5 Online Review Factors That Boost Sales
Introduction
A positive online reputation is a critical part of a business’ local marketing plan and, in order to ensure your strategy is successful, online reviews must play a starring role.
This is especially true for businesses in the property services industry.
It’s well-known that everyone goes online to research businesses that sell the products and services they want to buy. And, it’s also well-known that these people are looking for feedback and recommendations from other customers before they buy.
This is where online reviews come in. Online reviews help businesses improve their online visibility with search engines, social media, and online business citations so they can attract and convert potential customers.
However, to get the most from online reviews, it’s important to understand the key elements and how they impact both search engines and prospective customers.
In this post, we will discuss the 5 online review factors that boost sales.
1. Review Quantity
This factor is simply the total number of online reviews a business has across all review sites. The takeaway here? Having lots of online review is good for business.
There are several reasons why this is important.
- Businesses that have a large number of reviews shows that people are interested in the products or services they sell.
- Seeing different perspectives from review comments helps potential customers make more informed buying choices.
- Reviews are user generated content, and search engines, like Google, reward businesses that have this type of content with higher rankings in search results.
- Also, studies show that prospective customers want to read several reviews before they will buy from a business. 70 percent of online shoppers typically read between one and six customer reviews before making a purchasing decision.
What should your business do?
Commit to asking all your customers to leave online reviews and don’t stop when you reach a certain number. Bolster your commitment by including your employees in the process.
Then, ask for reviews. Use email, text, point-of-sale devices, and face-to-face engagement with customers to accomplish this.
2. Review Freshness
How old is the last review your business received? Weeks? Months? More than a year?
Having reviews is important for businesses. However, potential customers prefer to read “fresh” reviews versus ones that are months or years old. A recent study has shown that 70% of consumers say that reviews more than 3 months old are not relevant.
Having fresh or new reviews answers the “What have you done for me lately?” question prospective customers ask.
Consider this example: When searching for a hotel, aren’t you more comfortable making a reservation with one whose latest reviews are days old as opposed to months or years old?
When customers leave an online review, they are providing insight as to their customer experience including details such as staff friendliness and knowledge, location cleanliness, and business policies. Businesses that have recent reviews provide prospective customers with an up-to-date state of the business so they can make more informed purchase decisions.
Old reviews likely have outdated information about the business that is no longer true today. A lot can happen to a business in a short period of time, from employee turnover to new management. These changes can have a significant impact on the customer experience.
This is why it is important to be getting new, fresh reviews on a regular basis. Businesses that ignore this issue risk losing customers to the competition.
To help make this happen, businesses should commit to asking all their customers to leave a review.
3. Review Frequency
Another factor that is important building a healthy online reputation is review frequency. This simply means getting a steady stream of reviews over time. The main reason this is important is that businesses that have reviews being posted about them consistently show an active business with an engaged customer base.
Getting reviews consistently also provides potential customers with current information regarding other customers’ experiences, state of the business, including their products and services.
What is a good review frequency for your business? A lot has to do with what industry you are in. If you sell to consumers, you should be getting reviews almost daily. If you are a business that serves commercial clients, getting reviews on a weekly or monthly basis is expected.
An important point about review frequency is getting too many reviews can be bad. Some review platforms, like Google and Yelp, consider a surge in posted reviews as suspicious and may filter some reviews out as a result. Businesses should keep this in mind when sending out review requests.
Review frequency is another reason why committing to asking your customers to leave a review is so critical. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for businesses to work to get reviews and then curb their efforts once a certain number of reviews gets posted.
Starting and stopping this important tactic can lead to long time gaps between posted reviews. This can reduce your visibility in search and lead to potential customers buying elsewhere.
4. Review Distribution
There are hundreds of websites where consumers can leave (and read) online reviews.
Of course, everyone knows the importance of getting reviews on Google. However, according to a recent study, 77% of consumers use more than one review platform when researching businesses. Because of this, it is good practice to have reviews about your business posted on a variety of review sites.
What sites should you get reviews on? Aside from Google, you should focus on other popular sites like Facebook and Yelp.
Also, there are many review sites that focus on serving businesses in specific industries. So, it makes sense to identify those sites in your niche and work to get reviews posted there. For businesses in the property services sector, sites such as Better Business Bureau and Angi are well-respected names to consider.
To help get more reviews on different sites, businesses should suggest two or three review sites in your review requests to customers. Also, many reputation management software systems make this task easier by allowing you to add review sites options to review request emails and text messages including direct links to each.
Focusing on review distribution means more people are likely to see your reviews and helps improve local SEO, giving your business a competitive edge.
5. Review Quality
Consumers seek out online reviews to get a feel for what to expect from a business from an unbiased person’s perspective to help them decide if they want to buy from a business or not. In other words, they want to read quality reviews.
A quality review is one that contains relevant information about the business’ customer experience to help the prospective customer make an informed purchase decision. Information such as how well their products and services perform, interactions with employees, and service after the sale. They also want to read reviews on sites they trust, like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Better Business Bureau.
What frustrates potential customers is seeing reviews with just a star rating but no customer comments, or reviews that are clearly meant for another business, or reviews that are fake or inappropriate.
While a business cannot control what customers say in an online review, they can employ tactics to help improve review quality.
How? It starts with developing a healthy, managed review workflow. This includes asking all customers to leave an online review – and asking them to leave comments (and photos) about their experience with you. In addition, you should regularly monitor all your reviews and flag or report reviews that you believe are inappropriate or fake.
Taking these steps will help clean up your review stream, increase the volume of positive reviews, and improve the overall quality of your reviews over time.
Conclusion
Competition is tight. The more information you have regarding getting more from your online reviews can give your business an edge.
This is why we are sharing how to leverage the 5 online review factors that boost sales outlined in this post.
Having a better understanding regarding how online reviews impact your business allows you to make your reputation management strategy more effective in attracting customers and growing revenue.
Now, it is time to put this knowledge into practice.
Your tasks are to:
- Grow the volume of your reviews – Review Quantity
- Get new reviews – Review Freshness
- Get reviews consistently, over time – Review Frequency
- Get reviews on a variety of review sites – Review Distribution
- Encourage customer feedback and report fake or inappropriate reviews – Review Quality
All these factors are important and should receive the same amount of attention from you. If you only pick one or two to work on, your strategy will get less than desirable results.
As the online review environment evolves, businesses need to adjust their reputation management strategy to stay ahead. Taking these 5 online review factors into account will help you accomplish this.
ReviewIgnite offers powerful software to help businesses in the property services industry take control of their online reputation to attract more customers and grow their business. Our AI-powered online reputation management software makes this task easy. With our automated review management workflow, clients can request, respond, and amplify reviews from their secure dashboard.
To find out more about our online reputation management software, please go to our pricing page. Then, choose a package that is right for your business.
See our software in action. Click on the link below to see a self-guided demo.
