Online reviews. You can live or die by them, particularly if your product is sold solely through the Internet. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the significance of these online reviews will continue to rise as consumers turn to the web to shop, in hopes of avoiding the ridiculously high gas prices.
Personally, when I go online shopping, I won’t even give a product the time of day if it has less than 3 stars. And you know you do the same.
That being said, here are some tips you can begin implementing right away to boost your online review presence:
1) Keep up: The reviewers spent the time writing the entry, so make sure you spend the time reading it. I’ve said it over and over again, but the worst thing you can do is ignore your customers’ opinions – particularly those of the people most passionate enough to write about you (either positively or negatively). So be sure to constantly stay on top of reviews by Google Alerting yourself and constantly doing random searches.
2) Get them talking: If you can’t find any reviews of your products online, then you’re doing something wrong (meaning that no one cares enough about you, or no one knows where to review you). To solve this, provide your customers with direct links to sites where they can review you, and ask them to give an honest critique.
“OMG! But what if they write something bad about me?!” Well there’s a certain level of risk you must be willing to accept by putting the power in the hands of your customers. And that’s what word of mouth is all about: you’ve got to be confident enough about your products before you can expect anyone to talk positively about you.
And that leads me to my third and final point….
3) Give them what they want: For the most part, negative reviews are rarely isolated incidents. Many times, they represent serious issues with products or customer service… serious issues that should neither be ignored nor passed over.
Respond to your critics by fixing the problems. It sounds so simple, but you’d be surprised at how regularly this just doesn’t happen.
The ease at which word can spread across the Internet makes ignoring consumer complaints dumber than a box of coal (I learned that term on a Russian-American slang translation site…don’t ask)!
To be clear, I’m not saying that you have to constantly bend over backwards every time someone makes a picky complaint about you, but you’ve got to be open to your customers’ serious, honest criticism, and respond quickly.
A company that takes the time to read and respond to their online reviewers will produce products that collect more stars than Super Mario (name drop).
That’s all for now. Did you try Pownce yet?
