Why are genuine reviews so important?
One’s acquaintances who are familiar with a particular topic play a huge role in shaping customer trust.
If you look into it, you’ll find lots of studies and survey results published on the internet which deals with this topic directly or at least touches on the subject.
The McKinsey’s study unambiguously points out that as the process of the purchasing decision advances, customer reviews and references become more and more important. {1}
[1]
The diagram above illustrates the survey results of BrightLocal in October 2017 which – by asking 1031 participants – shows the enormous role of positive and negative customer reviews and recommendations regarding the online opinion about local enterprises.
The above diagram shows the results of a survey by BigCommerce in 2017 asking 1005 participants in the United States which also confirms the immense role of credible customer reviews during our online purchasing decisions. 68% of the participants take the satisfied or unsatisfied customer reviews into account while deciding about an online purchase. [3]
Survey results clearly show that one of the most important factors when making decisions in online shopping is the presence or absence of credible reviews, their quality and average.
Therefore the positive or negative feedback from clients and customers have a huge impact on us during the last and most important phase of the decision making process when we choose from whom we order the given product or service.
During my agency work I encountered a situation when the disappearance of a badge on a website – summarizing customer reviews – caused the conversion rate of the webshop to fall by more than 50% in the given month. After restoring the badge, the trust was re-established.
Situations like this that we experienced ourselves prompted us to create this simple yet great product which we named – quite appropriately – Trustindex.
But let us not go this far just now, let’s stay at the purchasing decision making.
What is the reason for the inefficacy in case of your campaigns and landing pages?
Newly starting enterprises often complain that their Adwords campaigns are unsuccessful, that they cannot advertise on Facebook effectively, or that they don’t have enough customers because their landing pages just don’t work.
The inefficacy of campaigns and landing pages can have several possible reasons in practice, which quite often even experts cannot identify unambiguously. Therefore most of the times we resort to analysis and diagnose the main flaws and deficiencies in a campaign or landing page.
Consequently it is rather difficult to trace back the inefficacy to a single unambiguous reason, and in most cases several problems together are responsible.
In case of a business website or web-shop, the quality of texts, the design and the harmony of the campaign and landing pages, or the presence or absence of a certain payment option are all crucial elements of trust. These I won’t address individually, because you can find lots of useful tools to analyze and improve these.
There is however one important building block of the trust index – which is first neglected by most – but the above statistics point out that this is really one of the most important factors during a purchasing decision.
Based on our experience the most frequent mistake of landing pages – also influencing the performance of campaigns – is the lack of positive customer feedback, their insufficient number or low quality, which make even our best offers completely unauthentic.
Based on several effective examples we know that if your customers trust your company, that is you collect the satisfied customer reviews more effectively and cleverly, it will result in significantly more customers and a lot higher conversional rate without marketing expenditures.
Why collect reviews specifically on Facebook?
Facebook is well known and recognized by everyone and the credibility of users’ reviews can be traced instantly with the quick inspection of their profile pages.
We think that Facebook is one of the best places and methods for collecting customer reviews due to its credibility and verifiability.
Users however tend to enquire on different surfaces at the same time, therefore it is very important to collect reviews on every other online surface relevant to us.
With this step we lower the business risk and exposure as we will not depend only on the reviews on our Facebook business page.
Based on our experience, if we are lucky, the adequate number (100 – 200) and quality of Facebook reviews can generate even 70% more customers or higher conversion without any extra marketing expenditure.
The difference will be most relevant in cases when you did not have any, or you only had a few credible reviews in the first place which you could have used on your landing pages.
How can you collect real customer ratings with our help?
Trustindex is easy and quick to install, you do not have to be a developer to embed the widgets on the website displaying the reviews and ratings, you will only need a little bit of technical acumen.
1. With Trustindex you will be able to send automated, scheduled email messages to your clients after every purchase they make so more and more people will rate the given product or service on Facebook.
2. Due to the automated email sending system you can request credible ratings from hundreds of your real customers on Facebook.
3. By using the system you can collect hundreds of customer ratings on Facebook in just a couple of months simply, quickly and without the smallest effort.
4. On Trustindex’s admin page you have the ability to search and filter based on the ratings (number of stars) or the content of reviews.
5. Here you can also add your own special labels to the reviews which you filtered by the different aspects (e.g.: product group, category, city, country, language).
The only thing you have left to do is to display the filtered and matching Facebook reviews in your web-shops and landing pages.
How can you display your Facebook ratings?
You have the ability label the requested ratings and display them on your website or landing pages with our excellently designed Facebook widgets.
Using the Facebook widgets on the website you are able to show only the best ratings, thus you can filter your Facebook reviews based on the number of stars.
Since you can tag every review received through the system, you have the opportunity to filter what reviews the widgets on your landing pages display by language, country, city, product group or category name.
Why do Facebook reviews increase the income so effectively?
Because due to the high number of fresh and relevant incoming reviews your trustworthiness and therefore your new customers’ trust will go through the roof toward your brand.
At the same time the conversional rate on your website and landing pages will grow, and therefore so will the willingness of customers to buy; This way the basket value will increase, hence your online income will raise without spending more on Facebook or AdWords campaigns.
Due to the high conversion rate caused by the heightened purchasing tendencies, more and more previously loss making campaign, advertising channel and device will become affordable which will be easily detectable in your incomes.
IMPORTANT
Facebook reviews on their own are ineffective or can even be harmful for companies following a bad business practice, offering low quality services or products, or companies who use inadequate sales strategies.
Források:
1. McKinsey; 2009
Forrás: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-decision-journey
2. United States; BrightLocal; October 2017; 1031 respondents
Forrás: https://www.statista.com/statistics/315751/online-review-customer-opinion/
3. United States; BigCommerce; 2017: 1005 respondents; 18 years and older; online shoppers who have made a month
Forrás: https://www.statista.com/statistics/788185/us-online-shoppers-purchase-influences/