Did you know?
Before deciding to visit or shop with a business, 90% of consumers read online reviews.
Similarly, 88% of those consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That’s pretty big news because 92% of consumers identify recommendations from friends and family as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions.
Online reviews can make a massive impact on how your consumers view and interact with your product—and they trust them almost as much as they trust their own family members.
That’s huge!
Focus on making the most of online reviews to regain control over your online reputation and how individuals perceive your product. If you’re not yet completely sold on how valuable addition customer reviews are to your business.
Here’s what reviews can do for you:
Generates trust
Trust is a hot commodity when it comes to business. In fact, according to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, only 56% of consumers trust businesses to do the right thing on their own.
That means that likely just a little over half of the people that use your product actually trust and believe in you to advocate for them. Luckily for you, right underneath the product itself, customer reviews and ratings are the top tools to improve customer trust.
So, what does that trust get you?
Higher and more frequent spending
Huffington Post discovered that just a one-star bump on Yelp translates into an increase in profit of between 5 and 9% for your business.
Better reviews and deeper trust from your customers boost the amount of money that customers are willing to spend. Along with the added boost for a positive rating, businesses that focus on customer experience based marketing have an average annual revenue growth rate of 15% versus 11% for other companies.
The people that trust you more and know that you are committed to their success are going to spend more money with your company in the long term and will remain customers for longer.
More word-of-mouth marketing
Trust is hard to develop—but once you build it, it’s one of the best ways to get new users in the door. An average consumer discusses specific brands that they use and love upwards of 90 times a week.
If you make an impact on a customer through positive and constructive reviews on your site, it puts you in the running for valuable advertisement time during their day-to-day conversations. In terms of what you get back from that: 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth recommendations as a key driver in their purchasing decisions.
The more people talk about you, the more people will feel compelled to purchase.
Reach more customers
People talking about you and trusting your brand is great, but it can also be useful to naturally reach more customers through your website. Customer reviews can also help with that.
Having good and plentiful reviews on your website or through other sites like Google, Yelp and Facebook reviews can give you added benefits to your business.
In the event that you don’t have tons of reviews, you can also consider running a promotion to drive additional reviews from past purchases or customer experiences.
Here are a few ways that getting customer reviews can help extend your brand’s internet reach:
Star ratings improve search results
The better your star rating and more frequently you are reviewed positively, the more likely you are to show up in search results. Because 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, it makes sense that ranking at the top of searches relevant to your business could help to drive new traffic and potential customers to your site.
Before making a large or important purchase, many consumers consult their search engine of choice as well. In fact, 81% of them do. In the event that you are the top of the list when it comes to results to their search query, that’s a lot of consumers that you have the opportunity to wow with your positive and bountiful customer reviews.
Improve SEO
You get a ton of additional value when people who are already looking for consumer opinions see your positive reviews at the top of the list. If you aren’t at the top, your results hardly matter because 75% of all online consumers never actually scroll past the first page when they’re looking for product reviews or insights!
Companies that have positive star ratings in Google Ads and Product Listing Ads also get a click-through-rate (CTR) boost of up to 17%, meaning that more people are clicking on your ads and finding them relevant. Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on an ad only to have it not be relevant or what you expected.
Helps better your marketing and product teams
Seeing information about how your customers feel helps give your company a boost outwardly in the form of great SEO and generating more trust from your customers, but it also benefits your team internally.
Product
Having a direct line to what your customers say about you gives your product team insight into what features people really love, and what they could be doing better. Not only that, but it gives you the opportunity to reach out to your customers and build better relationships.
Responding to customer reviews is an important step in your production process: thanking customers for positive reviews deepens their loyalty to you.
Similarly, if they’ve left you some constructive insights, responding can help repair things: 7 out of 10 consumers changed their opinion about a brand after the company replied to what they had to say.
Marketing
When going the route of content marketing over word-of-mouth marketing, testimonials can be one of the most effective routes; and with so many reviews, you’ve got tons of stories to pick from.
Customer testimonials and case studies are considered the most effective content marketing tactics, identified as 89% and 88%, respectively, by B2B marketers.
Having the option to use your customer reviews at testimonials or customer case studies gives your marketing team a whole bucket of potential content marketing pieces that are easy and impactful to implement.
Conclusion
For something which takes fairly minimal effort from your company (outside of providing an awesome customer experience), customer reviews are a hugely effective way to boost core aspects of your company.
Using them can help boost your SEO, getting you more views and traffic to your site; earn your customers’ trust by providing them with tried-and-true insights from other customers; even benefit your product and marketing teams by giving them extra constructive insights and content to use in their strategy.
If you don’t already offer social proof of the ability to leave reviews on your site, consider doing so to give yourself these easy-to-use benefits with little effort required.
