A Guide for Managing Online Customer Reviews to Increase Sales Performance
28.8 percent of all business is now conducted solely online in the US, and your online presence is arguably more important than ever. Online customer reviews have the ability to make or break a business. In fact, over 90 percent of potential customers read them before buying online. One bad review can tarnish your image, which is why online review management is essential.
But online review management is not just about managing your reputation—it’s about leveraging customer feedback to drive tangible results for your business. By implementing your own unique review management strategy, you can work to improve your sales performance by attracting new customers to your brand and retaining existing ones.
In this guide, we’ll provide a detailed overview of how you can properly manage your online customer reviews to build your reputation and increase your overall sales performance.
What is Online Review Management?
Online review management is when businesses monitor and analyze their reviews left on different platforms like social media, Google, Yelp, and Trust Pilot so they can execute a salient review response strategy. This might involve responding to reviews professionally or finding and deleting fake ones.
Though similar, reputation management isn’t the same as review management.
With review management, you’re performing a deep analysis of your product and service reviews. It doesn’t involve mining data from surveys or customer inquiries – you only look at reviews left organically by your customers. With the information you find, you can improve customer experience.
Why is Review Management So Important for Businesses?
Online reviews hold major power for modern business, especially since nearly half of all internet users post reviews online every single month. With so many circulating, it can be hard to stand out against other businesses that have thousands of five-star reviews. Managing your feedback is one way to keep your reputation squeaky clean.
Think of online reviews as the virtual word-of-mouth of businesses. Online review management allows you to tap into customer perspectives of your company to manage your customer service in the future.
Let’s take a look at why online review management is crucial for the future of your business:
1. Establishing Trust and Credibility
In an era where consumers rely heavily on online information, positive reviews act as social proof of your online business’s reliability. When potential customers see glowing reviews from satisfied clients, they’re more likely to trust your brand and buy one or more of your products.
2. Influencing Purchase Decisions
As we’ve said, 90 percent of consumers read online reviews before buying anything online. The previous experiences of other customers will directly impact the choices that future consumers make.
Positive reviews translate into more sales. At the same time, a negative review will work to deter potential customers from buying.
3. Improving Search Engine Visibility
Online reviews play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google consider review quantity, quality, and diversity when ranking businesses in search results. Actively managing your online reviews means you can boost your visibility in search engine rankings, driving more organic traffic to your business’s website.
4. Gaining Valuable Insights
Beyond their impact on sales, online reviews give you invaluable feedback about your products and the customer service you provide. Taking the time to analyze customer feedback means you can identify key areas for improvement and address customer concerns before you receive more negative reviews.
Think of analyzing online reviews as a way to cultivate a feedback loop where you consistently improve depending on what your customers tell you so you can improve and increase sales.
5. Managing Reputation
A single negative review can tarnish your reputation and bring down your average feedback score. Managing your reviews allows you to address negative comments quickly and slow down the damage to your reputation.
How to Successfully Manage Your Online Reviews in 4 Simple Steps
Successfully managing your online reviews is all about developing a unique management strategy tailored to your business.
The vast majority of successful strategies will follow these steps:
- Collect current reviews across different sites
- Analyze these reviews to find insights that are actionable
- Prompt customers to leave new reviews
- Consistently monitor the results and repeat the cycle.
Successfully managing your online reviews also involves integrating feedback collected from customer interactions in call centers. This integration lets you capture a broader spectrum of customer experiences, making your review management strategy more robust and informed.
Here’s a more in-depth look at the steps involved with curating your own review management strategy.
Identify the Review Sites You Want to Focus On
Before anything else, think about where you’re going to focus your review search. Identify the review sites that:
- Have the most feedback about your business.
- Are relevant to your industry niche.
- Where your potential customers are most likely to look for reviews of your business before they buy.
Sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, Trust Pilot, and Google are likely to have the most considerable influence over your customer base, but it’s still worthwhile to check for your business’s presence across other sites just in case.
If you run a business with an online and in-person store, you may want to integrate your reviews from both. Some advances in retail POS systems allow you to collect feedback from customers at the till, allowing you to get a broader sentiment perspective.
Similarly, transportation management systems play a critical role in ensuring timely delivery and inventory management, which can significantly impact customer satisfaction and their subsequent reviews.
Work on Your Review Management Strategy
Now that you know which sites you’re going to focus on, you can begin to create your own review management strategy. This is designed to help you not only check and manage reviews when they come in but also the types of reviews you’re going to respond to, whether positive, negative, or comparisons to other products.
You’ll likely want to respond to reviews from multiple channels, whether it’s on Yelp or through gathering data using AI in contact centers.
Ask yourself:
- How often am I going to check online reviews on my chosen website?
- Which reviews should I respond to in order to improve customer sentiment?
- What’s the best way to respond?
Responding to positive and negative reviews has its benefits.
Directly addressing positive feedback from happy customers will show you appreciation and loyalty to your client base, offering a more personalized approach to customer care.
On the other hand, responding to negativity online can show your commitment to improving the experiences that customers have with your brand.
Analyze Reviews to Find Insights
Once you’ve gathered your review data and developed your review management strategy, you can start to perform an analysis to uncover insights into the thoughts and feelings of your customers.
Perform both a traditional textual analysis and a sentiment analysis on all your data.
A textual analysis involves developing a coding scheme to categorize the content of your reviews based on themes like product/service features, customer experiences, satisfaction levels, and complaints.
A sentiment analysis is when you can tokenize preprocessed data into individual words and then choose a sentiment to analyze using machine learning-based methods. You can use generative AI to generate synthetic reviews to test your method.
In online review management, generative AI use cases include summarizing customer reviews and analyzing the sentiment of reviews to identify trends and patterns.
Encourage New Reviews
As part of review management, you need to take proactive steps to improve your online reputation. It’s easy to find all your review sources overwhelming, especially if you’re facing negative feedback. However, using well-tested strategies to prompt new, positive reviews will help to amplify your brand’s image.
Strategies include:
Showcasing positive reviews
Showcasing is a strategic approach that makes sure your best reviews are the first thing that your customers will see.
Instead of actively reaching out to customers, you allow positive reviews to come in and then highlight them on your website’s landing page or product pages, where your customers are more likely to see them.
Featuring positive reviews first means you can immediately capture the attention of your audience and bolster their confidence in your brand.
Prompting satisfied customers to leave a review
Another way to encourage more reviews is to prompt your customers to give you feedback (if they’re satisfied with your product). You should actively reach out to customers, either after a purchase or through an email marketing campaign, and ask them to leave reviews.
You could incentivize customers by offering voucher codes or reward points, but this can get tricky as it could encourage them to leave dishonest or insincere reviews.
Detect and remove false responses
Staying vigilant against false reviews is a critical part of maintaining the integrity of your review management strategy. Stay diligent by monitoring your reviews, look out for misleading feedback that seems to be written by AI or a bot, and report any you see to keep all your reviews sincere.
How Will Online Review Management Help to Increase My Business’s Sales Performance?
Customer review management can directly contribute to a boost in your sales figures because:
- It builds trust and credibility in your brand, acting as social proof of your product’s quality. When potential customers see that so many other people have had positive experiences with your business, they’re more likely to trust you and feel confident enough to buy something from your online store.
- It improves your search engine visibility, as engines like Google consider review quality and quantity when ranking local businesses in their search results. Let’s say you’re a local restaurant with an online website. If you have more reviews than other eateries nearby, Google is more likely to showcase you at the top of the results page.
- It boosts conversion rates. More positive reviews give customers the confidence they need to take action and see you as a legitimate business.
- It helps to differentiate your business from competitors. A reputation built on positive customer feedback will serve as a unique selling point (USP) that makes you different from your closest competitors. Highlighting your excellent reputation and satisfied customers will help you attract prospects who are seeking trustworthy businesses to engage with.
- It provides valuable feedback that you can use to improve, as online reviews provide insights into your customer base, including their preferences and expectations of you. Analyzing your reviews will help you identify where you can do better in your business to improve the customer’s experience moving forward. Creating a continuous feedback loop allows businesses not only to adapt but also to evolve over time.
- It lets you discover new potential leads since positive online reviews can help you find new prospects. Monitoring online reviews and engaging with satisfied customers can help you initiate conversations that may lead to sales opportunities, making it an integral part of the sales prospecting process.
Improve Your Sales Performance With Online Review Management Today
Improving your business’s sales performance through online review management is not just a possibility—it’s a necessity, given the weight that public feedback has on a consumer’s choice to buy.
By actively monitoring and responding to your customer reviews, your business can build better trust and credibility and influence more consumers to check out your brand and buy a product. Remember that positive reviews act as social proof for your product, letting potential customers know that your product is reliable and good quality.
A salient online review management strategy isn’t just about bolstering your brand reputation; it’s also about using valuable feedback to make positive improvements to your business.
Analyzing customer feedback allows you to uncover insights into what your customers expect from you so you can continue to grow and improve.
Adopt your own review management process using our comprehensive guide, and start improving your overall sales performance by listening to your customers today.
