The POWER of Online Reviews

As a business, one of your most powerful allies is customer-written reviews.
Only saying that people “trust reviews” doesn’t do it justice, in fact it wouldn’t even be the half of it.
Reviews are one of the biggest reasons people will convert to a sale or customer. The review is providing social evidence that your business is trusted, has been used by someone else, and is real, it’s what will cause people to choose you over your competitor!

Just read these points from over 2,000 consumers surveyed about their behaviour when searching for a local business revealed.

88% of respondents read/used reviews to determine the quality of a local business; an overwhelming majority of respondents, 93%, said they checked reviews before dining or shopping. This means no matter how good your website is, or how compelling your offering, your customers will seek out other opinions. Having a strategy to earn, manage, and respond to reviews is a must.

85% of respondents to the BrightLocal survey read up to 10 different reviews while researching their purchase, pointing to the fact that customers aren’t blindly accepting the first review they read, but triangulating the feedback they find to get the real story behind a business.

88% of respondents said they trusted online reviews as much as they’d trust a personal recommendation.

Source: BrightLocal’s Local Customer Review Survey

Knowledge Post Summary:
You NEED reviews, they are very hard to get, but you can get them if you put in the right customer followup procedures.

SimpleStuff Review System:
We have all our clients using our Marketing Package put in systems to help receive more reviews from their customers/clients.
It’s important to use systems that fit your business type, it may be sending follow up emails asking directly, asking after providing a customer experience check, asking after calling by phone, or by running special repeat customer promotions.