More and more companies publish post-purchase customer reviews on their website. Which is no surprise! There are multiple benefits: increased credibility, boosted conversion rates, an enhanced customer relationship, improved SEO… This article also takes a look at how consumer reviews are key to building a customer-centric strategy. 1 – Customer Reviews Add Credibility to Your...
More and more companies publish post-purchase customer reviews on their website.
Which is no surprise! There are multiple benefits: increased credibility, boosted conversion rates, an enhanced customer relationship, improved SEO…
This article also takes a look at how consumer reviews are key to building a customer-centric strategy.
1 – Customer Reviews Add Credibility to Your Website and Reassure Customers
Internet users naturally trust their peers’ reviews over brand sales pitches. Which partly explains why advertising is losing its influence.
Most users read customer reviews to find out more about a company, its products and services. Publishing consumer reviews on your website provides answers to your consumers’ questions.
This form of feedback, based on “social proof”, is a tool that reassures customers and strengthens a company’s credibility. Provided, of course, that the reviews are authentic. This is the only way to gain user trust.
Which is why at Skeepers, we decided to develop a platform of certified customer reviews. Only customers are allowed to post reviews, which ensures that they are authentic, qualitative and trustworthy.
You can also moderate the reviews before they are published on the site and disregard any offensive or insulting ones.
Negative or mixed reviews are also an important part of your customer review collection strategy. They add credibility to the other reviews on the site. Internet users see them as proof of transparency.
And since probably have other customer touchpoints, we recommend highlighting (positive) customer feedback in your communication strategy. In other words, by publishing reviews on your product pages, social media, in-store, in your emails, etc.
2 – Customer Reviews Help Boost Conversion Rates
This benefit is a direct result of the first. A trustworthy and reassuring website has better conversion rates. Just think about the impact of consumer reviews on product pages!
As you probably know, a product page with consumer reviews has a better conversion rate than one without. A recent study shows that 87% of consumers read customer reviews before making a purchase. This same study also reveals that going from 3 stars to 4 stars increases sales by 24 %.
Customer reviews remove consumer doubts and concerns, which drives purchases.
We recommend focusing on your flagship products when first collecting reviews. How? By creating an automated review collection scenario after the purchase of these products.
To find out more, read our article ‘Customer reviews directly impact sales’, in which we share the results of a study on the impact of consumer reviews.
3 – Customer Reviews Enhance Your Customer Relationship
Customer reviews add a human touch to websites: reading a consumer review is more engaging than a product’s technical specs.
consumer reviews can also strengthen your consumer relationship. For at least two reasons…
Firstly, asking for (post-purchase) customer feedback shows that you are listening to your customers, which makes them feel valued. We recommend implementing a solution that proactively collects reviews from your actual customers.
Secondly, responding to consumer reviews enhances your relationship. Several studies have shown that most customers who read reviews on the internet also read the brand’s answers.
consumer reviews provide an opportunity for brands to exchange with their customers… and to defuse mixed reviews.
Find out how to use customer reviews to improve your products and services.
4 – Consumer Reviews Boost Your SEO
All companies aim to increase traffic to their website. Optimizing your SEO is one of the most powerful drivers to boost your online audience.
The best way to improve your SEO is to produce value-added content. And what better way to enrich your site with good-quality content than customer reviews? In other words, user generated content.
consumer reviews impact your SEO more than you might expect. A Moz study places customer reviews in the top 5 factors that influence a website’s ranking in Google search results.
Which is yet another reason to integrate consumer reviews on your homepage, product and solution pages or anywhere else that seems relevant.
We also encourage you to use the Rich Snippets feature, to display star ratings in Google. This will increase your pages’ click-through rate.
5 – Customer Reviews are Key to a Customer-Centric Strategy
Customer reviews are not just a technique, they are a strategic lever. In such a fiercely competitive world, brands need to find ways to stand out. The best way to differentiate yourself is to build a customer-centric marketing and product strategy, that focuses on customer needs and expectations.
To adopt a customer-centric strategy, you need to know your customers well. Customer reviews are an ideal tool for acquiring this knowledge. Consumer reviews are a goldmine for companies who want to improve their products and services to meet their customers’ expectations.
Some companies spend several hours a week reviewing their customer feedback to identify any areas for improvement, such as to their product catalog, website, stores, customer service, etc. This approach always pays off and we recommend it to all our clients.
Conclusion
Each of these reasons is enough to deploy a customer review strategy. When there are 5 good reasons, there is no room for doubt. We hope to have convinced you of the benefits of this approach. The next step is implementing it. How? Check out our website for lots of resources on this very topic. You can also take a look at our certified consumer review platform that enables you to manage the collection, moderation, publication and analysis of customer reviews.