When you put together your marketing plan, it’s easy to forget that the best evangelists for your brand can be your own customers. In a mostly digital world, word of mouth advertising is something you should consider using. One thing to know: instead of fake positive reviews use authentic ones.
What can help your Marketing Plan?
Implementing reviews
If you are still unsure whether to use them or not, think about your own decision-making process for a second. Most of us check online reviews before buying anything, and a growing number of people write reviews after the purchase. So letting people tell their stories about your brand gives you a huge opportunity to gain new customers through reviews.
- More than one-third of customers read 1 to 3 reviews before their purchase decision
- More than half of young customers read online reviews regularly
Although there are freelance sites and freelance writers who would provide you seemingly unique and suspiciously positive customer reviews about your brand and product, you should stick with the real ones. Authors of authentic reviews vary by age, sex, and ethnicity. Their reviews have different tones and language, and from time to time they contain grammatical or spelling errors. Real customers won’t always give you a perfect rating, but suggestions or negative feedback.
It is your decision if you want to respond to all those reviews, but it makes a great impact on your customer if you do. But enabling customers to write reviews on your site without your approval can be both rewarding and risky.
Improving your customer service
If you chose to have reviews on your site about your brand and/or your products, make sure you deal with them accordingly:
- Delete only those reviews that contain hate speech, racist standpoints, or profanity. Implement this into your brand culture and your terms and conditions sections.
- Try not to argue with a customer online, in front of everybody. Reach out to them through a phone call or start a private conversation about their issues.
- Always be polite, helpful, and positive when addressing a review. There are quite some success stories that started with a kind response to a negative customer review from a brand.
- Be unique, just as you want your reviews to be.
Getting those reviews
There are several ways to obtain the unique and personal reviews everybody wants:
- You can use follow up emails asking for your experience about the purchase and the product itself. Try to make the process as simple as you can.
- You can use gamification to boost your customers’ will to share a review about their last purchase. Give them rewards or incentives if they take their time to write a feedback about their experience.
- You can also encourage them to give a review throughout the whole purchasing process.
All in all, we suggest you to use customer reviews and customer service on your site, but also suggest having someone who can handle any kind of feedbacks in any situations. We’ve seen enough PR disasters that started with a simple customer review that got handled poorly.
