58% of consumers say that the star rating is the most important factor in deciding to shop with a retailer or business. All things being equal, a shopper is going to continue on to the retail website with the best star rating. It is critical that your business has a high star rating on the search engines like Google and Bing, but also review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor.
A high star rating on your Google places profile or Yelp profile helps the shopper form trust in your business before they even visit your site or talk with you. Your rating is one of the first impressions your company will make with that shopper, and a bad rating will leave a bad first impression. Many shoppers will automatically exclude your business from consideration if your rating is low compared to your competition.
73% of consumers think that reviews older than 3 months are no longer relevant. This means that just having a large number of reviews, and a good star rating, are not enough. A one time push to get more reviews isn't going to help your business in the long run. You need a strategy to get customers to review your business and you have to stick with it.
From a shopper's perspective a very recent review is likely to give them an idea of what kind of experience to expect today. A review that is months or years old isn't worthless, but things change over time and the shopper knows it. Maybe the employee mentioned in the review no longer works there, there could be new management, or maybe the product mix has changed since that old review was left.
The key is to make continually generating online reviews a part of your day to day process. Your entire team needs to be on board and trained on how to ask for a review when they are working with a customer.
We provide the tools and method to make it easy to start asking for Google reviews and to keep doing it.
Today, shoppers use the internet not only to find the products they want, but also to find the companies they want to shop with. They rely on reviews to learn about what types of experiences other shoppers have had with your company. In fact, most shoppers (84%) trust online reviews as much as a recomendation from someone they know. 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
A rating between 4 and 5 stars is the best, and most trustworthy in appearance. It is important to have a mix of 5 star reviews and 3 or 4 star reviews because shoppers will strongly suspect censorship or fraud if they only see perfect reviews.
Owany equips your team with the tools and process to make it easy to ask for online reviews.
See how Owany generates reviewsYou can be up and running within minutes, it's that easy.
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