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Are customer reviews that important to your brand? The answer is yes, because 94% of consumers say that online ratings and reviews are the most critical factors influencing their purchasing decisions. Customer reviews have become an essential part of any company's marketing strategy to build credibility and reputation online.
How do you collect customer reviews? How to display them and how to activate them? Pimster tells you all about your customer review marketing strategy. 👉
A customer review is a note, a written comment or a video left after the purchase and use of one of your products or services on your website or social networks. The review is often about the purchase experience, customer onboarding, product feedback or even after-sales service.
The big challenge of customer reviews is their authenticity! There is now a great mistrust towards the reviews left online on brand sites, because they are considered as false or manipulated by the brand with a sorting on the comments.
The customer review brings you several advantages, including
Customer reviews have become an essential part of the marketing strategy of any company that wants to strengthen its credibility and reputation online. Reviews are a major choice criterion in customers' purchasing decisions.
According to the website business2community.com, 83% of customers prefer reviews to advertising. Many reviews on your site show that your product is popular, and that it has already proven itself, which is reassuring for your future customers.
Thus, 83% of online shoppers say that customer reviews of a site help them make their choice. In fact, 51% of them say that reviews have an important influence on their purchasing decision.
However, reviews should be as authentic as possible, and not only positive, because then you risk jeopardizing the credibility of your brand. But it is essential to note that customers often only leave a review when they have a bad experience. This is a phenomenon that can be observed for restaurant ratings on Google, which concentrate your negative testimonials.
Amazon is known for highlighting customer reviews on its product pages. Reviews are ranked by relevance, so that the most useful testimonials appear first. This allows consumers to get an idea of the quality of the products offered by reading the experiences of other customers. This transparency allows Amazon to build consumer confidence in its platform and in the products sold.
Finally, reviews, star ratings and customer testimonials embody significant social proof that can help you achieve your goals.
Customer reviews have a positive impact on your SEO by generating unique content and improving the click-through rate on your website.
The advantage of customer reviews is that they generate unique and new content for your website. Search engines like Google are fond of fresh and regularly updated content. So, reviews help your SEO, especially since they improve the relevance and quality of your brand's content.
Star ratings also increase the visibility of your product pages and increase your click-through rate up to 35% in organic searches.
Finally, customer reviews often encourage inbound links to your site, which improves your SEO. Indeed, the more inbound links your site has, the more credible and reliable it is considered by search engines and therefore the better it will be referenced.
Why is it crucial to be well referenced on a search engine? It's simply because 91.5% of organic traffic occurs on sites that appear on the first page of results.
Customer reviews are not only useful for your future prospects in their customer journey. By reading customer reviews, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Negative reviews can help you identify areas for improvement to provide a better customer experience.
It is a goldmine for your brand to understand first hand how your product is received and how you perform in terms of customer experience during the purchase or in the post-purchase.
You can, for example, build your Net Promoter Score with the opinions of your customers responding to a survey about the shopping experience you offer, to measure customer loyalty.
For example, Vente-Privée uses a CRM tool to centralize its customer database and has invested heavily in customer experience. The company hired a team of 10 trainers who travelled to all the customer relationship management centres to help implement a policy that puts customer satisfaction at the heart of its concerns. It works! Vente-Privée has been awarded several times for the quality of its customer service, and this has been accompanied by strong growth on the French market.
This is proof that by using customer feedback and above all by putting all the means at the disposal of the customer experience, it is possible to progress in terms of customer satisfaction. It is also possible to increase revenue.
It's in your best interest to encourage UGC, as **55% of consumers** trust user-generated content over any other form of marketing, making it a sure-fire way to boost your sales and improve brand loyalty.
Customer reviews can be a source of inspiration for your marketing content. Positive testimonials can be used to create case studies or video testimonials, while negative testimonials can be used to create content that addresses customer concerns.
For example, you can use customer reviews in your cart abandonment follow-up emails. This will definitely convince potential buyers, by including reviews about the experience you offer and the specifics of your products.
The best example is Burger King, which uses reviews and comments as a means of irony and effective communication. Despite responding with a cold answer, Burger King chooses to personalise its messages with a human touch.
Using content created and shared by your customers is User Generated Content (UGC) and this content is very effective in marketing strategies as it creates a community of engaged users sharing their experience.
There are obviously ways to encourage users to leave a review, whether it is positive or negative.
Indeed, as we detailed above, most reviews are only left by customers in case of a negative experience. Therefore, you can proactively ask for customer testimonials through satisfaction surveys that you distribute by email, SMS or QR Code depending on the clientele you are targeting.
Once the reviews are collected, use them on your Google reviews, or on booking sites like TripAdvisor or The Fork.
Pimster integrates directly on the platform a functionality allowing customers to leave their review, which will then be directly referenced on Google and will improve your natural referencing. We also allow you to analyse these reviews and then use them to define your marketing strategy.
Do you want to take your marketing strategy to the next level and develop customer reviews? Request a demo.