What are the benefits of online reviews? Positive reviews give potential customers confidence to purchase from your business because they know others have had positive experiences with it. Online reviews are effective tools that generate trust of new consumers.
Here’s why:
- Consumers rely on online reviews when making purchases.
- 63% of customers trust a brand with reviews more than one without.
- Buyers feel more risky when there are no reviews, which lessens their likelihood of making a purchase.
The vast majority of consumers (93%) say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions and they tend to choose businesses with excellent reviews from previous buyers. So it’s not an understatement to say that online reviews can make or break your company’s success. This is especially true for e-commerce type businesses.
Take a moment to recall the last time you purchased something on Amazon, for example. It is likely that one of the first things you looked at was the overall star rating. Individual reviews determine that rating.
Star ratings are so powerful that consumers still trust them even though 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. In other words, customer feedback should be a critical part of your digital marketing initiatives, including collecting, monitoring, and managing it.
That said, getting positive reviews for your e-commerce website business is a priority. To ensure your business is ahead of the competition online, you should try to gather as many reviews as possible. Knowing how reviews work and experimenting with them will help you streamline the review collection process. Now let’s talk about how to increase online reviews.
Offer Incentives
This is a tried and tested method and businesses state that running incentive programs for collecting reviews has helped them in numerous ways.
As a business, you should try to get creative when offering incentives, in addition to keeping the preferences and tastes of your consumers in mind. Free shipping and discounts are some of the most popular tricks adapted by the industries.
When running a review gathering program, let your consumers know that incentives are only offered for honest reviews.
That said, a combination of good and bad reviews is the best. Since, if a business has good reviews only, consumers cannot put in trust, as expected. It is good to have a mixture of reviews, which leads consumers to believe they are genuine and not scams.
Send Post-Purchase Emails
It is true that many people are happy to share their thoughts about a product or service that they have used previously.Nevertheless, customers probably need to be prompted to share their opinions. As everyone is busy these days, reminding consumers to leave reviews is necessary. Using post-purchase emails effectively encourages customers to provide feedback.
After a purchase has been made, send targeted emails to consumers. For a more appealing reminder email, you can also incorporate the review form directly into it.
In this way, consumers can share their opinions without visiting your website. Additionally, you can use review collection software right within the email to leave one-click reviews.
Delight Your Consumers with Special Brand Initiatives
Be so impressive that your consumers feel compelled to post positive reviews. Let’s face it, some customers are hard to please, and others are impossible to impress.
Are you familiar with the 80/20 rule? 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Even though the number is smaller, you’ll still have a manageable number of people who can influence your online business’s success.
Additionally, you may want to keep your loyal customers happy by offering giveaways, special discounts, and taking other initiatives.
More positive experiences you provide to your customers, the more likely they are to love your brand. As a result, they will recommend it to their friends and family.
Suggest Multiple Options to Post Reviews
You will not receive a review on Facebook from a customer who doesn’t have a Facebook account.
Therefore, we recommend offering your consumers a few platforms to post their reviews. You can request that reviews be posted on Facebook, Google, your Website, or any other site where reviews can be posted.
It increases the likelihood that they will leave a review since there are at least a few options to choose from. This will also eventually increase the number of customers who follow others and do the same.
Conclusion
The process of collecting reviews may seem daunting at first. However, you can employ strategies with different levels of involvement to generate more reviews. The more tips you use to collect reviews from customers, the better your business will be.
As part of our Orange County Web Design process, we integrate a separate section for customer reviews onto your website. This helps streamline the process and make it easier for customers to review.
You may think that collecting 100 reviews is a daunting task, but it’s still possible. Most consumers usually enjoy sharing their opinions.
