In the 21st century, customers are no longer passive onlookers, they are active participants in businesses. The internet has armed even the least of all customers with the ability to influence and impact on businesses, whether positively or negatively. The earlier businesses recognize the power wielded by their customers, the better for them. Customers can influence a business primarily through their customer reviews and ratings. The power of customer reviews cannot be overemphasized. It can down throne a thitherto flagship business within a twinkling of an eye and it can make a startup suave and debonair.
To maintain flagship in your industry, you need to take advantage of the power of customer review. Interestingly, this is easy to do. The tips are mostly obvious but often neglected by most businesses.
Share to see the Power of Customer Reviews
One of the first things to do in order to leverage the power of customer reviews is to share the reviews. This is particularly true when customers share some awesome positive experience they have with your brand. Sharing the reviews will make the customer realize that you actually care about what they say and it will also go a long way to tell your target audience what your customers are saying about you.
One way to share your customer review is through your email campaign. According to Radicati Group Report, more than 205 billion emails spend each day. Thus, email campaigns and marketing is an effective way to reach out to your customers. Incorporating customer reviews into your emails will ensure that customers get more engaged in your products and services and it can easily boost your sales. You can also share customer reviews through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and others.
Engage (Participate) in the Reviews
Most businesses are either too busy or simply indifferent about responding to customer reviews. However, this could be the most potent force that would differentiate you from other businesses and essentially make you the best brand. Engaging in the reviews could be as easy as replying to each review shared by your customers. You don’t just need to reply only to positive reviews but you should reply to both positive and negative reviews. Your participation could be either by thanking the customer for reviewing your product or going into more details to proffer solution to any challenges posed by the customer. You will experience firsthand the power of customer reviews if you engage in the review contents no matter how brief.
Participating in the reviews improves customers’ trust in your brand. Customers will realize that you care and will be willing to patronize your brand the more. This goes a long way to build a sort of emotional bond between your services and your customers and therefore boosting your brand.
Place the Reviews in Visible and Strategic Positions on Your Website
An easy way to leverage the power of customer reviews is to make the reviews visible. This can be done in so many ways, but most importantly by making sure that the reviews appear on your website’s main page. One way to do this is by linking your customer reviews from an external source such as Yelp to your main page or any other page you want the review to appear.
Your main page is not the only page that matters here. As a matter of fact, you need to determine the most visited pages on your website and ensure that the reviews appear on the page. This can be easily done by running analytics on your website pages. However, since the page is not entirely dedicated to reviews, you may not have to put all the reviews there. You can put a snippet of the reviews in each of these pages. Most importantly, you can leverage the power of customer reviews by placing the views in eye-catching positions on your website.
Make the Reviewing Process Easy
Several surveys show that customers who have negative experiences with a brand are more poised to post reviews on the service or product than customers who had positive experiences. As a matter of fact, most customers who had positive experiences may not even care to drop a review (and those that try may be discouraged) if the review page is difficult to access or obscure. You can leverage the power of customer reviews by ensuring that the review page is very easy to access. Make sure that your customers can easily access your customer reviews page through your social network, use email review request and so forth. This can be done by strategically positioning the links in very easy to access parts of your website.
In conclusion, the power of customer reviews is enormous. Businesses can leverage the power of their online customer reviews to their own benefit. This can help them to draw tremendous traffics, increase customer loyalty and boost the volume of their sales. You can leverage this power by making sure that the reviews are visible and easily accessible and also doing your part to assure your customers of your commitment and care.
