You wouldn’t want to run your business without referrals, right?

In the online game, the equivalent of referrals is client reviews. You see them everywhere: Google-My-Business listings, on Yelp, on Facebook, and on Bing, to name a few.  To say they are important to your business’s profitability is an understatement, and now it’s been quantified in a survey conducted by Womply.

The takeaway is that there is a strong correlation between online reviews and revenue. Here are a couple of key statistics:

• The more the better: Businesses with a greater than average number of reviews than other sites earn 54% more revenue. Businesses average 82.5 reviews, so if you have less than that, you need to work on getting more posted. Businesses with 200 or more reviews earn twice as much as other businesses.
• You don’t have to be perfect: Businesses with ratings averaging 3.5 – 4.5 stars earn more than businesses averaging 5 stars.
• Reply to your reviews: People spend up to 49% more money on businesses that reply to their reviews.

How do you get clients to leave a review for you?  Here are some tips:

• Ask!
• Set up a web page for testimonials you’ve received over the year and include links to all of the places online where you’d like clients to leave reviews. (At Accelerator Websites, we do this with every client we have. Check out an example here: https://www.stellaraccountingsolutions.com/testimonials/)
• Add a document in their deliverables that shows them how to leave an online review for you.

Further resources:

You can see the study results here: https://www.womply.com/impact-of-online-reviews-on-small-business-revenue/

Blog posts on client reviews:

The importance of reviews: https://acceleratorwebsites.com/importance-reviews-2/

What to do when you get a bad review: https://acceleratorwebsites.com/what-to-do-when-you-get-a-bad-review-online/