By Holly Korten
Every successful business rests on reputation. We are living in a world where customers have the power to make or break a business. Positive reviews work as wonders and allows the business to flourish. On the contrary, negative reviews breaks the momentum and results in complete failure.
Here are some great ways through which small business owners can generate more positive reviews online:
Pay Attention to Old Reviews
No matter how old the comments get, they will always be counted along with the new ones. Therefore, it is recommended to fix all the old negative reviews so that they don’t create issues for your present and future reviews.
Resolving issues means that you are paying attention to the needs of the customers and are listening to their queries. This helps in increasing the trust resulting in greater business goodwill.
While responding to negative reviews, stay calm and positive. Own your mistakes and say sorry. List all the possible reasons why the error happened and the steps you took right after the incident. This will let the customer know that you accept the fault instead of running away from it and moreover, you have taken all the suitable steps to ensure that such incidents are not repeated in future.
Make Reviewing Easy And Don’t Hesitate To Ask For Reviews Whenever Required
You can make reviewing easy and ask for reviews at the same time by offering three choices to select from: ‘send us a feedback’, ‘suggest a new thing’, and ‘take me to review site’. This way your customers also have options and will be more likely to provide you with positive reviews.
Remember one thing. No matter how good your company is going, there will be rivals that would post negative reviews about your page, site, products, etc. All you can do is reply wisely and improve where they found a fault in your product or company.
Most of the ecommerce store owners make the mistake of not adding a review option on their product pages. This reduces the chances of acquiring solid online reviews from your customer which can benefit your business in the long run.
As for example, Pearls Only, one of the world’s top websites for buying pearls online is able to gather so many positive reviews simply because they have made it easier for their customers to leave a review on their website. The company uses Schema data to attract the customers by displaying online reviews directly in the search engine results. More customers read positive reviews and are compelled to write positive for the company.
Have A Sturdy Web Presence
You have to be visible and social with people. Whether it is the website, social media sites, emails, pages, groups, etc., you have to be everywhere.
Having a great email marketing strategy will help you reach out to several people. Whenever a customer purchases a product, try sending a follow up mail asking for a review. This way you will be able to generate tons of reviews on your website.
Your website should look presentable and simple rather than cluttered which will confuse a viewer. You have to make your site mobile friendly so that your mobile audiences are able to read and write reviews easily.
Change The Vocabulary When Asking For A Review
Choice of words play a deciding role whether customers will leave a positive review on your website. Simply replacing the word “Review” with “Feedback” and sending “Invites” instead of “asking” for reviews can play a great role in bringing positive feedback for your business.
While writing reviews you have to thank the person, write their name, and then get on to their issue. You should also be aware of what product or service has your customer used. For example, “Thank you for your patronage Ms. Patricia. We hope you visit our site again to purchase another beautiful set.”
Follow The Law Of Reciprocity
The law of reciprocity states that if you do good to someone, that person will reciprocate by doing good to you. Businesses can leverage the power of reciprocity to encourage more and more customers to leave opinions.
You can start with a gesture to plant a tree in exchange for a review or send them a gift if they are the first one to leave a review for a particular product. Gestures like this will make it a habit for the customers to add reviews on your site.
Dominate On Social Media
Social media is a great place to get the conversation started. Create a group or community and make the people feel the presence of your brand by indulging into some form of social service.
Help the customers, help the community and in return, they will add more positive reviews for your brand. The top 3 social media sites where reviews matter the most are Facebook reviews, LinkedIn recommendations and YouTube video reviews. Entertain your audience, care for them, be there for them when they need you, carry out a conversation with them, promote a social cause and gradually you will start to have a loyal following.
Are you taking any other special steps in order to improve the number of comments on your website? Please let us know in the comments below.
A senior VP of Business Intelligence Development, Holly Korten is a relentless net worker with several years of experience in marketing domain for Small and medium businesses. Assisting several Fortune 500 companies in revamping their marketing strategies from ground up, he seeks to achieve the entrepreneurial dream of startups to make it big in the market. A thinker, communicator, counselor and entrepreneur, he aims to spread his marketing finesse to upcoming businessmen.
