Tops Reasons Online Reviews Matter for Your Business

There are many businesses that do not pay attention to online reviews. They either believe that online reviews are not quite important for them and their customers, or they just don’t want to pay attention to the handling of online reviews. Either way, they basically underestimate the power of online reviews.

You do not only need to encourage people to leave feedback about your brand and products but you also need to engage with those customers by initiating conversations based on their feedback. In this article, we are going to discuss the reasons you definitely need to pay attention to the online reviews about your business and products.

Majority of people read online reviews

According to a survey, 90% online viewers read online reviews. And 85% of them give importance to reviews as much as they give attention to personal recommendations. And the number of people who make purchases based on the reviews they read is increasing with every passing day. So, if you are not paying attention to using reviews in your marketing procedures, you are definitely missing out on something pretty big.

Effects on purchasing behavior

As mentioned above, 85% of the customers consider reviews as personal recommendations. It means that online reviews give those people a fair reason to select or reject any product for purchasing. If you sell tech items, you need to know that 70% of the people read online reviews before purchasing the tech items. Although the reviews do not matter much when the product is not quite delicate, people still read the reviews to get an idea about the product; and a percentage of those people distrust the brands with negative reviews.

People also read review sites

Amazon is the leading platform from the aspect of reviews. People like to read customer reviews on Amazon because Amazon has a roust system in place to handle the reviews. Other platforms include Google, Yelp and Facebook. If you have on-site review system in place, people are also going to read reviews there but most of the readers trust reviews on third-party websites more.

A very few people write reviews

While there are many people who read online reviews about the products and brands, a very few customers actually write the reviews. What’s quite unfortunate is that the customers are 3 times more likely to write negative reviews if they are not happy with the product.It means that if you are not successful in satisfying your customers, you are definitely going to get a lot of negative reviews. On the other hand, you are going to need to have a robust system in place to encourage your happy customers to write review for your brand.

Ways to Get Customer Reviews

When you plan on buying something, you do a research about it. The main purpose is to get to know about the best product and brand. One of the ways you can search for the best product you need is to read the online reviews.

The concept behind reading reviews is the same as that of asking people for suggestions. By reading reviews, you get to know about the consumers’ perspective about the product. And if you are a marketer, you are definitely going to need to work on getting and sorting the customer reviews.

How important are the customer reviews?

The first thing that shows importance of reviews is that 85% of the customers read online reviews regularly. 90% of the customers read reviews about a business before visiting the business. 88% of the customers trust reviews as much as they trust recommendations from their friends. Customers are going to be willing to pay 31% more than the actual price if the product has good reviews.

With these stats, it is going to be easy for you to understand the fact that you need to work on the customer reviews if you want to ensure better growth of your business in the online media.

Ways to get reviews on your e-commerce store

There are a few ways you can encourage your customers to leave their feedback about your product or brand.

  • When a customer buys your product, they just want to share their purchase with others. However, you may need to encourage them a little to write a review about your product. The best way is to offer them a discount.
  • You need to ask for the review about your product or service and you are going to have to ask it on time. If you ask for the food review from your customer after 12 hours of serving the meal, it is not going to be quite effective. Make sure that you ask them as soon as they are finished with the food.
  • While it is important to pay attention to other modes of marketing, you can actually consider using reviews as a primary way to promote your brand and products. Some reviews from your happy customers are going to do a great job for your brand. The best way is to pick some consumers and offer them your product for free. Then you will need to ask them to write a review about your product. You can then use those positive reviews to promote your brand.

Reviews are highly important for your business. Good news is that there are certain plugins and extensions in different CMSs that offer you easy integration of review management system in the websites. For instance, you can use WooCommerce if your online store is a WordPress based website.