Reviews Matter
During the last couple of years, traditional advertisement methods, such as television ads, and even Internet-based ads have decreased in terms of their influence on the market, and for obvious reasons. People are now free to state their very own, unbiased opinions, on practically all products and services sold over the Internet, almost everywhere in the world.
For those who do not know, online reviews are basically the opinions of consumers on certain products and services, posted either on the company’s website, on social media networks, on e-commerce sites, but also on review platforms, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, G2 Crowd, Capterra, TechCrunch, Wired, IMDb, CNET, RateMDs, Foursquare and many more.
With time, online reviews have managed to become a big trend on the internet, thus determining how consumers and business owners throughout the world act. Nowadays, online reviews can influence a multitude of our decisions, including what phone we have, what we eat on a daily basis, where we dine, where we travel, which hotels we book, and what other products we purchase. Reviews have become a way of assessing the overall quality of a product or service, prior to the first-hand experience, through the help of others that have used the product/service before.
Regardless of their importance, it is surprising that not many business owners can fully grasp the importance of online reviews yet. With this in mind, in a recent study by WebsiteBuilder.org, it was determined that with every star a business gets in terms of their rating, their profits will increase by around 5-9%. On the other side of the spectrum, 22% of customers are bound to give up purchasing a product after reading just one negative review, so the impact is huge. Business owners should be aware of the fact that there are numerous ethical practices that can be established, to reduce the number of negative reviews, and increase the number of positive ones.
If a little work is put into effective review management and customer satisfaction, then businesses throughout the world will be able to yield larger profits, and experience more popularity, both online, but also offline.
Here’s a cool infographic that WebsiteBuilder.org put together.
