Reviews as a tool for attracting new customers

Unfortunately, many business representatives rely on selling their goods or services, and not on the public opinion their products evoke. But such a strategy is obviously wrong. Practice shows that the appearance of at least 1-2 negative reviews from consumers can cause serious harm to the development of the company. New customers will think ten times before placing an order on a website that has a negative user experience. This means that the level of sales and income will decrease, and the efficiency of the staff will go into the negative.

Practice shows that clients are able to tell much more about a business than its management or the most professional managers. And it is their opinion that will have more significant weight on the user audience. This means that if you want to develop your business, increase your coverage, attract as many new clients as possible, and ensure stability and confidence, do not neglect customer reviews. Do not ignore both positive and negative opinions, look for compromises and the most correct solutions.

As part of this review, we will consider a number of advantages that reviews can provide business and clients alike. Here are a number of cases that will help you clearly see the effect that user opinions have on search engine promotion and sales.

The benefits of reviews for customers and businesses

Before making a purchase on a particular site, 90% of buyers initially study reviews from those who have previously collaborated with the store. It is on the basis of third-party user experience that the decision to place an order is often made. But reviews — this is a tool that will be useful to both parties.

So, if we talk about the benefits that clients receive from reviews, then it is worth highlighting the following:

1. It becomes possible to compare different products. You can understand what advantages and disadvantages a particular product has, and highlight its distinctive features. This is especially true if we are talking about goods that are quite similar to each other.
2. You can see the integrity of the company. In their reviews, people often describe not only the product they purchased, but also the level of service from the store, the competence of the staff, how the delivery of the order was organized, etc.
3. They help make the final decision on the advisability of purchasing a product from a particular company. Let us repeat that the presence of negativity in user opinion — this is what will make a new buyer think about contacting your company for the necessary product or service.

Businesses will also receive an equally significant benefit from reviews. Judge for yourself:

1. Reviews — This is the tool that will allow you to gain trust from the user audience. If people see that you have managed to satisfy the needs of other customers, that they are completely satisfied with your products or services, they are more likely to place an order on your website. According to statistics, 88% of buyers trust reviews left by customers on the site no less than personal recommendations from well-known people.
2. User opinion will show the weak points in your business better than any other tool. It's always clearer from the outside. You should not treat negative reviews as something terrible and irreparable. You must learn to accept criticism and find ways to mitigate negative impressions. That is, a bad review — this is a point for future growth. This is something that will help improve both the product itself and the level of customer service.
3. That is, we can conclude that the more positive reviews your company has, the more purchases will be made on your website, the higher the rating your company will have (many search engines today take reviews into account when site ranking). In addition, a large number of reviews will help you optimize advertising costs and direct the freed-up funds in another direction.

Now let’s move on directly to the cases that will allow you to finally see how much impact customer reviews can have on business development. All the cases described below are taken from the work of SEO studios, that is, those who specialize in website promotion.

Case No. 1: influence of rating on position in Yandex market

There is a website in Yandex Market that specializes in selling women's clothing. The company has been on the market for quite a long time and has a fairly large audience of regular customers. But at one point the store’s rating on Yandex Market dropped sharply. The figures fell from 4.7 to 3.6. As a result, the indicators turned out to be the lowest among all companies operating on this platform in this niche. This resulted in higher ranked competitors receiving more user traffic. Everything is clear here, because these sites evoked higher trust among the user audience than the one we are talking about.

CTR indicators were used to assess the impact of the rating on the store’s position in Yandex Market. In particular, a check was made of resources occupying 2-3 places in the search results and those that were in 4-10 positions at the time of the analysis. The results clearly showed how much lower the click-through rate of stores located below is.

In parallel with this study, a traffic check was carried out on both Yandex and Google. The results showed that this problem is unique to Yandex, since no drop in traffic to Google was recorded. In addition, the identified difficulties had nothing to do with seasonal changes or the presence of any global failures on the site.

At the same time, changes in ratings did not directly affect the site’s visibility in search results. But as reviews accumulated, the CTR rate decreased, and the online store gradually began to drop in search results. Initially, he fell out of the TOP-3, then dropped to 6th position and literally a few days later ended up at 9th.

It was possible to eliminate this problem and return the online store selling women's clothing to high positions only after the issue with the rating was resolved by improving user reviews and smoothing out the negative.

Case No. 2: reviews from product cards

The visibility of a site in search engines is also influenced by reviews that users leave directly in the product card. Thus, specialists conducted another experiment, in which they selected 50 product cards from a household appliance store that were in the highest demand among the audience. It was to them that a block with reviews was added as an experiment.

After a certain period of time, experts compared how the visibility of this product group in Yandex search results changed in relation to the overall visibility of the site. The total indicator of the entire resource showed an increase of 26% during this period, while the results for the tested group improved by 70%. That is, literally out of nowhere, we received an increase of 44% thanks to the addition of reviews to product cards. But again, let us draw your attention to the fact that we are talking about positive reviews. This means that the product itself must be of high quality, and the level of service to the client audience — as high as possible.

Case No. 3: a lot does not mean good

In this case, it was proven that a large number of reviews will not bring growth to your business, but on the contrary, can harm it. An online store of children's toys was chosen as an example. Having already had certain knowledge and skills in the field of working with user reviews, experts suggested that the presence of an average of 10-15 reviews in a product card has a positive impact on the results of its position in search results. If there are more of them, this will negatively affect the textual relevance of the page and, as a result, its ranking.

In principle, this theory has been confirmed in practice. The site had a large number of product cards where there were no reviews at all, those where there was only one. There were also products that received 10 and even 20 reviews. The studies showed that for each of the four segments, the highest ranking indicators were observed on pages where there was at least one review, but their number fluctuated within 10.

As a result, it was decided to hide some of the reviews from the search engine index. For greater purity of the experiment, visibility indicators for all segments were at the same level. As a result, a 10% increase in the tested group was revealed in Yandex per card, where the number of reviews was reduced. At the same time, the control group, where 20 or more reviews were left, on the contrary, dropped by a little more than 11% during the same period.

Moreover, strong growth was established in the tested group in the Google search engine. Here the increase was almost 32%.

That is, to get the most out of user reviews, you should encourage your customers to write them. But it is important to maintain a balance between their number, between positive and negative. It is optimal to leave up to ten reviews visible in product cards, automatically removing the rest from the field of view of search engines. At the same time, you should not rely solely on a positive user opinion, because this may alert new customers. That is, if there is any negativity, leave it, but try to somehow smooth out this situation, show that you are working to eliminate the problem.

Case No. 4: online reviewers

Today, such sites are presented in a fairly wide variety on the Internet. Here people can leave their opinions both about certain goods, services, and directly about the companies where they bought them. Therefore, SEO studio specialists decided to check what impact reviews posted on such resources have on the conversion level.

In particular, work was carried out with the sushi delivery service in the context of such competence as “Quality Service”. We are talking about a service that constantly monitored the reaction of the user audience, responded to all reviews and questions that came from the user audience on the same review sites, on social networks, in instant messengers.

The results of the study showed that such work on reputation actually had a significant impact on the level of orders. But at the same time, direct sales from launched advertising campaigns turned out to be higher. But if you pay attention to the level of conversion that comes directly from review sites, it is more than five times higher than the figures for other sources, including social networks. This case clearly showed that the vast majority of the user audience prefer to study reviews before ordering certain services or products.

As an interim result, we can say that all the cases that we considered above indicate that reviews are very important for business development, for increasing the site’s ranking in search results and the level of satisfaction of the user audience. And now all that’s left to do is to motivate customers to leave their own opinions after working with your company and learn how to respond correctly to both positive and negative reviews. We will dwell on these aspects further.

We motivate clients to leave reviews

The first thing you must clearly understand is that your customers can leave reviews on absolutely any platform. So, this could be your company’s website itself or an online store, review sites, accounts on social networks, instant messengers, online maps. This means that you should regularly monitor all those sources where user opinions about you may appear. The simplest solution to the problem — set up automatic monitoring of the main sites and collection of relevant information.

But still, statistics show that not every buyer leaves reviews after making a purchase. A number of recommendations will help correct this situation:

• Follow in hot pursuit. This means that it is better to collect reviews immediately after the buyer receives his order. That is, at this stage his emotions will be the most vivid. If he likes everything, he will be happy with the product or service he received and tell his friends and acquaintances about it. The longer you wait, the more neutral the experience will be. Accordingly, the desire to leave a review will disappear. That is, as an option, as soon as you see that the buyer has collected his order, send him a message through one or another communication channel asking him to share his impression of the cooperation and the purchased products. You can also make a short survey with the most popular questions, which will take a person a couple of minutes to fill out.
• Offer some kind of benefit for a review. Alternatively, you can promise the buyer an additional discount or some kind of gift on their next order of goods or services in exchange for a review. Most often, such a solution works in the category of consumables or ongoing services. That is, something that the user audience constantly uses in practice. Believe me, there will be more than enough people willing to receive an additional discount on such attractive conditions.
• Give customers the opportunity to leave reviews where it is most convenient for them. That is, do not become attached to the official website of your company or its representative office on marketplace, on a social network. In your mailing after making a purchase, offer the person all possible ways to post reviews about their cooperation with you. Let him choose the option that will best suit his needs and be the easiest to implement.
• Carry out activities. Alternatively, you can run a competition with prizes for the best review. This way you can collect a really large number of user opinions. But here it is very important to offer a prize that people will really be interested in. In any case, the emphasis in reviews should be on truthfulness, and the main criterion for assessing the winner will be the detail of the presentation.

But, regardless of which method of interacting with the audience to receive feedback you choose, it is also important to respond to them correctly. This is true for both positive and negative opinions. This is the only way you will let customers know that their opinion is really important to you, that you always make contact. And you can be sure that this will be highly appreciated not only by those who have already cooperated with you, but also by new customers.

We will dwell on how to do all this correctly in more detail.

Learning to respond to positive reviews

If you analyze all the reviews that users leave after cooperation or purchasing goods and services, they can be divided into two separate categories:

1. Short. Many buyers do not want to describe their opinion about cooperation in detail. They are limited to such phrases as “I liked the product,” “Everything is fine,” “I’m happy with the order,” “I will order again.” etc. Moreover, there are those who do not write anything at all, but simply put “stars”, assessing the level of their own satisfaction with the cooperation (from 1 to 5 or from 1 to 10, depending on the settings you specified).
2. Long. These are already the most detailed reviews, containing a large number of details both about the product itself and about the terms of cooperation. They are often supplemented with attached photos or videos. It is these reviews that most potential buyers focus on, because here they can find a lot of useful information for themselves and understand whether they want to purchase this product or not.

Reacting to short user opinions is not necessary. And what else except “Contact us, we will be glad to receive new orders”? or “Glad you liked it” you won’t be able to write anything here, since the clients didn’t answer what they liked most. But if you saw that a person described his opinion about cooperation with you in several sentences, then here you should definitely respond, at least to express your gratitude for the fact that he found the time and desire to write a review. This is how you will make it clear that you value the user's opinion.

The exact form in which you will write your review — It's an individual matter. But in any case, it is necessary to proceed from the content of the review itself. Moreover, it must be individual. This is not the case when you can get by with general phrases in each case. If you prepare a standard phrase in advance, as an option: “Thank you for contacting us for a purchase, we are glad that you were satisfied with the cooperation, we look forward to new requests,” and you write it in absolutely every positive review, you will not receive a high response . This will show people that you are only interested in positive reviews, and not what people really think about your company.

That is, it is worth showing creativity not only for clients, but also for you, as a business representative personally. But still, working with positive reviews is much more pleasant than working with negative ones.

Learning to respond to negative reviews

How many people — so many opinions. And this phrase is relevant for absolutely any business. Find buyers who would all be satisfied with cooperation with you and the purchased goods – impossible. There will always be those who are not happy with something. And you should always be prepared for this. The first thing you cannot do in this situation is remain silent. This way you let the audience know that you completely agree with the user’s opinion and somehow want to make amends. This means that you will not only lose a customer, because he will never return to you for the product, but you will also alienate other customers.

Here is the most effective way to generate feedback on a negative user opinion:

• Apologize on behalf of the company. Just a couple of sentences stating that you regret the inconvenience you caused to your customers.
• Think about what solution to the problem you are willing to provide them with. If, nevertheless, the client is wrong, then as loyally as possible, without any complaints, explain to him his mistake and tell him why you cannot help solve this problem.
• Leave your contact information, using which the person can contact you directly to finally close the issue. This could be a phone number, email or any other means of contact.

All further discussions will need to be conducted personally, without making them public. If you manage to solve the existing problem, ask the person to supplement their review by indicating that the problem has been resolved and that they are completely satisfied with this outcome.

But in any case, personalization must be present here, that is, no general phrases. You must react precisely to what does not suit the person, offering him individual solutions.

To summarize

As you can see, reviews — This is a fairly powerful tool that absolutely any business can use. They will also be useful for promoting your products and services, attracting new customers, and increasing the site’s position in search results. They also provide significant benefits to the consumer market, allowing them to easily navigate the variety of solutions and choose the one that best suits their needs.

As part of this review, we have provided a number of cases that clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of reviews. We also showed how to get people to leave reviews about working with you. We have also outlined a number of recommendations for working with positive and negative reviews, which will allow you to establish the most effective interaction with both satisfied clients and those who were not satisfied with cooperation with you.

But the basis of all this work will be regular monitoring. Carrying out this work manually will be very, very difficult due to the fact that today buyers can leave their opinions on absolutely any platform, from the official websites of retirees to your profiles, various social networks, messengers. And at this stage it is worth using specialized services that perform data parsing.

This will be possible if you additionally connect mobile proxies to your work, as an option from the MobileProxy.Space service. In this case, you are guaranteed the highest level of functionality and stability on the Internet. This became possible thanks to the effective substitution of the IP-address and geolocation of your device with the technical parameters of the intermediary server, as well as the ability to additionally select the optimal location and cellular network operator.

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