Response to customer reviews: a powerful marketing tool!

In our last post we talked about how to answer negative online reviews – it’s a difficult and rather emotional topic and that’s why we wanted to talk about it at the beginning. But have you ever thought about why bother to respond to the reviews at all? Some reasons are obvious, some maybe not so much – but let’s start at the beginning.

1. Taking your customers seriously

How would you deal with a live-feedback (positive or negative) from  your customer right after she/he bought your service? Would you just ignore her/him and walk away or would you instead listen carefully and learn?
Sounds obvious right, but to be clear, people have always talked about your business – ideally with direct feedback or possibly behind your back – it’s happening anyway. If it happens online, you are lucky, because you can deal with it calmly and show appreciation to somebody who took time to write about/to you. It’s just natural and respectful to respond to your customers, to take them serious and use some tricks to make more than just writing a response out of it…

“Your responses are a powerful marketing tool and best thing about it, it’s for free!”

2. Win new customers & learn from current ones

Online reviews and responses are a versatile marketing tool – use it! We’ve already learned that the majority of new customers inform themselves online. What do you think they see, if on the relevant platforms, that all reviews are responded to? Yes, they know that the business truly cares about its customers – the happy and maybe not so happy ones equally. This makes your business more authentic and at the same time, you collect new feedback about your business and can maybe make good things even better or correct little flaws.

3. Advertise

As mentioned, reviews and responses are a marketing tool. You don’t only show potential customers how they are going to be treated at your place, but you can also advertise the highlights of your business.
If you have, for instance, a new offer for lunch or a weekend special, why not let the person you’re responding to know about it? Of course, chances are high this particular person isn’t coming to this event, but your response is read by many thousands of others and now, they know about your new offer – it’s that simple.

4. Optimize your results on search engines

All your reviews and responses are a part of your business’ online reputation. This means, how people “see” you online. But it’s not just people who are looking for your business online, the bots from search engines do the same. So if you write in your responses the keywords which are relevant for your business, it’s helps to create a better result, if people are looking for your type of business. Simple, but powerful!
Of course the whole topic SEO is rather complex and therefore we are going to cover it a bit deeper in on of our next posts.

You see how powerful writing a “simple” response can be and how much you can make out of it. In our next blog we are going to talk about which are the most relevant platforms you should take care of.

If you don’t have the time or the dedicated resources to tackle all your customer reviews and respond to them, stay updated with our newsletter. We are building a solution, that’ll make your live much easier….