Why Online Reviews are Important to your business.
In a city full of four and five-star companies, your business must look it's absolute best. The average consumer spends about 13 minutes on average reading reviews before making a purchase decision. If that potential buyer reads negative reviews or worse, you have a negative average star rating that potential buyers will most likely run to your competitors. Online reviews are important because they become a reference point to your potential buyers and give them insight on what to expect when it comes to your product or service.
Here are five important reasons as to why online reviews are vital to your business.
86% of 35-65 year olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. So if your business appeals more to this age range, you might want to start taking online reviews very seriously. Potential buyers, patients, customers will run to your competitors if you're slacking in any way. This age range tends to have the more financially stable individuals who have the deepest pockets when compared to the 18-34-year-old's we mention below.
91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. So if your primary demographic is 18-34 years-olds, a recent study showed that 91% of potential buyers in this age group trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Making sure your company looks it's absolute best would be vital; otherwise, these 18-34-year-olds would most certainly run to your five-star competitors.
40% of consumers only take into account reviews written within the past two weeks. Some of the companies we have as clients come to us and wonder why they were not receiving more business when the last positive review they received was from over six months ago. Potential buyers and customers want to see that you're generating frequent positive reviews. Reading reviews that are six months old, give the potential buyer the idea that you might not be in business or that your business is nothing to rave about. Our dashboard eliminates this problem and gives our clients the ability to generate online reviews through our collect reviews tab.
57% of consumers only use businesses with a four or better star rating. It's extremely hard to maintain a five-star rating, and we always refer to that sweet spot being between the four and five-star range. Anything less, you're losing money and have a serious problem. When your company shows one, two or three stars – you could easily be losing four, five, six figures or more in lost sales annually and not even know it. Very rare do consumers call on companies with a bad star rating, you wouldn't, and neither would we.
Every 1-star increase in a Yelp rating leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue. As we touched on the topic listed above, a slight increase in your average star rating on sites like Yelp can result in a 5-9% increase in your revenue. Only you would know how much of an impact this would make, but for the sake of argument, say you're listed as a two-star company. You could easily increase your annual sales into the double digits by fixing that negative review problem.
To sum things up, having a positive online presence when it comes to reviews is vital to the success and overall growth of your business. Having negative reviews, or an overall negative average can be quite damaging to your business. As we said at the beginning of this article, in a city full of four and five-star providers, you must be on the same level (or better) when compared to your competition. Our company is dedicated to helping you remove as many negative reviews as possible, while simultaneously working with you to increase the positive reviews that go to your online review pages. Let's work together and strengthen your online reviews.
Additional Review Facts