For many years now, the purchasing behavior of consumers has changed significantly, especially due to the boom in online commerce. Actually, shopping at home, sitting on your couch and avoiding the crowds of big shops has become a routine for some people…
So when we see that online shopping has become commonplace for many consumers, it is understandable that e-merchants have a bright future ahead of them, but also that competition is increasing rapidly.
In just a few clicks the prospect can switch sites and make purchases from another, so e-merchants must come up with a new strategy to stand out. Differentiating yourself from the competition with customer reviews is a great way to boost your site’s performance and sometimes at a lower cost.
Customer reviews have many interests, in fact, they reassure your prospect and therefore encourage him to buy. They also increase your conversion rate and improve your online reputation. But in addition to the purely business aspects, customer reviews also allow the development of your natural reference.
Today we are going to give you our best advice to make customer reviews a real performance lever for your e-commerce site.
1: Reply to all reviews
The purpose of customer reviews is to reassure your future customers about the quality of your products and services, in fact, reviews influence about 80% of purchase decisions among consumers (IFOP SourceIt’s tempting to leave positive reviews when your customers are satisfied, but more often than not it’s when you’re unhappy that you feel the need to say what you think. Many e-merchants are afraid of negative reviews and don’t know how to handle them properly when they can be very useful.
Sometimes you need feedback to understand what is not working in your company and which points will need to be revised. In fact, in some cases these reflect reality and give you an indication of what can be improved to fully satisfy the customer experience.
One of the biggest mistakes with negative reviews is to moderate them and/or leave them unanswered, with 30% of consumers saying they don’t trust a site that doesn’t have negative reviews (Source Econsultancy.com). Don’t forget that when you respond to a review, dozens of people will consult it. Responding to a negative review means passing on information to future customers and answering potential questions. It is for this reason that a response to a negative opinion will be completely different from a positive opinion, the e-merchant must provide elements capable of convincing the customer, but especially the possibility.
Taking a good attitude towards these comments is also an important element to effectively manage negative thoughts, don’t be aggressive in your response as you risk losing new customers, instead adopt a sensible attitude.
On the other hand, while responding to positive reviews cannot be ruled out, keeping these reviews in mind lets your customers know that you are grateful and that you are listening to them.
2: Collect enough customer reviews
For your customer reviews to have a real impact on optimizing your business’s performance, you should still have enough. If you have a high overall rating but it only shows a dozen reviews then it won’t be reliable.
Urging your customers after an act of purchase is the key to a higher harvest rate, in fact, without this urge many people don’t have the reflection to leave a review or see the benefits of it. The best way to request some questions asking them to be answered is to send an email. In this request for advice, however, be careful not to ask too many clients because you risk rushing them and not having time to answer the entire questionnaire. Let the client answer freely using open-ended questions.
3: Use a customer review management solution
Adopting a good customer review strategy is easier when you use a trusted third party. by establishing Customer Review Management Solutions Like Guaranteed Reviews Company, you make them easy to manage for yourself at multiple points, effectively allowing you to: automatic solicitation of customers, manage reviews on a single interface integrated directly into your back office, and more.
The solution is available on the main CMS: Prestashop, Shopify, Magento and Woocommerce. An installation is possible for other CMSs to retrieve commands and request them automatically.
Promote your customer reviews on Google with the Google Shopping Feed and Reviews on Google My Business. You can also customize the widget to your graphical charter thanks to the many customizable widgets.
In the context where you do not specifically place an online order, Societe des Avis Guarantees offers the importation of CSV orders.
The solution also offers a multilingual option, which allows you, if you work abroad, to do machine translation and opinion sharing.
To promote the work of e-merchants, the company has instituted “Mention of Excellence” awarding all professionals who have obtained an overall score of more than 8/10. This mention helps to assure your prospects not only about the quality of your offering, but also about the approval of a recognized company.
Guaranteed Reviews What sets the company apart from other customer review solutions by itself prices, these are the most profitable in the market with an introductory offer of €19.90 per month.
4: Monitor your customer reviews
Once a strategy for processing customer reviews is in place, monitoring is essential. In fact, leaving your opinion pending unprocessed runs the risk of leaving a wave of negative comments affecting your online reputation.
That’s why it’s important to consult and respond to reviews every day or at least regularly.
In addition, if your potential customers find that there has been no response or follow-up, they may think that your site is no longer active or that you are not taking your customers’ opinions into account.
5: Check that all your reviews are genuine
Authentic reviews make it possible to guarantee that the person who left this comment has actually made a purchase on your site, without which the opinion is not really representative of the quality you have to offer.
We come across the problem of inauthentic reviews when we call on free platforms. In fact, take the example of reviews left on Google, everyone is authorized to leave reviews while nothing certifies that they are actually customers. There is a risk with this type of platform that malicious people or even your own competitors will act with the sole purpose of harming your image.
To avoid this, check that everyone who leaves reviews is part of your customer file, if they are not, moderate these reviews.
Article written in collaboration with Societe des Aviso Guarantee.