If you‘re using our online review email generator, you’re hopefully getting lots of positive reviews from happy customers. But it doesn’t stop there. How do you make the most of these reviews and get them in front of as wide an audience as possible?

View them as the valuable marketing collateral they are

With 90% of consumers saying they read online reviews before visiting a business, it’s clear they can have a significant impact on sales. So once you’ve managed to get some reviews, it’s important to do all you can to promote them. Use quotes from customers across your website - on the home page and other relevant subpages. Also think about creating a special review page that you can direct people to through email campaigns. You could design a specific piece of content around reviews or case studies to send out to prospective customers as they progress through their ‘buyer’s journey’. Remember, it could be just the validation they’re looking for.

Use and repurpose them across as many different platforms as possible.   

Don’t be shy about using the same reviews across multiple social media platforms - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. You want to get your reviews in front of as many potential customers as you can. Put them as pinned tweets on social media so they’re the first thing people will always see. Consider using different media too - videos, blogs or email promotions. As well as your own customers’ feedback, investigate third party sites such as TrustPilot, VouchedFor and Unbiased. Plug-ins can bring these across automatically to your own site.

Optimise for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Reviews can help your business show up in search whenever people search for ‘financial adviser’, ‘solicitor’ or ‘mortgage adviser’, for example. One of the best ways to get reviews to appear in search results is to use what are known as ‘rich snippets’. These are bits of code that alert search engines to your review and allow you to mark up individual reviews or group content together. It’s worth researching this in more detail as Google does have some specific requirements.

Be careful with sorting

Don’t just sort your reviews by the most recent and leave it there. You want prospective customers to see your most glowing reviews near the top. Customers don’t just want to see star ratings either. They want to read more detailed content that tells them about the actual experience of doing business with you. So think carefully about which reviews will appear ‘above the fold’ (that’s before the point on the page where you start scrolling). Test a few options, such as ‘most helpful’, ‘representative sample’, most positive (for each star rating) or some combination of all of these.    

We hope you never have to deal with the scenario of a negative review, but it’s important to recognise that a negative review is no different to a customer walking into a branch and giving negative feedback face to face. Negative feedback may well be classed by your regulatory body as a complaint and therefore should be managed using the same response process. This will ensure you remain compliant with regulatory guidelines. If you receive a YBS related complaint please follow the normal process.

[Sources]

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/293368

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/the-importance-of-online-customer-reviews-infographic/

Important notes

Yorkshire Building Society has worked together with a growth marketing agency, Clients First, to supply this content. We hope it helps you grow your core business and you have found it of interest. Please ensure that if you apply any of these tips to your YBS agency that you comply with the specific marketing guidelines which can be found in the YBS ‘Working Together’ Agency Operations Manual.

YBS A008 20/03/19