It’s impossible to overstate the importance of customers to a business.
No customers mean no business. It’s as simple as that. For a business to thrive, it has to keep its customers happy!
Reputation is everything, and happy customers become your biggest advocates. They help in all manner of ways, but the positive online reviews they leave is one particular source of support.
These days, 90% of people read reviews before frequenting a business!
If what they read is negative, you can guarantee they’ll spend their money elsewhere. In this way, reviews have become the lifeblood of many a business operation these days.
Every company in the world needs to maintain a positive online reputation. Don’t, and it’s a one-way ticket to failing as a business.
Do you still need convincing about the need to keep customers happy and incentivize positive reviews?
Keep reading to discover 7 reasons reviews are crucial to business success.
1. Greater Sales
Think about the last time you went to a restaurant, bought something on Amazon, or looked for a new hairdresser.
There’s a good chance that you checked for reviews and ratings beforehand.
It makes sense! Making a purchase decision online carries risk. You can’t see the product; you haven’t used the service. As such, you don’t know anything in advance about it.
Reviews and ratings provide the confidence to make a decision and hand over hard-earned cash. They convince you that it’s worth booking a table, or entrusting your hair to somebody.
This demonstrates the importance of reviews to sales-generation. Working hard to cultivate a quality online reputation will naturally increase revenue.
2. Greater Conversions
Just as positive reviews incentivize sales, negative ones hinder them.
Out of 100 reviews, you could have 95 positive ones. But you can guarantee that those 5 negative reviews will become the focus for some consumers. They’re less likely to spend their money as a result.
This point demonstrates the need to protect your reputation at all costs. It isn’t enough just to get positive feedback; even the occasional poor review can lead to lost sales and conversions.
3. Free Marketing
Review sites like TripAdvisor can be a major boon for business.
Ranking number 1 on these websites acts as social proof for your product or service. It’s essentially like free advertising. Offering an amazing customer experience incentivises positive reviews.
Gain enough of them, and consumers find you via the sites and directories they’re checking for recommendations. It amounts to newfound organic exposure!
Of course, failing to take these sites (and online reviews) seriously can have the opposite effect. You’ll find yourself far down the rankings and lose out on the potential traffic as a result.
4. Free Feedback
Reviews offer free feedback on customer experience.
They save you the effort of conducting customer feedback surveys! All of a sudden, all the data and insight you need to improve your service is ready and waiting. You can see what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong.
Of course, some trolls will leave unhelpful and deliberately false reviews. These are a problem in their own right. Nonetheless, the majority of poor reviews can be taken as constructive criticism.
A nice aspect of these online review sites is that you can often sign in and respond to them. Create a profile as your business and comment below any negative feedback.
In this way, monitoring online reviews provides a chance to apologize for the perceived issue. You could even offer something to resolve the problem.
Other people will read your comments and appreciate your positive approach.
5. Better Online Rankings
Ranking your business website in search engines is key to success these days.
It can help you stand out from the competition and establish yourself as a leader in the industry. It’s also a way to attract traffic, leads, and conversions.
Online reviews are often picked up by search engines. They’ll treat your website more favorable if they identify large numbers of positive reviews. You’ll end up ranking higher in results pages in the process.
That’s good news! The easier you are to find, the more customers you can expect through the door.
6. Snowballing Brand Awareness
Here’s another truth about online reviews:
Reviews beget reviews.
In simpler terms, gaining one or two reviews almost always inspires additional reviews to come. It’s as if nobody wants to be the first to open their mouths! But, as soon as somebody does, it opens the gates to more.
Of course, that’s not good when you haven’t cultivated a positive customer experience. Lots of bad reviews is a recipe for disaster. However, gaining masses of 5-star feedback is all good news.
It creates a discussion around your business. As more people add to it, awareness of your brand starts to snowball.
7. Reviews Create Trust
Relationships are at the heart of any successful business.
You have relationships with customers, investors, partners and employees. When any of these relationships suffer, so does the business.
Trust is a pillar of a healthy relationship. If you want your business to grow, then it must inspire trust in consumers. Nicely, reviews can lend their weight to building it.
Let’s go back to our previous example of choosing a restaurant. Positive reviews from an unbiased source are inherently more trustworthy than one from the business owner! There’s no incentive for someone to leave it, other than to let someone know about their experience.
A positive note of feedback inspires trust in others.
Compare that to a restaurant with no feedback whatsoever. Consumers are so used to checking reviews that a business without any is likely to be ignored.
Time to Realize the Importance of Customers and Reviews
The importance of customers to your business is second to none.
Their opinions of your product or service can hold the key to success or failure.
In a modern world, purchase decisions are becoming increasingly reliant on online reviews. Businesses are preceded by their online reputation. That has the potential to work wonders and drive sales, but it can prompt severe negative repercussions too.
Hopefully, this post has convinced you to take those reviews seriously.
Want to read some of our very own reviews of products and services out there? Head to the reviews section of the website now.
