In today’s customer-driven market, advertising your products and services is no longer enough to attract new customers and retain them. Small businesses must focus on sharing relevant content that influences the customers’ purchasing decisions. Sharing customer reviews is one of the excellent ways to inform prospective customers about the benefits of using your products or services. 

According to Digital.com, 88% of online shoppers read at least 3 reviews before purchasing a product. Hence, leveraging the reviews shared by the customers about your products or services is an ideal medium to drive traffic and boost sales. 

In this article, we will learn 5 ways how small businesses can utilize customer reviews to skyrocket their sales.

#1 – Invest in the Right Tools 

The customers share feedback on various channels in different formats, such as text, video, survey responses, and more. This results in large volumes of customer reviews across a multitude of platforms where they start gaining a lot of subscribers . Technology adoption helps businesses keep a track of these reviews and manage them. Intuitive digital tools are hence, essential for building a fool-proof marketing strategy and delivering a good experience to the customers.

Customer feedback tools help small businesses to collect, capture, measure, and analyze the feedback and make data-driven decisions based on the same. It also ensures great customer satisfaction as small businesses can address their queries faster.

Here is a list of tools every small business should consider investing in. 

• Survey maker tool – This tool helps in creating and designing engaging surveys to capture customers’ feedback. All you need to do is add the questions, finalize a design, and share it with the customers. The tool also offers features to review and analyze the survey results in the form of graphs and charts.
• Customer relationship management software – This is a centralized tool to manage all the customer interactions and build better relationships with them. It helps in identifying the customer’s unique requirements to provide them personalized services and track the sales effectively. 
• Email marketing tool – This tool helps small businesses to plan, manage, and monitor email marketing campaigns right from email creation until their delivery. Email automation is one of the excellent features this tool offers which helps businesses fine-tune their email strategy.
• Social listening tool – This tool monitors and analyzes the brand mentions and online conversations thereby giving businesses insights into what the customers think about their brands. 
• Chatbot builder – This platform helps businesses build smart chatbots to share news, product updates, surveys, real-time notifications, and more for providing immediate customer support. Depending on the chatbot pricing model, these chatbots can be customized to suit the business requirements and budget.   

For example, Paysafe, an end-to-end payment solutions provider, leverages a customer survey tool to create satisfaction surveys for merchants. With the help of this tool, the Paysafe team could design visually attractive surveys and share the same with the merchants via built-in email without any hassles.

#2 – Share Social Proof on Social Media Networks

Sharing customer reviews on social media is an excellent medium for increasing conversions. Because of its extensive user base and reach, social media is becoming the preferred medium for marketers to reach their target audience.

Convert the simple textual reviews into appealing visuals and share them across your company’s social media pages. Sharing customer feedback on social media builds a sense of trust in the minds of potential customers. These posts serve as the best form of social proof, resulting in a large number of prospects making purchases. 

Check out how Buffer shares customer reviews on its Instagram page. The review here is a tweet shared by one of its customers on Twitter. 

Similarly, Sirona Hygiene, a manufacturer of intimate care products for women, has created a highlight named Customers on its Instagram page. The brand shares the customer reviews over the Instagram stories and adds them to this particular highlight.

Here are some tips to help you make the most out of reviews on social media.

• Acknowledge the customers’ reviews and thank them for taking out time and sharing the feedback. 
• Repost the image posts or video reels that talk about your products or services on the social media pages. Tag or mention the customers while reposting after taking their permission.
• Respond to all comments you receive on your posts. In case of any negative feedback, address it in a calm and respectful manner and resolve the issues as soon as possible.
• Leverage all the features provided by various social media platforms, such as carousel posts, stories, live, highlights, and more to ensure the reviews reach a larger audience. 

#3 – Include Reviews and Testimonials on the Company’s Website

Just like social media, the company website is frequented by customers and prospects alike. It serves as a powerhouse of the entire business information and contributes to building brand credibility. 

Leveraging the company website to promote customer reviews and testimonials is another proven technique for influencing prospective customers and increasing sales. Reviews can be shared on the website in various formats, such as quotes, videos (to be discussed at length in the later sections), case studies, customer interviews, and other resources like ebooks, swipe files, emails and newsletters, and more.

Let us understand where to place these reviews on the website for increased conversions. 

Homepage

As the website homepage usually receives the most visits, placing a testimonial on the homepage will certainly catch the audience’s attention. Positive feedback might also motivate them to explore the website further.

Check out the screenshot below to understand how BreezyHR, a recruitment software has displayed customer testimonials on its website homepage.

Product or Services Landing pages

A prospect who is interested in your products or services will surely check out its pages to learn more about them. Placing a review on such pages will provide the customers with that extra nudge for making the purchase.  

EngageBay, an all-in-one marketing software, has included the client reviews on their comparison pages, thereby helping customers to understand how the EngageBay tool is better than the others. Further, the client review on the page strengthens their claims.

Website popups

These popups are website overlays that are displayed to the visitors when they try to navigate away from the website. Showcasing reviews that describe how the product or service benefitted the customers might aid in changing their minds.

Pressed, a leading cold-pressed juice brand, added short customer reviews on the website popups on their product pages. This review acted as the social proof for that product while influencing the purchaser’s thoughts.

Call to actions (CTAs)

The CTA sections encourages the audience to take the desired action. Complementing these sections with positive customer reviews or ratings will motivate the audience to take faster actions and ultimately lead to increased sales.

OptinMonster, a lead generation software, has placed an engaging CTA for capturing new reviews directly on the testimonials page under the customer review section. 

Dedicated page for reviews and case studies

Having a dedicated page for reviews is a good practice especially if you have a fair number of reviews. You can further enrich this page by adding customer success stories and video testimonials. This not only helps in influencing new customers but also in making the existing customers feel valued.

Freshsales, a customer relationship management platform, has a dedicated page for customer success stories on its website. This page focuses on telling the visitors how the product has simplified the lives of many sales teams and accelerated their growth. 

#4 – Leverage Video Reviews 

Did you know 39% of customers find testimonial videos effective because they showcase how a product or service can impact their lives? Video reviews allow prospective customers to see and observe how the existing customers have leveraged your product or services to their advantage. It fosters an emotional connection with the viewers and has the power to compel them to take an action.

Let us understand how small businesses can leverage video testimonials to strengthen their brand identity and increase sales.

• Repurpose video reviews on various social media channels, industry-specific forums and communities, video streaming websites, and more.
• Add videos to the website landing pages, emails and newsletters, blog posts, case studies, and other company resources.
• Promote video reviews via paid advertisements if you have the required budget. Some minor tweaks can transform the video review into an engaging video ad.
• Host webinars to showcase the best video reviews to the participants. Further, you can invite your customers to be a part of your webinar to share their experiences with your brand.
• Include customer reviews in the podcasts by converting them into audio.

So, what contributes to a good video review?

A great video review is authentic and short. It feels like the existing customers are having a conversation with the prospective ones. The customers talk about their experience using your product and their likes or dislikes. A good video review tries to capture genuine customer reactions and is usually non-promotional.

Check out this video testimonial shared by HubSpot on their YouTube channel. Sola Salon Studios, the fastest-growing salon franchise in the US, uses HubSpot to support its sales and marketing needs. In this video, the Sola Salon team talks about the bottlenecks they faced and how HubSpot helped them overcome those challenges.

#5 – Get Active on Review Websites

Third-party review sites, such as FinancesOnline, Google Reviews, Capterra, G2Crowd, Yelp, and more are frequented by potential customers for reviews and recommendations. The reviews on such websites are considered to be authentic, honest, and credible in the eyes of the consumers. Hence, leveraging these websites to collect customer reviews should be part of every small business marketing strategy. 

Here is a quick guide to help you get started with third-party reviews.

• Identify the review websites that are the best for your small business. Understand how much traffic the review site receives in a month and research if your competitors have a page on the same. For example, a SaaS product company must focus on third-party review sites like FinancesOnline, Capterra, G2Crowd, GetApp, and others.
• Understand the website’s guidelines and review policies before planning your next steps. 
• Connect with customers over a cold email or a phone call and request them to leave a review. 
• Offer incentives to encourage the customers to leave a review of your products or services. You can share promotional coupons, discount offers, free trials, and more with the customers in exchange for a genuine review. Further, you can give away monetary rewards to customers leaving a picture or video review.
• Acknowledge every review you receive on this website, regardless of whether it is a positive or negative one. 
• Once you have a considerable number of reviews, highlight the star rating on your company website.

Summing Up

Customer reviews play a crucial role in helping small businesses connect with their audience across multiple channels and convince them to make a purchasing decision. To achieve that, having a customer review strategy for collecting and promoting these reviews is essential. Follow the tactics mentioned in this article to leverage customer reviews for boosting your small business sales.