A BrightLocal study shows that 91% of customers aged between 18 and 34 consider reviews as reliable as recommendations given by their family and friends. Today paying attention to your online reputation can make or break your business. Positive reviews can motivate customers to travel further to reach your selling point, and vice versa negative reviews can discourage them from buying altogether. Let’s dig deeper into the stats related to reviews and get the most crucial takeaways from them.
You need to get positive reviews frequently
It is important to keep gathering fresh customer reviews. 85% of customers don’t like reading reviews older than 3 months and 40% of consumers don’t check reviews older than 2 weeks. So gathering up-to-date feedback is a must to keep your business working. All this means that you should indeed pay attention to your online reputation if you want to sell well. Otherwise, companies that ask for positive reviews more often (and hence get more fresh positive reviews) can quickly get your part of the market.
Your customers pay attention to your rating
In addition, it was discovered that 80% of customers buy exclusively from businesses that have 4.5 to 5 ratings. Only 13% of users are ready to try a 1-2 star business. About 50% of customers consider 3 stars a point under which the product or company is unacceptable. All this sometimes stimulates companies to buy fake 5-star reviews, however, here you should also be careful. Studies showed that, if a company has a round 5-star rating, about 80% of users start to look for negative reviews because a too ideal company seems suspicious. Overall, the ideal rating for stimulating customers to buy is between 4.2 and 4.5.
Check the balance between positive and negative reviews
At the same time, another survey found that about 70% of customers decide to buy from a particular business because they read positive reviews, and 40% make a decision to never turn to a particular company if they get negative reviews. However, negative reviews are not always triggered by the quality of your product. More than 80% of people admit that they can leave a 1-star review after contacting a rude employee. So while working on your online reputation, you should pay particular attention to your corporate culture and how your employees treat clients. Otherwise, all the efforts for improving your product can go to zero.
Your reaction to reviews matters for your customer
According to BrightLocal, 89% of customers pay attention to how your company responds to client reviews. Among those who read, 59% of clients take their decision to buy with a company or not based on the quality of your answers. According to another study, 56% of customers even changed their negative opinion to positive after reading the company’s responses to other clients. And customers do expect an answer from you. According to ReviewTrackers, about 50% of users expect to get an answer from the company within 7 days. So, a correct and gentle answer can help you calm down an unhappy customer and show other clients that you value their opinions and deserve trust.
Encourage users to leave detailed reviews
The stats show that 65% of customers are ready to trust a business more if they read reviews with user-generated content, like photos and videos. You can encourage your users to give more detailed reviews in exchange for a discount or promo code. Another way to make reviews more effective is to use verified reviews. Spiegel found out that verified reviews increase the likelihood of buying by 15% which is already quite a lot. So you can motivate users to sign up before leaving a review in exchange for a small bonus. If users don’t want to leave pictures or sign up, at least ask for a minimum number of words to add. Fan and Fuel discovered that 73% of users value written reviews way more than just a star rating, so even this small thing can change a lot.
Don’t wait for reviews – Ask for them
Well even if you understand that reviews matter a lot, it is still not you to write them. People are lazy. Quite often we forget to say something good even after we really enjoy the product. So how to get reviews frequently? Actually, simply asking your customer to leave a review works in 68% of cases according to BrightLocal. There is nothing bad in approaching your customer after buying to ask them for reviews. Spiegel’s research says that 80% of reviews are triggered by follow-up emails. Just remember to add a direct link and make the review process as easy as possible.
Customers see real value in reviews
Broadly checked how many people were indeed satisfied with their purchase and found out that 78% of people who make their purchase decision based on reviews are later satisfied with what they have. And today more and more people are ready to share their experiences online. This fact, on the one hand, creates more “free” marketing opportunities for good brands and, on the other hand, imposes a major risk for companies that have problems with additional services or the product itself.
In our previous post, we shared tips about how to use reviews to get more clients on your dating website. Check the post and get more valuable ideas!
