Good customer reviews are very important in reputation management. To get a positive review you must have a good product and a good service, but on its own a good product doesn’t guarantee you’ll get any reviews. You must make it easy for your customers to leave a review, and you need to ask your customers to leave them. Once you’ve generated positive reviews, you can present them to potential customers and increase your conversions thanks to the concept of social proof.
What are the benefits of positive customer reviews?
Positive reviews contribute to a better conversion rate. Some customers who visit your site might be unsure whether they really want to make a purchase. If you can garner positive reviews, then present those reviews to customers at an influential stage in the buying process, you will likely see an increase in conversions.
Consider if you were thinking of buying a pair of socks from brand X. You do a search and find pair available on a site without any customer reviews. There’s another pair available on a site with 50 positive reviews – prices are about the same. You’re more likely to click on the page with the positive reviews to read feedback from other customers who have bought those socks in the past as it’s validation the item is popular. This is an example of social proof and demonstrates why positive customer reviews should be leveraged to convert your site’s visitors into customers.
Good products and service yield customer recommendations – and more revenue
You need good products and good service because you won’t get good reviews otherwise. It’s not like many people are intentionally putting out bad products and bad services. However, there are a lot of bad services and bad products out there. Some might be the intent of a sleazy business person, but others are the results of mismanagement. Nonetheless, no one will leave a positive review if they experience a bad product or bad service.
Sometimes it’s helpful to audit your offering. Are you putting out the best products and customer service you can? When was the last time you reviewed with staff how to respond to upset customers? What about how to respond to happy customers? All of these questions are relevant to your online reputation management; your staff is your real-world reputation management, and real-world customers are the ones leaving online reviews.
Where do most customers leave reviews?
Once you are confident in your great service and products, we can look into increasing positive customer reviews. If you are selling anything online, you already have an edge in this category. Brick and mortar stores don’t always have the ability to get the customer’s email – they can ask nicely, but it’s often easier online because providing an email is part of the ecommerce process. A great way to develop positive reviews is to send follow-up emails post-purchase to ask for one. Being honest with your intent also leads to higher conversions at this stage, because people respond well to honesty.
How do I best leverage my positive reviews?
Now that you have positive reviews, and a system encouraging customers to leave them, we can look to how to leverage all these testimonials. It goes back to our first point – some people just don’t know if the product is worth the price, and online recommendations can show them that it is. There are a number of sophisticated systems that can allow you to leverage positive reviews, it’s only a matter of finding what works for you. You can optimize your Google My Business listing to present your yelp score; you can implement widgets on your site to present reviews directly to the customer; the list goes on.
At the end of the day, if you are not working with your online community to make your business thrive, it’s likely a rival is already on their way to take your piece of that pie. Online shopping and eCommerce is a very competitive market, and we can help if you need.
Still need help? Reach out
In this post we have covered how to develop and leverage positive customer feedback, which is such an important part of Online Reputation Management (ORM).
If you are interested in generating and leveraging positive online reviews for your business, but don’t know where to start, feel free contact us.
