It’s rare to leave the house these days without checking the Internet first.
Clearing your email inbox, catching up on social media notifications, messaging a friend to confirm plans, or Googling the address of the new business you’re about to visit.
How often do you shop for a product you’ve never tried before, or eat at a restaurant you’ve never visited, without first reading the reviews?
If your answer is “never”, then you’re with the close to ninety percent of people who crowd source before they buy.
Ninety percent.
With so much information at your fingertips, why not?
This is how your customer thinks in the information age.
As a business owner, you can see the importance of customer reviews.
So where, and how, should you be gathering these reviews?
At Silverman Consulting & Retail Services, a retail liquidation consultant, we help you find the answers to all of your retail business questions.
Let’s start by examining the ways in which customer reviews can help your business, and then look at where to find them.
Using Customer Reviews For Marketing?
Let’s say you need to take your daughter shopping for a prom dress.
You don’t know much about prom dresses, but you want her to have a great experience.
A quick online search leads you to two dress stores in your neighbourhood, but you only have time to visit one.
The first store has a great online rating – 5 stars!
However, a closer look shows that only two customers have provided a review and rating.
The second store has rating of 4.8 stars with over 200 customer reviews.
That sounds a lot more promising, so you decide to visit the second one, sure that you’ll have a great experience.
With no money spent on the part of the business, this marketing tactic has worked wonders.
A customer review is a free, accessible marketing tool for your business if you know how to use them.
Where Should You Gather Reviews?
The first place most people turn to when searching online is Google.
But depending which browser they use, and depending on the customer, they may prefer to search on Facebook, or use sites more focused on customer reviews, such as Yelp.
Google My Business is a free site available to you as a business, and it is the first page that comes up when your customer searches for your business on Google maps.
Some people won’t look further than that, so they will be looking at the rating and reviews posted by your customers on Google.
If you have not yet set up your Google My Business page, register for free and provide as much detail as possible, such as hours of operation, a website link, and even photos of your business.
Likewise, a Facebook page is free and should be used to communicate to your customers.
Facebook also allows visitors to your page to leave you a review and a rating.
You get Facebook notifications if a new review is posted on your page, and this is a great way to interact with your community as a business.
Yelp is a crowd sourced review site for businesses.
If you have enough positive reviews on Yelp, you may appear in lists like “top ten retail stores in your neighbourhood”.
This can really be a boost for sales and the visibility of your business to customers.
Yelp tends to be more popular in the United States, but it’s still useful in Canada as well.
How To Get More Reviews
So how do you go about getting all those positive reviews?
The key is to engage with the customer when they are in your store and to remind them that you appreciate their feedback online.
Ask them how they discovered your store, and whether they would be willing to leave you a review.
If a customer shares positive feedback with you about your store or your employees, thank them and encourage them to post a review on their preferred platform.
Offer your customers an incentive to post a review, whether it’s a discount on their next visit or a product you can afford to give away.
And after you have done all that work to solicit reviews, don’t forget to read them!
Check your Google, Facebook, and Yelp pages frequently, as it is important to continue to interact with the customers promoting you.
How To Deal With Negative Reviews
But what about the customers who post negative reviews on your sites?
As you saw in the earlier example of the prom dress stores, no business will please everyone, all of the time, and a 5 star rating can even look suspicious.
Treat a negative review as an opportunity to engage with a customer who hasn’t yet been satisfied by their experience with your business.
Responding to reviews online, both positive and negative, makes it look like you care about your customer.
And you do care, of course.
Post a short reply to a negative review, encouraging the customer to reach out so that you can fix the issue.
This will also show other customers that you are listening.
Try not to take a negative review personally – we all have bad days and need to vent.
Rather, empathize with the customer and thank them for giving you the opportunity to make things right.
A customer who has had a bad experience will tell ten of their friends not to visit your business.
But a customer who has had a negative experience turned positive will often become a repeat customer who will be raving about you for years to come.
They may even write you a glowing review!
Contact Silverman Consulting & Retail Services Today
Silverman Consulting & Retail Services has 30 years of experience as a retail store sales consultant.
If you’re considering selling your retail store business in Canada, running a retail store closing sale, or a retirement sale, we can help, and we’ll work hard to get you those glowing reviews right up to your last day.
Contact Silverman Consulting & Retail Services today.
Silverman Consulting & Retail Services229 Yonge St suite 400,
Toronto, ON M5B 1N9, Canada
1 (888) 955-1069