Could your business benefit from having positive reviews on review sites such as Google Business and Yelp? While there is an obvious benefit to receiving a good review online there are several hidden benefits to soliciting good reviews from your customers.
Additional Search Result Rankings
When you search for a product or service, particularly if its retail like a shoe store or plumber, you will often be presented with a series of map-based results before the normal search results.
One of the driving factors for why certain businesses show up over others is how well ranked those businesses are over their competition on Google Business. Not only do good reviews make it easier for your customers to buy your products and service but they will also see your business more often because Google prioritizes results that have a large number of reviews (among other factors).
Additional Communication Channel
Your customers are not going to naturally or automatically leave your business a positive review even if they’ve had outstanding service. You need to actively ask them to leave a review and make it as easy as possible for them to leave the review.
Scenario 77 recommends that after every purchase of your product or service you send an email to your customer dedicated to only soliciting a review. Don’t up-sell them on something else, simply thank them for their purchase and then direct them on how best provide a online review.
Drowns out the Bad Reviews
How often are you shopping Amazon or similar e-commerce platforms and you look at the overall ratings and reviews? Many times your customers are doing the same thing and it always looks better when there are dozens of positive reviews to that one or two bad reviews.
What you don’t want to end up with online is only the one or two bad reviews. Use this process of actively soliciting reviews to ensure that a wide set of customer experiences are represented online not just the loudest and angriest.