If you own a business, getting customers through the door can be a hard task. Even when you know your products or services are good, sometimes you just need some endorsement to encourage people to come in.
Nearly everyone reads reviews of a business before offering them their money. If you can manage to control the reviews people post and how many reviews there are for your business, you can set your business up for steady growth.
Controlling your reputation in the modern age can be difficult if you don’t have a plan, as many people write reviews online rather than relying on word of mouth.
Unanswered negative reviews can have a large impact on a business’s reputation, and reputation is everything in the modern marketing world.
Like anything in business, awareness and organization can be the best preparation for success.
Understanding which kinds of customers review businesses, and which don’t, as well as understanding what amount of customers actively write reviews and how to get more reviews from them can be the right place to start when building your business’s reputation.
Understanding The Modern Customer
One of the first stops on a customer’s journey with your product or service is reading online reviews. Just like reading the menu before you go to a restaurant, your customers want to be prepared and informed before doing business with you.
A Trustpilot study from 2020 suggests that at least 89% of customers read reviews before purchasing a product, highlighting the importance of online reviews. A large chunk of the reviews customers and clients will read will more than likely be Google reviews.
Having a steady stream of online reviews is important, but it’s also important that those reviews come across as genuine. The same study found that 62% of consumers lose trust in a brand or company whose reviews appear inauthentic.
While reviews are important, working to make sure they are (mostly) positive as well as authentic is vital.
Most consumers trust reviews from strangers as much as those from people they know, outlining authenticity as important once more.
This can be inferred from the fact that 79% of shoppers claim to trust online reviews as much, if not more, than in-person endorsements (BrightLocal, 2020).
What is clear is that authentic online reviews play a large role in informing a customer’s decision to use a service or purchase a product
How Many Customers Leave Online Reviews?
Here’s where the issues arise. It’s clear that positive reviews attract more customers into your physical store, but is this easy to gain naturally?
The statistics suggest otherwise, finding that only 47% of customers report ever leaving reviews after using a service or product (GlobalWebIndex, 2019). That’s not 47% of consumers leaving reviews after every purchase.
That’s only 47% of consumers ever leaving a review at all.
This means that even if a customer has a good experience in your store or business, chances are highly unlikely they will actually write a review unless you have a strategy in place (more on this in a moment).
This creates a specific problem for the modern business owner who understands the need for and value of a steady stream of positive reviews.
It’s also important to understand which consumers are writing reviews. A recent study (GlobalWebIndex) shows that 53% of online review writers are under age 35.
This means it is the younger customers who are often writing reviews, while almost 90% of consumers read reviews before buying a product or service.
So it is clear there is some discrepancy in terms of those writing reviews and those reading reviews.
A smaller number of people leave reviews, those who do leave reviews are from a specific background, yet nearly all customers will read reviews before utilizing a business.
Use ReputationStacker To Get More Reviews
What has been established is that nearly all customers will read reviews, but not all will write them. A business needs to get more reviews, but also authentic reviews, in order to garner a positive reputation.
Manually reaching out to customers to give you reviews, and trying to manage those reviews, can waste valuable time and resources.
This is where ReputationStacker comes in. ReputationStacker automatically reaches out to your customers to provide feedback and reviews.
ReputationStacker also routes your customers to the review platforms of your choice (Google, Yelp, etc) to post a review.
And it automatically notifies you of unhappy customers so you can take care of their issues privately.
ReputationStacker is a trusted service that increases the amount of customers who review your business.
There is no easier way to increase your reviews and take control over the reputation of your business, so start building your reputation today with ReputationStacker.
