How to gather and use customer reviews efficiently?

As customers, we have an opinion about every purchase we make. Sometimes we like what we buy and keep doing so. Sometimes we don’t for some reasons. In both cases, we share our feedback with everyone, from our sister to strangers on the bus. Either to prevent them from buying the same thing or to encourage them to. Yet, often we don’t naturally give reviews to the one to whom it matters the most : the brand. Why? Because it doesn’t ask us to.

In Marketing, customer reviews are a powerful form of social proof to build trust and influence decision. For brands, customer feedback is the best way to assess the quality of their products or services, improve them and make their customers happy and satisfied.

If you are an entrepreneur, customer feedback is the best way to keep your business growing. So how to gather reviews efficiently?

98% of shoppers say reviews are an essential resource when making purchase decisions.

First of all, what type of feedback do you need?🤔

Customers feedback are not the same. They can be insights about the level of satisfaction, issues about the use of the product/ service or specific inputs. They can be positive or negative. However, they all help to improve your brand.

Before moving further, identify the objectives you want to achieve with this data collection:

→ Do you want to promote your products/services ?

→ Do you want to improve them ?

→ Or make informed decisions about a future launch ?

Having the right answers will allow you to come up with the right questions for your customers and the right channels to distribute them.💪

Where to gather customer reviews online?  

There are different channels to gather your customers feedbacks. Depending on your digital assets, your business strategy and your audience, you can use the right levers to collect reviews.

• Your Website: your website is a channel you own as a brand. There are many ways to gather reviews with it. Through pop-ups, Chatbot, forms on specific pages like testimonials, product rating on product pages.
• Google my business: Google reviews are so powerful and trustworthy, because they are authentic, verified and can’t be deleted unless they violate Google’s policy. For Businesses with physical store like restaurants, coffee shops, hairdressers and more they can be so useful to attract and retain customers.
• Social media: Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin and TikTok are platforms you can use as a brand to gather your customer reviews. How ? Through specific content that either ask for feedback or entice to give a feedback. For example, making a story or a reel listing the products benefits and asking your audience in the caption or through questions/polls stickers on stories their candid feedback.
• Emailing: do you have a Newsletter ? Great! You can send a survey to your customers list asking for their reviews. Or you can create automated email to send each time someone purchase a product from your store.
• Review websites: There are website specialized in gathering customers reviews. They are trusted and used by million of people to search for performing products. For instance in B2C : Truspilot, Amazon reviews. To use them, you have to create your account and follow instructions.

How to entice people to give a review?

This is more trickier than you think. Sometimes, customers give review naturally. In some cases, they need a little extra help, especially if you want to gather a complete feedback regarding specific areas of your customer experience. Nevertheless, they are some levers to use such as :

• Incentives: offer a voucher on the next purchase if your customer leave a feedback on your website.
• Run a contest on social media: offer a prize or a discount to your customers, if they tell you what they like the most about your product or service. This is also a genuine way to grow your followers base if people tag their friends.
• Create an hashtag: If you run a campaign for a specific product/ service or offer, you can create and hashtag and entice your audience to use it whenever they want to share a content about it. It is also a great way to gather UGC organically.
• Create a referral program: what better than a referral program to entice your happy customers to recommend your product to people they love and get a reward for it ? One action for 2 great outcomes : more customers + positive reviews.

How to use customer reviews to make your business grow in Luxembourg?

→ Use your reviews, negatives and positives to improve your products/ services and make informed decisions about your business growth.

→ Use them as social proof by displaying the positive ones on your website’s homepage or on a dedicated page.

→ Create content about your reviews to highlight your product /service features and benefits.

→ Use customer reviews as paid ads, they feel more authentic, relatable and engaging.

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