We don’t know about you but before we buy a product or service we first check the reviews. Whether it be buying a product on Amazon, having dinner at a new restaurant, or contracting someone to work on your house, reviews are always important and can be a reliable source of information. In this blog, we will talk about the benefit of reviews, why your business should utilize reviews, and how to incentivize customers to review your business.
The Benefits of Reviews
Reviews are immensely important to any business as studies show that 90% of consumers read online views before visiting a business. Recommendations used to be the central way of expanding your business before the internet, and reviews have become the modern form of recommendations as 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. In fact, reviews have almost become a necessity in some fields as 72% of consumers will take action only after reading a positive review. Simple statistics like these emphasize the importance of reviews and reiterate the point that all businesses should seek reviews from customers to help develop a formidable reputation.
Locations to Find Reviews
One of the best places to post reviews can be through your website – you can leave a location for users to review your products on your website or you can select specific reviews to use as testimonials. Beyond your own website, there are also numerous websites for consumers to find reviews. Yelp is a popular site where users can review any business, TripAdvisor is a website popular for reviewing hotels and restaurants, and Houzz is a site for reviewing various contractors for house work. As for Yelp, a site with 26,380 new reviews posted every minute, a one-star increase leads, on average, to a 5 to 9 percent increase in a business’s revenue while a negative review can cost you 30 customers. Similar statistics follow for the other sites like Houzz and TripAdvisor and just emphasize the importance of reviews. Therefore, all businesses should be checking these sites to ensure that they have reviews and that these reviews are fair and accurate.
How to Get Reviews
Reviews are not something that can be bought online – reviews are a reward for strong customer service and fair business policies. However, we have found that most people do not immediately think to review businesses after working with them, and this results in great businesses having no ratings. A simple message asking customers to review your website will often do the trick, but if this is still not working then you could try starting a contest for customers that review your business. This way you incentivize customers to review you, but give no reward for higher ratings, as the contest would be completely random. We are just like everyone else in that we rarely think to review businesses or simply just forget to, but small things like these can encourage people to review your business.
What Do I Do About Negative Reviews?
Negative reviews will happen even to the best of businesses – nobody is perfect. In order to deal with them, your business should respond to them promptly with a personal tone, admit your mistakes and work to fix them, or take the review offline if needed. However, we recommend not taking a review offline, and this should only be done as a last case scenario for a review that is inaccurate and abusive. Overall, it is important to always address a negative review, and do so in a consistent matter. A negative review left unaddressed is a red flag for most customers and can lose you business, while a negative review that is addressed and worked at is only a minor setback and can show persistence.
Nate Trimmer is a Co-Founder of Omnibeat. As a social media enthusiast with a background in organizational development and computer technology, he strives to help businesses understand and embrace social media.
Omnibeat is the digital marketing outsource solution for growth in Los Alamitos and the greater Long Beach area.
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