With the emergence of online platforms, customers can share their experiences with the world in just a few clicks. Customer reviews are an essential part of online branding and marketing. They help build trust and loyalty and typically describe what sets your products apart from others.
Importance Of Customer Reviews
Product reviews are one of the most useful ways to eliminate customer’s confusion regarding a product. Multiple studies and surveys have shown the power of customer reviews. According to BrightLocal, 97% of consumers looked online for local business reviews in 2017. This number already says a lot about the importance of customer reviews and their impact on buying decisions.
According to Invesp, 90% of the consumers read online reviews before making a purchase and 72% of the consumers will be prompted to take an action after reading positive reviews.90% of customers say buying decisions are influenced by online reviews. – Marketing Land, 2013
Reviews become even more important in the absence of the ability to ‘test’ products prior to purchasing online. Means there is no ‘test drive’ or trial before purchase. 😀 But your previous customer can be a proof for new customer with their honest review.
How to Manage Customer Reviews In A Easy Way?
When a customer leaves a review for the product, he is helping others understand what they can expect from the product, how it actually looks like, how is it performing, what are the flaws, what are the pros, and much more.
Criteria-Based Customer Reviews: Allow Customer To Share Reviews In Different Ways
Give your customer flexibility to leave a review based on specific criteria rather than a classic average rating. Like you have an online shop for dresses, you can set some specific criteria [e.g. color, size, delivery time, price etc] for your product review. Now if someone is happy with your product she/he can give a good rating in that criteria, but if he is not satisfied with delivery time, then he can express that by giving a poor rating on delivery.
Verified Badge:
Honest customer reviews from real customers can help customers feel more secure they are making the right choice, as they can read the good and bad points of each product. Now how can you define the real customer? A verified purchase badge can prove that the customer really bought from your store.
Visual Attachments:
Photo & Video can be particularly helpful to your customers, as they show what the product looks like in real life and allow customers to explain their opinions in more detail. Honestly with some customer dont bother to read the text review rather to see the actual photo/video of the product.
Review Reminder Email:
Power of personalization plays a vital role in business. How can you personalize your review requests, a review reminder email is the tool in this personal communication. You can send it to your specific customer to give a product review. Automated reminder email with specific schedule can make the process easy for you as a store owner.
Respond to Review:
Communicating to your customer is also a good practice for customer retention. Respond to review and also habitually thank every reviewer. Your time is valuable, and so is your customers, so make sure you’re giving thanks to your customers for their review — even the negative one. Without being defensive, to come to a resolution with your customer and take a lesson from this situation.
Set Rules For Review Approval:
Just like most of the other things, reviews can be harmful too! Spammers are everywhere as well as some customers may give the wrong reviews without even understanding it or before asking for support. So, set rules for review approval for your site administrators or customer service team. If the review is libelous or uses obscene language, you can moderate or block it.
Brands will obviously try to highlight every feature of the product in the best way possible, but it’s the customers who will give honest feedback on the product. So undoubtedly product review can be a great tool if you can manage them efficiently.
If you are an online store owner which is powered by WooCommerce, a perfect solution can be ReviewX which will let you follow all these practices without any efforts.
ReviewX offers automated mail notifications to customers for leaving a review along with Multiple photos, video attachment options with the review, verified badge for the customer, social share option, and much more.