Did you know? According to Harvard Business Review, in 2021 alone, online reviews were predicted to affect a whopping 3.8 TRILLION dollars in revenue worldwide!

It's no secret that consumers today heavily rely on reviews and testimonials to make informed decisions about the products and services they purchase. The credibility of your business is at stake if you neglect the importance of customer reviews and testimonials. So, let's delve deeper into why and how these reviews can positively impact your business, regardless of its size.

What is a customer review

Customer reviews provide a genuine reflection of their experience with your products or services and can be found on major review sites like Google Reviews, Trustpilot, Shopify or Capterra. These reviews are crucial during a buyer's journey, helping potential customers to understand how your product works and whether it's worth investing in.

While anyone can publish a review online, reviews posted on third-party sites by real users are perceived as reliable sources of information by consumers. According to BrightLocal, 49% of customers trust them as much as personal recommendations.

However, it's essential to note that reviews can contain negative experiences and even untrue claims about your business. Don't underestimate the power of customer reviews as they can make or break your business.

How do I ask for a customer review

1. Timing is important

You will get more responses and better quality if you can nail down correct timing.

Right after they purchased

After closing a deal or selling a product, ask why they chose to do business with you. These testimonials will be precise on what attracted them the most to do business with you.

After they experienced the value of your product

The exact timing is product specific, but asking for reviews right after people experienced a WOW moment with your product delivers high quality reviews.

2. Keep it simple for the customer

Remember, we are asking for a favour here and should be respectful of the customers time. To keep it efficiënt, try to guide the customers response to answer you aim for by guiding them with a question:

What brought you to our product in the first place?

How has my product improved your daily life?

Which challenges have you overcome by using our product?

What made you choos us over our competition?

For a full list of tips, check-out our guide on how to ask for reviews politely.

How do I manage my customer reviews

If you haven’t yet, start by creating accounts on the review platforms that are relevant for you. This way you’ll get notified when someone leaves a review.

Second, keep an eye out for new reviews. We recommend blocking some time each day to go over the reviews and respond to each one.

yes, including the positive ones! It’s important to be grateful and maintain a good relationship with people that are positive about your business. And don’t try to hide the negative ones, instead start by listening to the complaint and aim to find a solution with the customer.

Why is this important? Because people that are considering buying from you are reading these reviews and your responses. Everyone understands a 5* service 100% of the time is impossible, things will go wrong from time to time and they’ll pay attention to how you handle these situations. Think about the times you had a complaint and needed to fill in dozens of documents, speak to countless agents just to get a repair or refund. Now compare this to the businesses where you got in touch with the right person that was helpfull right away, and how the issue was resolved.

How do I show customer reviews on my website

Showing your hard earned customer reviews on your website can be either difficult, or very easy, dependent on how custom you want to go.

Most review platforms like Google Review provide the option to import their reviews on your website through the API. This implies you are technical and know how to connect an API on your website and how to integrate this in your website lay-out.

While this offers the most options for customization, you will need a developer to build this for you. And we all know how expensive developers can be. Luckily, there are alternatives that require no-code. Try searching for “review widget” or “review plugins” in the template store of your website builder. (Wordpress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, ..)

The difference between a review and a testimonial

Customer reviews are genuine reflections of the customer’s experience with your product. A testimonial goes 1 step further: Here the customer actively endorses your product and the review will take more prominent places on the vendors website or marketing collaterals.

Usually, these testimonials are video content and high quality. Imagine an on-site videoshoot, a script and professional video editing to create customer testimonials for your website.

All these factors will drive up costs. According to Wyzowl, 58% of marketeers pay 500$ or more for video marketing and more than 7% of marketers spend over 10.000$ on video marketing annualy.

If you are starting out and work with a limited budget, professional case study testimonials will just not be economical. Instead, we suggest looking for solutions that require a lot less time and budget. Like socialjuice for example, a tool that will streamline the process for collecting, managing and sharing your hard-earned reviews and testimonials.

Conclusion

Customer reviews and testimonials are crucial for businesses of all sizes, with online reviews predicted to affect trillions of dollars in revenue worldwide. Reviews provide a genuine reflection of customers' experiences and can make or break a business. Timing is important when asking for reviews, and it's essential to manage them by responding to both positive and negative feedback. Showing reviews on your website can be done through importing APIs or using no-code alternatives like review widgets. Testimonials go one step further than reviews by actively endorsing a product and can be costly to produce, but tools like SocialJuice can streamline the process for collecting, managing, and sharing reviews and testimonials.