The Power of Reviews
In a crowded digital space it’s oftentimes hard to stand out as being the best or unique. Scrolling through almost endless search results looking for a florist in your location customers have to make quick decisions as to whether they choose to click on you.
Reviews can definitely help get more click through rates for your florist website and increase your sales conversion rate once they are on the site.
There are multitude of different type of reviews but how important are they and how do they work?
- Google Business Reviews
- Google Customer Reviews
- Site Generated Reviews
- Feefo Reviews
Google Business Reviews
Google Business reviews are the reviews people leave on your Google Business Listing. It’s a score out of five and the rating and reviews are visible when someone googles your business name.
The reviewer must be a registered Google Account holder to make a review, but this simply involves setting up an account and verifying the email address. Google does state that they make take down a review that they believe is fake or doesn’t follow their policies.
However a person doesn’t actually have to be a customer of your business to leave a review.
These reviews are quite important as they will display:
- When your business name is searched
- Google Maps Local Searches
- Google Maps Google Searches.
They are quite simple to do and they definitely should be a part of your overall review and SEO Strategy.
Setting up an Automated Email Asking for a Review on Google
They form part of the strategy to encourage people to click through to your website from Google.
Google Customer Reviews
A Google Shopping Review is displayed as a badge on your website and is relatively involved to get.
When a customer makes and order on your website a pop up screen appears and asks them if they would like to review the experience.
An email is then sent when the delivery date has passed to the customer asking them to rate the experience and then leave a review.
How does this work?
To add this to your website you need to have some code added to the template of the site to display the badge and have some code added to the Transaction Confirmation page.
You will need to have 150 reviews before the badge will display on your website and for smaller customers this can be a long time as not everyone will agree to create a review.
These reviews are excellent to improve the trust about your website and ultimately the sales conversion rate of the site.
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7124326?hl=en
For customers with a high rating Google may automatically add your star rating to your Google Adwords.
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2375474
Site Generated Reviews
Site Generated Reviews are wholly managed by your website. On site reviews can take many different forms.
From simple forms on a page to allow people to add their own review. To emails that are sent to customers requesting reviews.
Whilst sites like Amazon allow customer generated site reviews, for most other websites they are of little to no value as there is no third party validation of the reviews.
Feefo Reviews
Feefo is one of many companies that provides a validated third party review process. Feefo sends the customer an email requesting that they review the experience and product of the website.
The review is public and you can respond to the reviewer publicly. The public part of the response is important as you can resolve a bad experience with a customer and show potential customers that you are responsive to problems.
Feefo ratings are also shared with Google AND the added benefit is that you can use the ratings to embed in your site for structured data.
This can then be used to show star ratings for products and pages in Google search results and on the page.
Feefo reviews are useful for both encouraging people to click through to your website and for increasing the sales conversion rate.
Feefo however charges a monthly fee and will require a deeper level of on site integration to make the most of your reviews.
How does it work?
Feefo grabs a list of the customers who have purchased for a specific period (usually daily) automictically from your website. Then a few days later after the delivery date feefo sends the customer an email requesting a review.
To grab the data for your website there is some technical work that needs to be done.
Flower Store In a Box integrates with Feefo and there are links under Marketing in your dashboard to get started with Feefo.
Dealing with Reviews
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of review sites out there and you do need to regularly Google your business name to make sure no one has left a bad or damaging review.
If you do get a bad review there are various strategies that you can take. Obviously the best option is to try and resolve the issue and turn it around. However if you believe the review is fake you can contact the website and request that they take it down.
There are also new companies popping up that can assist you to have the reviews removed:
What should your review strategy be?
Your review strategy will depend on your budget and how many orders you get a month.
If you are a small florist with an online presence my advice would be to concentrate on the Google Business Reviews. These are by and far the easiest to get and you can automate the process of sending an email request to your customers in your Flower Store In a Box Website.
If you have a medium to large florist, I would recommend you use both Feefo and Google Customer Reviews as they are both extremely valuable.
However you still need to have a well thought out strategy for how you use the review data and embed it in your website.
For example with Feefo Data you can embed not just the star ratings but you also embed the actual reviews customers leave for products and the site as a whole.
Bottom line reviews should be a part of your overall marketing and SEO strategy to both encourage people to come to your site and get them to make a sale.
