Your 5 Star Review is Costing You Business
Are Your Stars Not So Lucky?
You may be losing up to 80% of your business due to your star review and online rating.
You may, or may not, realize the actual impact that your online ratings may have on your business. Did you know that unless you are reaching an average of 3.5 stars you could be losing up to 80% of your business, according to some of the latest findings from a research group call PowerReviews.
In fact, a rating of less than 4.5 stars could be losing you up to 20%! While these findings may vary per industry there are 2 constants:
1. A 4+ star threshold exists when considering optimized revenues
2. A corresponding approval for bad, or not-so-good, reviews actually improves business
We’re going to take a look at how online rating and star reviews can affect your business, products or services and what you can do to improve or optimize your online rating to help maximize your revenue and growth.
Negative Reviews Build Trust
After reading that higher ratings produce higher purchases, it may stand to reason that a perfect 5 star rating might be even better than the stated 4.5 stars. Wrong.
When considering negative reviews, nobody really wants to hear the bad things that might be happening within their company—right. Wrong again. Apparently, negative reviews can have a very positive reaction. In fact, Power Reviews has found that 82% of shoppers are actually searching for negative reviews.
How can this be? Why would a negative review build trust between a brand and a customer? Have you ever heard the phrase “it’s is too good to be true.” Seeing nothing but rave reviews makes people skeptical, and this cynicism will potentially prevent people from frequenting your business as much as all 1 star ratings.
So if you’ve ever thought about, or already practice, deleting, editing or requesting review rewrites you may want to reconsider.
Ratings Relate to Price
The more expensive the product the more important the higher reviews. Take this example from the Weight Loss Industry, notice the intersection slopes. We note that from roughly 4.5 stars the price of the product corresponds to the rating of stars. The lesser the price of the product the less the importance of the star rating. While I cited this singular industry example, PowerReviews assures that this slope correspondence example is similar across multiple industries.
How Many Reviews is Enough Reviews
When it comes to what’s the magic number, there’s no real data that I could find to answer that. What I can say about this, is reviews matter and the more you can scrape up the better off you’ll be. In my own personal experience, I’ve found that places with fewer reviews I have to take with a grain of salt; where places that have more reviews I can pretty well take as gospel. This means that if you’ve got 1000 reviews and your average stars are only 2, then there’s going to be some serious work that needs to be done to turn things around to show a more positive atmosphere.
Turning Around Your Star Ratings and Reviews For Success
Don’t be afraid of what “poor” reviews come in. This “negative” review can really be positive. But, it’s time to take control of your destiny and pay attention to what the customers are saying. Not too long ago I was watching a Restaurant Impossible knock off series. The consultants that came in paid attention to watch customers and critics were saying and worked to revamp the restaurant according to the reviews.
You can do this too. To turn it around, discover what needs to be fixed and implement the means to accomplish it. If you correct the problem, it very likely that the person may write a new review or revise the current review.
Formulate a strategy to review and improve your star status, if it’s poor, or too good. A good Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program can really optimize your ratings to find that sweet spot, whether that’s via SEO, Social Media, or working with your customer service team to develop improved scores. A good digital marketing consultant can guide you in developing a plan going forward, working across teams, and monitoring analytics as you go. If you need help in this, I’m available on a consultative or permanent basis. I might also suggest the services of PowerReview too. They are very well versed in this side of digital strategy.
By the way at the end of the episode the critics rewrote their reviews giving the restaurant far higher reviews. The end result was a much more profitable business, all due to reformulating their strategy and getting updated reviews. It can be done.
Bruce Bartel is a journalist, digital marketer and a SEO specialist who is currently associated with Pro-pr, a source of digital marketing trends, news and opinions.