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It’s become increasingly common for consumers to turn to the Internet when making decisions about brands and products. Online reviews are a particularly popular method of gauging the worthiness of a business. If you’re a business owner looking to capitalize on this, here are just four ways to build trust, increase traffic and maximize your profits with online reviews.
In This Post:
Encourage and Emphasize Honesty
When choosing reviews to pin or highlight on your website, select the ones that sound authentic and not like they were written by someone who works at your company. You won’t fool customers with gushing praise that’s too good to be true. In fact, 52 percent of consumers are more likely to trust a product if it has a few negative reviews tossed in the mix. You’ll want to limit their exposure to this kind of criticism, of course, but all things considered, a few naysayers here and there might actually be good for business. It will send the message that you’re honest and have nothing to hide.
Feed Into Your Image
You can’t control what people say about your business, but you can choose which testimonials to showcase on your blog and which reviewers to thank on third-party websites. Look for positive reviews full of the kinds of buzzwords and imagery that you want associated with your brand. For example, the company Xyngular has a review page filled with bright, vibrant images of healthy people smiling and stretching in the sunshine. It also boasts pictures of its reviewers to emphasize their legitimacy. These are the associations that you want people to make with your brand, especially when they’re reading critiques and trying to decide whether to get out their credit card. Reviews that underscore your mission statement are much more likely to make an impression than generic ones.
Work the Window
Only seven percent of people will make a purchase within an hour of reading reviews. When you extend that time frame to a week, however, the number of buyers jumps to 89 percent. That’s more than three-fourths of shoppers who make purchase decisions within a week of reading reviews, so you only have a short window for increasing your chance of a sale. Make sure that you take advantage of it. Include plenty of relevant links to products and services on the review page so that they’re easy to find for potential customers, and use analytics software to figure out where your traffic is coming from within the first seven days of a new batch of reviews. All data is useful data when it comes to traffic patterns.
Speak Directly to Your Demographic
A grandma won’t care what a teenage boy has to say about your product. This is why detailed, personalized reviews are so high-value: When a review opens with something like “I’m a construction worker who’s been looking for the right power saw for years,” that’s immediately grabbing the attention of other handymen who are in the same boat. Try to encourage these kinds of testimonials with your feedback surveys. For example, you might have “required fields” for name, age and location before you allow people to give their opinion on your product. Demographic information will provide context for other customers when they’re scrolling through your reviews and trying to reach a decision.
A business can live and die by the strength of its reviews, so don’t make the mistake of treating them like an afterthought. They should be one of the cornerstones of your marketing strategy, especially if you’re running a digital brand with lots of online content. They can bring substantial traffic to your website if you play your cards correctly.
