In the last decade or so, online customer reviews have emerged as a crucial element for any company. They have the power to decide the fate of an enterprise’s growth. On the one hand, they are the dealmakers and breakers for new customers. Various studies and surveys have confirmed that people proceed to buy a product or service by reading a couple of customer reviews.

On the other hand, a reasonable aggregate of online reviews, particularly the positive ones factor a lot in how Google ranks your page. As per Moz’s finding, the online reviews of a business account for 8% of

how Google and other search engine algorithms evaluate it for the ranking. However, gathering customer reviews is no mean task.

As a new business that is still trying to understand the intricacies of digital marketing and online visibility, you should know some basics of harnessing positive customer reviews. By executing these tactics in the right manner, you can have more customers leaving positive reviews about your general business or particular product or service.

Six Ways to Harness Positive Reviews

You can try these tips to gather positive reviews for your enterprise.

1. Only Ask the Satisfied Customers

The first rule to collect positive reviews is to ask only happy and satisfied customers. You can’t ask every customer to leave a good or positive review, especially if they have faced some issues while doing business with you. A customer who has experienced a seamless journey with you throughout the sales funnel won’t have any reason not to leave a good review.

So, identify the fully satisfied consumer base and ask it just for reviews, not the positive and good ones, because they will ultimately say good things in their reviews. Let’s say you ask 100 satisfied customers for their reviews, and even if only half of them leave one, you will end up with 50 positive reviews. This will not just add to the aggregate but will also help in reducing the negative impact of highly critical and outright bad reviews.

2. Make It as Easy as Possible

Keep in mind that no matter how happy a customer is with your services and products, they will not go out of their way to leave a review. This means that if writing a review for your business requires quite a work, customers will just get around despite loving your services. Many times, customers who come to write a good review without any prompting leave before finishing because it turns into a frustrating and time-consuming process.

In short, if you want more people to leave good reviews about your business, you have to make sure they can do it the most hassle-free manner. The ease of leaving a review involves fewer clicks and lesser scrolling with no redirections.

5-second Rule: When a customer figures out where to give the review and start writing it within five seconds, a review process can be considered easy.

3. Don’t Delay

You want a customer to write a review about your company when they are still under the liking of doing business with you. A person will able to right a more wholehearted review about a product that reaches them in time and meet or exceed their expectations in the first two days after the purchase. Once a couple of days gone, many of them won’t even bother to open your mail, let alone write a good review.

However, you also need to make sure that you are not asking them for a review prematurely. For instance, if the review request or window pops right up when they are checking out is more likely to annoy them than earning you a positive review.

4. Add a Dash of Incentive

First thing first, you can’t buy reviews and then bank on them to earn your more customers and improve your search ranking. Aggregator websites, as well as Google, strictly advise against buying customer reviews and don’t consider them in their evaluations. However, you can give incentives to your existing customers for leaving a review.

For instance, you can add points to their loyalty program when they leave a good customer review. In this case, you only persuade those customers to leave a review who are already satisfied with your services.

5. Always Send a Follow-up

Remember that leaving a review on your enterprise is not the most pressing thing in customers’ schedules. There are many cases where customers are going to give a good review of a business but suddenly forget in the bustle of daily life. Therefore, it is always a good idea to send out a reminder to customers in the form of a follow-up email or message. There are strong chances that you will be able to get many positive reviews from forgetful clients.

6. Get Your Team on it

Make sure that gathering positive customer reviews is an integral part of your work culture. Your employees should know the importance of good reviews. Your sales and support team must play a proactive role to make sure the maximum numbers of customers leave a review. You can introduce bonuses and incentives for staff that succeed in collecting a particular number of positive reviews.

Importance of Reviews in Numbers

Before we wrap up this piece, we would like to share some important statistical findings that highlight the importance of online reviews from a business standpoint.

• Around 70% of customers rely upon positive reviews before making the final decision about a product or service.
• One-fifth of customers trust online reviews as much as they rely upon in-person recommendations.
• More than 85% of customers avoid buying from an entity that has a lot of negative reviews.
• More than 90% of customers read online reviews before visiting a business in person.

If you want to harness good customer reviews on your website, Google Business Page, and across various social media platforms, get in touch with Business Marketing Solutions Group. The company also offers expert review management along with other digital marketing and management services.

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