Online reviews are a vital part of your brand’s marketing. 93% of buyers say that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions. Third-party review sites are increasingly important — at least half of online shoppers say they trust third-party review sites more than reviews on company websites.
Reviews increase your brand exposure, send trust signals to give buyers confidence in your products or services, and can improve your conversion rates. But did you know you can also use online reviews to improve your business, too?
In this article, we’ll examine how your reviews can provide insights for business success, along with examples and tips for using reviews to improve customer satisfaction.
Leveraging Genuine Feedback
Reviews — whether positive or negative — provide an opportunity to get direct feedback from your customers that can help grow your business.
Positive reviews help you see what customers like about your products or services. This can help you hone in on the key differences in what you’re selling. Negative reviews can give you feedback on things you need to improve.
By keeping an eye on your reviews, you can quickly identify patterns and anomalies to solve any problems that pop up — including unexpected ones. For example, if people are complaining about long response times to customer support, you’ll want to pay special attention to your customer support procedures. You can use this information to research issues and solutions. You can also tell reviewers what you are doing to resolve the issue, showing you care about customer satisfaction.
Reviews may also help surface additional features or product enhancements that your customers want. This can help product managers to grow their product roadmap and marketers to highlight the features customers find useful.
Feedback can also help you understand:
- Customer preferences
- Alignment with industry trends
- Whether your marketing approach is resonating
Engaging with Customers
Reviews are a powerful way to engage with customers. When you respond to a review, you can demonstrate to others that you take feedback seriously, which helps increase brand loyalty.
Building a relationship with your customers is key to developing loyal and passionate advocates for your brand. When customers feel they are valued and appreciated, they are more likely to become repeat customers. Happy customers are also more likely to recommend your business to others, which can help attract new customers.
Consumers expect you to respond, especially to less-than-glowing reviews. 53% of customers say they expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within the week. Nearly 60% of customers said they would not likely do business with companies that ignore negative reviews.
Here’s one more statistic that emphasizes the importance of engagement: 56% of brands that excelled at customer engagement exceeded their revenue goals. Reviews provide you with a forum do to exactly that — respond to and engage with customers.
Embracing Negative Reviews
Responding to your negative reviews can help you turn unhappy customers around. When you’re transparent about problems and work to solve them, negative reviewers often turn into loyal customers.
At the same time, you are demonstrating to potential buyers that you take feedback seriously. This transparency and willingness to address problems builds trust.
When you respond to negative reviews positively and professionally, exhibiting empathy in a transparent manner, you’ll impact both the reviewer and others who read the review. It gives prospective buyers confidence that if they encounter an issue, you will be there to remedy their situation with your product.
Here’s an example. A customer of a B2B office equipment company leaves a negative review, saying their equipment arrived damaged and delivery was delayed. In many cases, reviews like this are posted before they ever contact you about the problem. By responding quickly and making sure everyone reading the review knows that you are shipping a replacement product immediately, you show your commitment to excellent customer support.
People understand that sometimes things go wrong. It’s how companies respond to problems that set the best companies apart from their competitors.
Providing Social Proof
You can tell people how great your products or services are, but prospects know you have a vested interest in what you’re telling them (and you aren’t likely to share any negatives about your products or services). On the other hand, firsthand reviews from other customers won’t be shy about talking about the pros and cons.
Reviews provide social proof, acting as word-of-mouth from actual customers that have experience with your products. They also present a third-party endorsement that counters the declining trust in advertising and brands. Just 13% of people trust advertisements — fewer than trust Big Oil and Big Pharma companies.
While most people are skeptical about marketing or advertising claims made by companies, they trust reviews.
Sharing Reviews
Sharing reviews can help provide this social proof to prospective customers who are looking at your website. The average customer spends about 4 hours a day on social media — yet, only a few minutes on your website. Meet customers where they are and showcase your reviews on social media.
Reviews on your social media accounts and website serve as third-party recommendations, acting as a powerful reinforcement of the features and benefits highlighted on your site. Sitejabber makes this easy to do, offering an extensive library of widgets that you can add to your website to feature reviews.
Monitoring Competitor Reviews
By monitoring competitive reviews, you can see what their customers like or dislike about their products or services. This can provide valuable insight to help identify gaps in the market that you may be able to use to grow your business.
For example, if you are in the food service business, you might notice reviews on your competitor’s site about how much customers love their vegan, gluten-free, or paleo options that you do not offer. When you see a significant number of customers interested in healthy meal options, you might analyze your product mix to see if these options make sense for you.
Another example might be a SaaS platform for enterprise customers. In monitoring competitor reviews, you see that customers may like their solution but have concerns about how expensive it is and how challenging the onboarding process is. This allows you to counter-program your marketing to their customers based on affordability and ease of use.
Helping with SEO
Google recently made significant changes to its quality rater guidelines to focus on content that provides experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google calls this E-E-A-T or Double E-A-T.
Reviews play perfectly into this ranking signal. Customers leaving reviews have first-hand experience with your products or service, which the Google algorithm favors.
Reviews on high-quality review sites like Sitejabber and your website help establish your products and services, and can enhance your search engine quality ratings. This sends the right messages to Google’s algorithm to help your search engine optimization (SEO).
Grow Your Business With Online Reviews
Online customer reviews play a big part in your online reputation. They can help send trust signals, give potential customers confidence in your products and services, and help you improve your business.
Sitejabber can help you leverage reviews to grow your business. Businesses that proactively collect reviews from their customers using Sitejabber get more than 95% positive reviews. Join the more than 40,000 businesses that manage their reviews on Sitejabber and take control of your online presence.
Register for your free account on Sitejabber today.
