but the challenges you face in your business are not unique. You also want more customers, more sales, and more revenue for your business but how? Even many businesses like you are also bewildered by the speed at which marketing is changing, like in just a couple of years the yellow pages have been replaced by online search. At present when the potential clients, customers, or patients looking for local business google about it that’s where the customer reviews come into action. According to a census, 80% of people said that online reviews are as trusted as personal recommendations and Google also gives enormous weightage to online reviews and you can think of online reviews as a herd. It means where one goes there goes another!
Your homepage, about us page, product pages, and landing pages are good places to throw positive customer quotes or feedback into the mix.
Now let’s see how you can get more online reviews-
1- Deliver Exceptional Services- Give your customer the service for which he will give you a review or thanks on his own, if done properly then you don’t require to ask him for giving a review for your service or product. Giving good service is the best form of marketing as it will make your customer loyal to your business and will make him a brand advocate of your service or product. Everyone praises the good things and when he will get good service he will promote it to others as well and we all know that word-of-mouth marketing is the best form of marketing.
2- Incentivize Your Reviews- Ideally, every customer would write glowing reviews about every product they purchased. But that’s just not how the world works, sadly.
Our research found that about half of consumers (52% to be exact) write reviews multiple times per month. The other half submit this content far less frequently – and 2% never do.
Luckily, their several strategies have proven to increase review volume for brands and retailers. One particularly impactful way to generate more content is to offer an incentive in exchange for a review.
Frankly, incentives are the single most effective way to generate a ton of reviews fast.
Overall, nearly three-quarters (73%) of consumers say they’d be motivated to write a review if they were offered an incentive. And (perhaps not surprisingly), incentives motivate shoppers of all generations. And that incentive might be anything from a small product to some discount or you can play a hit and trial game in which any sudden of the customers will be given incentives based on the actions he performed while giving a review. But never offer anything directly in return to a review as it will affect your brand value and it is also illegal in many of the countries.
3- Ask For Reviews- If you want something then you have to ask for it, as same in the case of online reviews. According to a study, it was found that 68% of people give reviews when they were asked for it. You have to send them mail or link to the review page and many of them will promptly give you a review! Reviews are the free and trusted form of advertising and through reviews, you can understand what are your customer’s needs and wants, businesses that they like about your product, and what they don’t like about your product. Concerning it, the Harvard Business Review wrote that-
“We believe that many companies need to dramatically shift their marketing strategies to account for the rising power exerted on future customers by the opinions of existing customers.”
Many websites are only for reviews such as Yelp and TripAdvisor where you can take reviews of your customers and you can also find such websites related to your industry and focus there. In addition to it, create your special landing page for reviews because here you can add more pictures, videos, and features as compared to review websites.
4- Respond To Your Reviews- Always respond to your reviews as it will make your customers feel responsible about your business and will make them happy. Start your response with thank you and make it personalized for every customer. And if you got a negative review then address the issue briefly and try to understand it from the customer’s perspective and then find out where the things have gone wrong and try to adjust them and make sure that will not happen again and try to covert a negative review into a positive dialogue.
Never reply to negative reviews in a bad manner or when you are in anger as it will affect your brand value and will spread a wrong message about your brand. Instead of that, you can assign someone who can responsibly handle your customer complaints.
5- Monitor Your Brand- Monitor your brand if you don’t want to be surprised by reviews, thesis, nothing worse than going through all the energy and effort of creating a quote and going out and visiting a client and then realizing that you have lost the bid or you have lost the business because they have found a negative review that you had no idea existed. If you did know it has existed you would have been able to address it. Maybe even resolve the issue or have the review taken down to better or yet change to a positive review. So monitor your brand, monitor your review channels regardless of where they are whether it’s Facebook or Google, or top-rated review sites. You have to keep an eye on these different channels. Setup google alert that way you get an email from google they let you know wherever you get mentioned so that you can go and respond to that reviews. Then you will never get surprised by a customer finding something that you didn’t know existed.