Building client, customer and consumer trust through reviews
It doesn’t matter where you are in your brand’s eCommerce journey, the gathering and surfacing of customer reviews needs to be at the top of your to-do list.
How you do it, though, is a bigger question.
The customer reviews dilemma
The biggest challenge is marrying the two things that will make customer reviews work for you. Do you make them independent, which is what your customers will prefer, or do you include them in your site architecture, giving you full control over which reviews are shown?
Using a dedicated review service can also come with its own set of issues, the largest of which is going to be cost. More well-known platforms offer enhanced services that can be helpful in building your calalogue of reviews, but the price can be significant, and the more reliant you become on these services, the harder it will be to leave if you need to cut costs.
Getting started with client reviews
If you’re not currently gathering reviews, this probably all seems like a problem for a far-off day. So how do you start without breaking the bank? Let’s look at a couple of options that can get you started for free.
A word of warning
Moving between review platforms is very difficult once you’ve started gathering reviews. The only harm in using several free platforms at once is that unless you’re a very busy company, you’ll struggle to create a decently sized review base, but that does mean it’s better to aim your efforts in one direction if you can.
Google Reviews
Somehow, the most universally available reviews are often overlooked. If you’ve set up your business in Google Business (the easiest way to tell is if it appears on Google Maps), you’ll be able to start gathering reviews which will appear on your business listing every time someone searches for you on Google (which is probably almost every time someone searches for your business, full stop).
Try not to end up like this:
The benefits
Huge brand credibility
Completely impartial
Depending on your website, can probably be surfaced easily
The drawbacks
It can be very difficult to get fake reviews removed (although this is improving)
Very manual process to gather reviews
Google account required to leave a review, and not everyone has one (depending on your demographics)
How to implement Google reviews
Firstly, get your business set up on Google Business. You can do that here.
Once that’s done, if you search for your business on Google while logged into your account, you’ll see this menu:
Click on the “Ask for reviews” button and it will give you a link you can send out to customers. That’s where the manual part comes in - other platforms can help you build and send the email, or even automate the process altogether. For a freebie, though, it’s tough to complain.
If you have a CRM system in place, you can use that to send the emails, but if you’re a smaller business, you can draft and send the emails as you would with any other. Provided people are signed in to Google, the link will pop open the review window, so they just need to give you a star rating, and hopefully some nice text to say how happy they are.
Judge Me
Every once in a while, there’s an exception to the rule which says “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is”, and Judge Me is happy to fill that niche when it comes to review platforms. It offers a free version that’s somehow got a decent selection of features, it integrates with sites including Shopify and Wordpress, and if you need to scale up the cost is a very reasonable $15 a month, which is around £12 at today’s exchange rate.
The free features include automatic review reminders, which crosses off the issues with using Google Reviews. Upgrading add further features and support for a ton of integrations.
If you’re a new reviews collector, this is pretty hard to beat. Those who already have some reviews they wish to port over are going to find it’s hard to do so, but that is unfortunately a fairly universal issue.
The most important thing to consider here is that Judge Me have lots of positive reviews from their own customers, which both proves their value and the point of this article.
Implementing your own reviews
OK, so we’ve looked at a couple of third party review options. What if you really want to have full control?
This is where it gets a bit awkward. If your website/theme supports user accounts, it’s likely that there’s an option to feature at least product reviews on your pages, or you could ask a developer to build the feature for you if you don’t have it. However, you’ll miss out on those extra features built into the dedicated platforms.
You’ll also have to decide the point at which to intervene, which could look bad if you get it wrong. Research shows that consumers look for a score around 4.5 out of 5, not trusting a score that’s entirely made up of 5’s. It also says that a good response to a bad review can mitigate the effects, while showing that brands are engaging with their customers in a positive way. That’s got to be more of an opportunity than a detriment.
If you’ve got a Shopify site and you’re not currently building a review base, get in touch, and we can help set that up. Why miss out on potential sales when building trust signals can done for free?
