Whitefish Wednesday – Do collect reviews
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another one of our Whitefish Wednesday videos. I’m Chris Surridge, Director here at Whitefish Marketing, and today we’re going to have a quick chat about what to do with reviews. More specifically, if we haven’t given any thought about reviews, now’s the time really to go ahead and think about it.
We’re going to coin this one here, Do Collect Reviews. It’s as plain and simple as that. Reviews, we know have positive benefits, but I’m just going to relay some of the benefits and what you should be doing and how to collect some reviews.
What statistic of people trust reviews?
So let’s have a look at the first statistic here, 87%, 87% of people trust online reviews just as they would do a personal recommendation. Okay, that’s a huge factor. So subsequently if you’ve got five star ratings, that’s great. Someone’s going to go ahead and have 87% people trust that five star rating. But likewise, though, if you have negative ratings, if you have a one star review, two star reviews, that is also going to reflect badly upon your business. We’ll talk about negative reviews a little later on in this video.
Other things is about reviews, regardless of which way the reviews are, they also help you to rank higher. It shows that there is a lot more engagement there. It shows that there is a lot more information there, that people have written about your company. So Google want to show that to other prospective people. So having reviews will help you rank higher within the search results.
Having your reviews on your sales page, like in some sort of widget, whether it be a Google Review widget or Yelp widget or whatever it is can actually increase your conversions by as much as 18%. That’s a huge amount. That’s almost one fifth of an increase coming through to your website.
Claim your free review profiles
Do go about claiming some of the free profile places where you can get reviews from. So Whether it be GMB or Yelp or yell.com, or if you’re an accountant, have a chat with the company VouchedFor, which is the accountancy version for online reviews. Okay. So do go about claiming up your reviews, your profiles, and then subsequently go out there ask for reviews. It’s as simple as that, just put forward out an email to all your customers with a link to the particular review platform and just ask them, “Look, if you have had a positive experience, please get in touch with us and please enter in a review.”
If they’ve had a negative experience, ask them to email you instead, so that way you can actually respond to that and deal with that negative review without it actually going into the public domain. It’s as simple as that.
Remember to respond to negative reviews
Lastly, respond to negative reviews. Even if you have native reviews being posted in the public domain, respond to it because it shows to other people that you’re proactively dealing with the problem. Okay. You’re not just letting it sit by the wayside, but you’re actually dealing with issue in hand, and it shows people that you’ve got a good customer service and that you’re always proactive in dealing with problems.
So that’s it in a nutshell. So one, go ahead and collect reviews, okay, to have benefits there for your business. From a trust factor point of view, it helps increase your conversions by 18%, and it helps you to rank higher. For those reasons alone, you should be doing reviews and trying to collect as many reviews as you possibly can for your business.
Any questions, as always, you could just drop us a line at hello@whitefishmarketing.co.uk. If you’ve got any questions here about the reviews or if you have any other questions about digital marketing and you might want to have a chat with us about a topic for another one of our Whitefish Wednesday videos, just drop us a line and we’ll have a chat. For now, thank you very much indeed. I’m Chris Surridge, and we’ll see on the next video.
