Customer reviews are important, whether you’re an established brand or just getting started. Around 72% of customers are less likely to make a purchase decision unless they’ve read the reviews.
A vast majority of customers tend to rely on the experiences and opinions of others before opting for a product or a service for themselves. And, since the internet has made information readily accessible, your potential customers are more likely to search for reviews online before making a buying decision.
Now, you may come across customers who shy away from sharing their experiences with others as only 6% of customers actually write reviews about the products or services that they use. Ideally, you should reach out to them for what they think of your brand but instead, many avoid communicating with their customers – leaving potential reviews on the table.
If you’ve been doing the same, here are a few reasons that may help you make the right call.
Know Your Customer
The key to acknowledging customer delight, in the long run, lies in knowing your customer preferences and meeting their demands in the best way possible.
What do your customers want? Are they satisfied with what you offer? How likely are they to recommend your brand to others? Finding answers to these questions pave the way for you to acknowledge undying loyalty.
Reviews help you extrapolate valuable insights from the experiences of your customers. These findings enable you to optimize your buyer’s journey and avoid the same mistakes that you made in the past.
Reviews Facilitate Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is the key to disrupting growth and attaining new heights of success for any company.
Businesses spend millions on conducting surveys to gather data that can help them improve their products or service offerings. And, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that similar insights can be accessed through review content and used to make informed decisions.
Customer reviews make it possible for you to access the most authentic data provided to you by people who have had first-hand experience with your brand. What’s more? You don’t even have to spend a single penny, such valuable information is made available to you for free.
You can leverage reviews to fix the problems that would otherwise cause dissatisfaction among customers and sales to gradually decline. It all comes down to how well you can handle the criticism and use it in a positive way to evolve and be better.
Reviews Drive More Purchases
Around 55% of people will look for customer reviews and recommendations online before making a purchase. People feel more comfortable purchasing products if others before them have had positive experiences with their purchases, especially with the new brands.
Customer reviews can take you a long way. The testimonials by your current customers can help you gain the trust of your potential target audience – fueling positive word of mouth and driving more sales.
Reviews Fuel Search Rankings
We live in a digital age. Customers search for anything and probably everything that they need online. Around 88% of customers rely on online reviews and visit Google for referrals and/or recommendations.
Hence, the search engine rankings are likely to affect the buying decision of your potential customer. And, in most cases, the search queries that people use to find the right solutions for their needs don’t contain a company name.
For example, if you need a table for two in a fine dining restaurant, you are more likely to go over to your preferred search engine and type “best fine dining restaurants near me” and select one of the top search results to make the reservation.
Now, search engines follow their own parameters for indexing and ranking brands, but, the one thing that generally fuels their algorithm is fresh content. Customer reviews help enhance the visibility of your brand online by giving it the SEO boost that it needs to rank among the top recommendations in response to a particular search query.
When customers rank you higher than the competing brands, search engine algorithms start viewing you as a preferred choice among the alternatives and consider you as an authority in the industry.
Reviews Increase Your Brand’s Share of Mind
Reviews are contagious. One positive review leads to another and the cycle goes on. Customer reviews increase your brand’s exposure and reach by many folds. However, this isn’t something that you should expect overnight as it may take years to build rapport and credibility among customers through a steady inflow of positive reviews.
Once you’ve gained trust among your customers, your brand will be one of the first if not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of products or services that you offer.
User-Generated Content
No matter how brilliant your product or service is, you need content to enhance the reach of your brand. No wonder around 64% of marketers want to learn how to create a stellar content strategy. It’s content that helps you climb the search engine rankings and stay relevant in the long run whether you’re an old company or just getting started.
One thing worth mentioning here is that content demands continuity. Around 60% of marketers produce at least one piece of content per day. And since there’s so much you can write about your brand, relying on other ways to generate authentic content is a viable option to avoid monotony and exhaustion.
Customer reviews are fresh user-generated content that helps you enhance your brand’s reach. The reviews written by your customers can be published on your website, social media platforms, and online communities – serving as social proof to entice your target audience.
These were a few reasons why you should reach out to your customers for reviews if you haven’t been doing it already. Listen to what your customers have to say, especially the ones who aren’t saying good things about you.
Sweeping negative reviews under the rug isn’t going to help. It’s time to put that information to good use and make the much-needed improvements as a buyer’s journey fueled by the voice of customers is the one that ensures lasting customer relationships.