Why Online Reviews Are Essential for Business Survival User-generated feedback, in the form of reviews online, is vital to modern business success, whether your company sells products in a brick-and-mortar store, on an ecommerce site, or both. Most customers research products online before buying, and that process includes reading reviews. To get the most value from customer feedback, it helps to understand how reviews can benefit your company, and what strategies are proven to be most effective. Benefits of Customer Reviews Reviews from customers help you: 1. Increase conversion Positive reviews influence buying decisions for 90 percent of consumers, Dimensional Research found in a 2013 survey. This means customers are much more likely to buy a product that has user reviews available than one that doesn't. 2. Build trust in your products (and brand) Opinions from experts and users can help establish a positive image for your products based on their absolute value rather than just brand reputation. Existing customers can exert a great deal of power over future customers, especially if buyers in your market rely heavily on input from others when making purchase decisions. When managed strategically, having customer reviews available increases trust in your products and brand. Considerations include diversifying review formats and where they're published (e.g. feedback on community forums, Facebook fan page discussion, reviews on Amazon.com), and preventing fake reviews (especially negative ones). 3. Maximize SEO Reviews benefit your search engine optimization (SEO) investment by: ● Providing new, unique content that influences search engine rankings. ● Increasing the chances prospects will find you when doing specific product and long tail searches (those with several words specific to what you sell). ● Encouraging click-throughs to your site. ● Increasing global reach since customers leave comments in the same language native to other prospects when they search.
How to Make Online Reviews Work for You Leveraging customer feedback to your advantage takes strategic, ongoing monitoring. A review management system like ReviewInc can help. Where and how reviews are published and discovered, and who writes them, impacts their effectiveness. Consider, for example, that consumers rely most on recommendations from people they know and trust information from advertisers the least. Focus on the following three activities to optimize the sales utility of customer reviews. 1. Attract reviews ● On your product pages, invite people to leave reviews. ● Make it easy for people to leave reviews. ● Offer incentives to leave reviews—like automatic entry into a drawing, or a discount on a future purchase. ● Engage in social activity to answer customer questions and encourage feedback. 2. Manage the impact of negative reviews ● Engage customers on social media networks where they're more likely to leave positive reviews than they are on popular review sites. ● Give customers time to receive and use your products; then follow up by email and invite them to provide feedback. This can help increase the ratio of positive to negative reviews. ● Respond to all reviews, good and bad. ● If you suspect a negative review was left by a troll, contact the publisher and ask to have it reviewed and removed if it's determined to be fake. 3. Format and present reviews effectively ● Give site visitors an easy way to rate the helpfulness of each review. ● Use filtered navigation to help customers find reviews useful to them. ● If you sell products in stores and online, get creative by presenting online reviews in the store. ● Use charts to organize reviews by their user-generated rating or other criteria. ● Display both summarized and detailed review information. ● Get listed on Foursquare and similar apps if you run a local brick-and-mortar establishment. Summary Business reviews from customers help sales, build trust in your products, and optimize SEO. Make the most of them: attract reviews, manage the impact of negative reviews, format usergenerated content effectively, and maximize SEO impact.
Company Bio ReviewInc provides review management services to help businesses monitor brand reputation in real-time, improve quality of customer reviews, and turn happy customers into free advertising. Their customers include auto dealers, dental and medical practices, international chains and retailers, restaurants, country clubs, retailers, travel and leisure companies, and property managers. Visit http://www.reviewinc.com to learn how ReviewInc can help your business use reviews to improve brand reputation.