Start New Year Off With a Bang – Gain New Customers Using Online Reviews

Heading into the New Year, you must be looking forward to growing your business and acquiring new customers. But those new customers are not lining up at your door. So, what is your strategy for gaining new customers in 2017?

Like every business, yours too must be following a method that involves educating potential buyers through blogs and social media and generating traffic to your website. With time, those visitors become leads, some of these leads will become customers and a few of these customers will become your brand ambassadors and refer your brand to others. According to a report, buyers are 50 percent more likely to buy from a brand that publicly displays customer reviews. Though customer reviews are most commonly used on product pages, recently businesses have started to invent different ways to display them.

Here are the top six ways to display customer reviews that can help you gain new customers:

1. Display on your website: Depending on the platform you use, you can provide a plug-in or an add-on button that allows you to pull and display customer reviews from review sites like Yelp and Google Places. You can increase your chances of acquiring a customer by displaying reviews of your products on your business website.

2. Share on social media: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are where your customers are likely to post reviews about your products or brand. You can gather and leverage positive customer reviews by sharing them on your brand’s social media page. If you look at review sites such as Yelp and Google Places, you will find a share button that will allow you to instantly post a review. Sharing customer reviews on review sites will not only generate high-quality backlinks to your website, it will also show why customers prefer you.

3. Promote through emails and newsletters: Weaving customer feedback in your promotional emails may encourage potential buyers to make a purchase from your website. You’ll need to first populate your website with customer ratings and reviews, then link those reviews in emails and newsletters. You can send these promotional emails to either a group of customers or the entire mailing list.

4. Show on the product page: The product pages on your business website are the obvious places for displaying customer reviews. It’s considered all right even if there are a few negative reviews as these will make the positive reviews more credible.

5. Include in local listings: Customer reviews play a big role in local SEO as they impact the positioning of local search results. For instance, when Google displays business listings, positive reviews will help your business appear in the top three searches. In addition, reviews will help the potential buyer click through or visit your website.

6. Use in promotional material: If customer reviews can work online, why shouldn’t you use them in promotional material such as print ads, outdoor ads, TV commercials, PPC ads, etc.? Using buyer ratings can help your search results stand out and will definitely improve click-through rates.