Online reviews — Do they negatively affect your business?

With more and more people using the internet to research your brand and products it has never been more important to have strong positive reviews showing up for your business and products when people find them.

Think about it: how many times have you made a buying decision because your friends told you they really enjoyed a product? How many times have you decided to buy a product from Amazon because you saw that it had 5-star reviews VS the other products that only had 4-star reviews?

The online world works just like the offline world. If you get an injury and your friend comes up to you and recommends a doctor who helped him fix the same issue, then you are probably going to use that doctor to solve your injury as well.

This is the same type of psychology that applies to the online world. When consumers are shopping online they cannot feel or physically see the product for themselves, so we rely on other aspects to let us know if it is a good product… reviews!

The statistics

68% of all consumers trust opinions posted online.

This falls back on the statement, “I read it online, it must be true”. From blog posts, reviews, videos, and all other free content that can be found online, most people believe what they read.

This makes sense, we search Google for a reason, we trust that Google is going to give us the most relevant and accurate information it can possibly provide. So why not trust the opinion of others? 

88% of consumers put just as much faith into online reviews as they would personal recommendations.

This is a mind-blowing statistic, but if you think about it the internet gives us the opportunity to give our opinion everywhere. Google gives us the opportunity to write reviews, Amazon encourages everyone that buys a product to write a review, Yelp a popular online directory puts a strong focus on reviews. 

There is a reason these massive companies encourage reviews, it’s because they know people actually care about them. 

72% of consumers say positive reviews make them trust businesses more.

This one seems like common sense. If you see a bunch of positive reviews for a business or product online you will most likely trust that brand more and vice versa, if you see a bunch of negative reviews online for a product or brand you probably won't trust that business at all. 

Dealing with the negative nancies

Customers tend to share negative reviews over positive ones

This comes down to the mindset of the customer. If they have a horrible experience with a product or company it's easy for a customer to want to write a negative review to release frustrations that could have been built up through this bad experience. It’s also them trying to help other customers avoid the same mistake they made. On the flip side, maybe it's just their way of getting revenge.

Turn a negative review into a positive one

Negative reviews can affect your business a lot in the long run. While you should be doing everything you possibly can to avoid negative reviews, they might just eventually show up.

The great thing about most review systems is that they give you the option to reply to the review. The key here is to reply in a kind manner and figure out a solution with the customer. You need to put an effort into fixing the situation because if you don't, that negative review could be affecting you for a very long time. If you come up with the solution with the customer they will most likely end up removing their review and everyone comes out on top.

Moving forward

Now that you know how important online reviews can be for your business, you need to start putting more attention towards receiving positive reviews and even more attention towards avoiding the negative ones. It would be a good idea to create systems and processes to encourage current customers and future customers to write reviews for your products after they purchase, it would be even better to create a system and process for dealing with negative reviews as well. This way if a negative review ever does pop up you will already know how to deal with it and get it removed or resolved as fast as possible.

If you have any further questions feel free to contact us and we will be more than happy to help you out!