Consumer Reviews: How to Get the Ratings That’ll Grow Your Business

If you’re wondering just how powerful consumer reviews are in the marketing aspect of your products and services, think of it this way: every year, companies spend billions on marketing and ads and yet, in the long run, the opinion of consumers is still worth so much more.

Reviews influence the purchase decisions of other customers. Potential customers may read the product information and details of the item’s features, but at the end of the day, Amazon customer reviews and reviews on other platforms remain to be a strong deciding factor on whether they will engage with your business.

As a business owner, how do you respond to the effects of consumer reviews in your marketing strategy? If you’re not already working to improve your consumer reviews, now is the right time to do so. In this article, we will be discussing several ways that you can boost the ratings from your consumers and gain positive reviews.

If you’re not convinced that reviews matter and can define the success and failure of your business, consider these statistics: a staggering 93% of consumers say online customer reviews affect their purchase decisions, whereas 94% say a negative review has convinced them to avoid a business. These numbers come from surveys conducted by Podium and RevviewTrackers and reflect that ignoring reviews can threaten your branding, image and most of all, your sales.

A report by Vendasta states that about 74% of customers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations and 39% of customers read reviews regularly. Consumers are known to trust each other, and therefore, their positive feedback can drive an increase in sales. So how can you use their voices and leverage their reviews for your business?

Consumer reports and reviews are effective marketing tools that can go hand in hand with some of the best content marketing software solutions. They can sometimes influence other buyers more than paid ads can do. Your customer’s opinions about the products and services that you offer hold power, and when used right, it can increase the profitability of your business. With that in mind, the following sections discuss in detail how you can get the reviews that can drive your business forward.

1. Importance of reviews to consumers

Studies prove that consumers value reviews just as much as they value personal recommendations. About half of your consumers need to see 4 or 5 stars on your ratings before they even decide to engage with your business. Drop below that and they would immediately check other sellers with a higher rating offering the same item.

For consumers, reviews are their guides in the purchases that they make. A report from Podium shows that 58% of consumers look at local reviews at least once a week. By checking out the other feedback from consumers like them, their trust for a particular brand grows and it encourages them to proceed with the transaction.

Furthermore, a study conducted by Invesp found that customers are willing to spend 31% more on a business that has positive reviews. This is how excellent reviews can drive revenue growth for your business.

2. How to get customers to leave reviews

Offering a superb quality of items and services can be pointless if no one is leaving you enough reviews to make other customers interested. Thus, you have to come up with plenty of ways where your customers can be encouraged to rate and leave reviews for your brand.

One such way is by offering incentives in the form of discounts and gift vouchers. This way, your customers will be motivated to share their purchase experience with your brand. This also shows transparency in your review collection process and leading further to the credibility of your reviews.

Another key factor that motivates a customer in leaving reviews is the simplicity or difficulty of doing so. A simple process of leaving reviews encourages more customers to write one. The less time they expect to complete a review, the more chances you can generate more reviews in the future.

3. Getting a product review

In this day and age, consumer reviews are crucial to any type of business, small or big. It gives reliability and credibility to your brand, and at the same time, it gives you visibility in search engines. The higher the number of consumer reviews, the higher is the improvement of your search engine ranks. But how do you actually get reviews for your products or services?

Ways to get product reviews

1. Post-Purchase Emails: Sending out post-purchase emails can help you generate reviews from your customers. It’s also one of the easiest ways you can use to get customer feedback. You can simply ask your customers for a review of your product via an automated post-purchase email. Post-purchase emails are usually sent to customers right after or several days after the purchase. You wouldn’t want to pass too much time, though, before asking a customer to recount their transaction experience with you because that risks getting your email ignored.
2. Product Sampling Programs: Another way to get product reviews is to launch product sampling programs. Product sampling campaigns are especially effective for brands that don’t have a huge number of customers. By such campaigns, you can reach out to large sampling communities that have a variety of audiences ranging from typical customers to micro-influencers. By launching sampling campaigns, your brand receives enough exposure from people willing to provide visuals and reviews for your brand all for a free sample. This way, you can raise the interest of other consumers and thus generate more high-quality reviews.
3. Trusted Ratings and Reviews Platforms: There are several reasons why it’s just as important to partner with trusted review platforms. Review platforms host and display visual content such as images and videos from your brand. Also, they apply SEO on your review contents and thus increase your traffic and rankings. By giving your brand a place on several trusted ratings and reviews platforms, your review content can increase and potential customers gain more confidence in purchasing from your brand. These platforms add functionalities such as streamlined product questions and answers, which are helpful in increasing conversion.

4. Reasons why consumers write reviews

Research results by Podium found that 82% of consumers find reviews convincing enough to make a purchase. But what are the reasons consumers leave a review in the first place? Understanding this part of consumer behavior can help you generate more customer reviews and ratings for your company.

From Trustpilot’s recent consumer report, the top three reasons why consumers write reviews are to influence other customers in their purchase decisions, to share their experience, or to reward the good performance of a company. Additionally, the research found that consumers are more likely to write a review when their purchase experience triggers their emotions, whether positive or negative.

Most customers leave testimonials when they are pleased with the purchase they made. Positive reviews are a form of gratitude from your customers when they receive the best quality of products and services. Thus, it is important to inform them of where they can write a review for you.

Likewise, it is equally important to respond to the reviews you are receiving. Management of consumer reviews is made easier today by a number of leading feedback and review management software solutions.

Here are some examples of feedback and reviews management software:

1. Zendesk

Zendesk provides solutions for tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer support tickets. It places all your customer support transactions in one place, and it allows your customers to connect with you via web or through their mobiles. Zendesk’s ticket forms allows the creation of multiple support request forms that have a unique set of ticket fields.

The software boasts of robust analytics tools that can give you better insights about customer behavior so you’ll know where to improve on your customer support. With the satisfaction prediction feature, the software can predict how likely your customers can be satisfied with the customer support you have offered. The software is also helpful in letting your team engage with a customer conversation in a more detailed context.

The vendor offers a comprehensive free trial to get you up to speed with the features. You can sign up for Zendesk free trial here.

2. Qualtrics CX

Qualtrics CX is a customer experience management software designed to gather customer feedback. It has advanced research, analytics, and centralized platform features. The platform is designed to effectively gather customer feedback. It also helps monitor, respond, and improve customer experience by prioritizing and predicting key experience drivers.

With the software’s tracking and optimizing features, you can track consumer behavior across diverse segments. Benchmarking tools can also determine your company’s status versus competitors. Furthermore, the software allows instant creation, testing, and modifications of surveys with no required training or coding.

If you want to investigate the features closely you can easily do so when you sign up for Qualtrics CX free trial here.

3. LiaCX

LiaCX is one of the leading customer experience management solutions available in the market. It is purely cloud-based and allows you to listen, interpret, and act based on customer feedback and operational data. LiaCX provides surveys so you can easily ask your customers for feedback from the right channel.

LiaCX is built for retail and hospitality sectors, connecting review site data to specific locations. The software has a set of features allowing you to manage and monitor social media and online reviews. It also comes with unlimited self-serve dashboards that allows building reports and charts.

If you want to investigate the features closely you can easily do so when you sign up for LiaCX free demo here.

4. Yotpo

Yotpo is a feedback and reviews management software with an array of out-of-the-box features. The software is equipped with a top analytics suite, and it allows generation of product reviews. It provides tools for customer reviews, visual marketing, loyalty programs, and referrals. Yotpo also has features for displaying reviews, ratings, Q&A, and visuals across key conversion points on your website.

5. xSellco Feedback

xSellco Feedback is another feedback and reviews management software. It has the functionality to automate your feedback requests and build your reputation on every channel. By using only one xSellco account, you can manage all customer feedback from the different platforms that you are using.

xSellco has the optimization features that can help you create a strategy to increase positive feedback and improve your rankings, beating out your competition. The software also has personalization features that allows you to use personalized tags that automatically applies data about customer details, product, and order information among others.

5. Responding to negative reviews

Once you decide to incorporate consumer reviews into your marketing and improving customer experience strategy, you can’t really control what people say about you. As the saying goes, you can’t please everyone, and your customers can leave you a negative review when they find even the littlest flaw in the products or services you’re selling.

Negative reviews, however, have a fair share of relevance in them. They can counterbalance the number of positive reviews you are getting, which may otherwise seem too artificial, and thus help build your credibility. They can also guide you on the improvement of your products or services.

Sure, you can choose to ignore the negative reviews, but it will be much better for you to give the customer a response to their feedback. Responding to business reviews and complaints show other customers that you have everything under control and are willing to make things right.

Here are some tips when responding to negative reviews:

1. Respond quickly. As much as possible, respond within 24 to 48 hours before it gets out of hand. You don’t want the word to spread, and not responding at all can leave an even worse impression to other potential customers.
2. Offer solutions. Try to offer your customers the solutions they need in the problems they encountered. This is among the best customer service tips, and by doing so, there’s still a chance you can provide them a good customer service.
3. Be sympathetic. Never be rude in your responses to customers with negative reviews. They could be wrong about your product and thus hurt your feelings. However, responding rudely is not gonna make it better for you and your business.
4. Reach out. Sending a personal message to your customers shows that you’re taking responsibility for the bad experience that they had. In the case that there’s nothing you can do to help them, be transparent and promise them better services in the future.

6. Encouraging customers to leave Google reviews

Apparently, Google reviews is outpacing other review platforms such as Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor in terms of the number of online reviews. This is according to the 2018 Online Reviews Survey by ReviewTrackers.

Google business reviews are important for the ranking signals of local SEO. Having Google business reviews is one of the most efficient ways to build the confidence and trust of your customers toward your brand. With Google as the leading search engine, it’s only natural to prioritize getting reviews on Google My Business page.

By integrating Google My Business with the Google Plus platform, you can now manage the information provided in maps and searches. Additionally, Google shows the reviews that your customers made about their purchases from you. These reviews can help with your click-through rate, so it pays to focus your attention on encouraging your customers to leave you local business reviews on Google’s platform.

Encouraging ways for your customers to leave you reviews on Google

1. Find the perfect timing. It can be tricky to choose the right date and time to ask your customers for a review on your products or services. If you ask them too early, they might not have any opinion yet because they do not have enough experience with their purchase. But if you’re too late on asking them for a review, asking them too late their initial impression might have faded already. Thus, getting a review from them boils down to the right timing of asking them.
2. Link your review section to Google My Business page. Most of your customers lead a busy life, so if they’re willing enough to create a review for you, you must make it as easy as possible. You can do this providing your customers a direct link to Google My Business page review form that can be found in an obvious place on your website.
3. Incorporate a CTA to your email auto signature. You can utilize your email marketing campaign to ask your customers to rate and leave you a review. By incorporating a call to action (CTA) on your email auto signature with a Google My Review page link, you can easily show your customers where they can voice out their opinions on your products.

Importance of Social Media Analytics

If after reading all that you’re still wondering if reviews would really matter, the answer is a definite yes. Consumer reviews will give your brand a good and reliable image. Their opinions about you are powerful and influential. They can also provide you the insights that you need for improving your products and services. Positive reviews can drive more sales and higher revenue. Furthermore.  it can let you know your brand’s strongest points that you have to promote and emphasize.

Aside from incorporating a solid marketing strategy and utilizing several marketing and customer support solutions, such as the best customer experience management software platforms, consumer reviews can steer your business in the right direction.

Conclusively, there’s one thing to realize from this. Your employees are not your best sales representatives and marketers. Instead, your consumers are. The consequences of ignoring such reviews and customer feedback may have a long-term effect on your business, so investing on customer experience management solutions can pay off in the end. Signing up for Zendesk free trial here can thus give you a head start on improving your customer experience management.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.