Experts Need expert help? Don’t hesitate to talk.
One local consumer review survey found that 87% of the consumers read online reviews before doing anything. People are becoming conscious of where should they spend money online. And it is increasingly becoming rare to find people who blindly make any purchases online without getting any kind of social proof.
Another review trackers survey finds that 94% of consumers avoid such businesses having negative reviews. This means, having a positive online image is important for brands to reap the benefits and improve their sales. Often businesses don’t pay too much attention to the customer reviews that can significantly affect your eCommerce business. Positive customer reviews create social proof that helps other customers to trust your brand. Following are ways how customer reviews can boost online sales.
How Customer Reviews Can Boost Online Sales
Reviews are becoming a key part of your branding. Understanding the need why reviews are essential will help you better your digital footprint and improve the checkout experience of your users.
1. Review Help Increase Credibility:
Placing reviews & ratings of customers on different pages, especially your homepage and the product page is a practice everyone should adopt. It signals to the potential customer that your business is a credible source to purchase products.
Moreover, positive reviews work like a charm for your visitors. When your visitors see that other customers have given their mark of approval, the chances of their purchase increases. However, it’s essential to note that consumers know all positive reviews are aimed to provoke sales. So, highlighting some challenging aspects of your products is necessary to convince customers to go through the purchase.
2. Reviews Create Social Proof for Your Brand:
Social proof is a psychological experience that helps determine the purchase decision based on the choices of others. Today, the biggest source of social proof is online reviews and they clearly impact the sales of your eCommerce store in a positive way.
Also read: How Customer Reviews Improve eCommerce Conversion Rates
Brands have opted for ways that guarantee a review from their customers such as offering a discount on the next purchase for completing a review. Customer feedback plays a major role in creating social proof for your brand that can entice visitors to go-through checkout more convincingly. Also, it can help you reduce your reliance on other channels of getting sales.
3. Reviews Give You More Visibility:
An increase in digital visibility means an increase in the chances of being a successful brand. Most product searches happen on search engines like Google & Bing. And guess what, they all have unique ways of indexing content and showing users reviews/ratings.
As per Yotpo, customer reviews can help a business boost their organic page visits from search engines. So, keeping your brand favored for search engine algorithms would help out a lot. Search engines value the positive content while choosing which results to show on top. More the higher ranking more the authority you get in your industry which will help you get more exposure.
4. Reviews Make You Trustworthy:
As online reviews mark social proof for your brand, it can help significantly to build trust in the minds of your customers. Also, many surveys have found that reviews act as a powerful weapon for building your brand’s online trustworthiness said brightlocal. In addition to that, shoppers distrust companies having low average ratings below 4 and in some cases above
Companies with better ratings and reviews get more organic views that convert into a quality lead and ultimately become your customer. Having positive digital footprints on your company translates to having more sales and conversion.
5. Reviews Help Rank Site Naturally for Long-tail Keyword:
Long-tail keywords have low competition in contrast to highly competitive general search terms. They are specific phrases or words and are much easier to target to rank batter on search engines. The problem here is knowing which long-tail keywords to target. However, you can look into your customer reviews and find the phrasing that concerns and integrate them into your on-site optimization.
The use of long-tail keywords also improves the message you want to convey to your audience. Your customers want to hear those words that will entice them to make a move and purchase items from your brand.
6. Reviews Help in Decision Making:
Reviews act as a catalyst for decision making. And to make purchase decisions, your customers turn to Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other platforms rather than a newspaper or their friends and family. Also, these platforms help give better visibility to your brand if you have proactively cultivated it.
Another great tool is to use social media in your favor. Many brands have started to utilize the potential social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and others hold. Social media platforms provide the ability to showcase and generate social proof for your brand and help customers reach decisions in the process which ultimately gives a boost to your sales.
7. Reviews Are Open Line of Communication:
Reviews are an open line for you and your customers to communicate directly. Today, customers expect to get a reply from brands after they have posted a review online. Review forums and other platforms provide brands an opportunity to be frank and reinforce the positive reviews with a reply of appreciation and promotion.
Moreover, communication gives you a way to remedy poor and negative reviews and issue an apology with a solution. Doing so will show that you care about your customers and are willing to do anything to improve their purchase experience from your brand. The personalized responses and immediacy of reply, position your brand uniquely in this fierce competition.
Wrapping Up
All in all, reviews are a great tool for any online business to boost the sales volume of your eCommerce store. Review help instill trust and credibility. They increase your brands’ visibility, help in rank better on SERPs, and make your brand a trustworthy choice for customers. Online reviews are nothing but a word of mouth promotion technique where people talk about your brand which ultimately helps other visitors to convert into customers.
Consult our eCommerce experts if you need help with eCommerce design and eCommerce development for your online store.
