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Online reputation management: how to automate reviews with Pluspoint

Research shows that an increase of one star in a company’s rating boosts revenue by up to 9%. Another number – 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase. The point is simple: reviews are the fuel for local business growth.

That’s why online reputation management is crucial for a local business. There are four usual challenges business owners and CMOs face in review management. Let’s explore each and find the way your business could solve them and be on the ball.

Shine bright like a diamond. How does reviews on Google Maps influence local business income?

If you open Google Maps, you will see a lot of places nearby: cafes, clinics, etc. If you are looking for some of these, the chance you will choose the visible businesses is higher. On big numbers it works this way: businesses that are shown on maps get more clients and revenue than “invisible” ones. The question is how to make your local business visible?

The Google Maps algorithm considers a lot of factors, but the main are three:

1. Search history and personal recommendations for a user.
2. How complete and relevant is your company’s Google Business Profile.
3. The number, recency, and rating of reviews your business has.

For sure, you can’t influence the first point, but the second and third are completely under your control. Completing your Google Profile might be a topic for another article, now let’s concentrate on reviews.

The average number of reviews companies have on Google Maps is 82. If your business has more it will earn 54% more income. It happens due to the increased number of customers from Google Maps and better conversion from other channels – people trust a business more if they see a lot of reviews. Even more interesting fact is if your local business has 200+ reviews, you will get twice as much revenue, as the average one. Now you have a basic benchmark that will help you to understand how many reviews your business should have to become at least basically discoverable.

How can you increase the number of reviews for your business? The ahead of the curve approach is to automate review generation. Requesting for review manually requires time, managers could be too shy to ask or just forget about it – there are a lot of reasons why just a manual approach isn’t working. Pluspoint allows automating the process with QR Codes, emails, links, and SMS. Also, you could integrate Pluspoint with your CRM or anything else via Zapier, which has 4000+ integrations. It’ll make your experience completely seamless.

The process of sending invites with the last two is very simple. Just take a look at the interface – it’s very intuitive:

1.https://www.illumine8.com/blog/profitable-negative-reviews-womply-survey-proves-surprising-correlation

Pluspoint leverages three channels to get reviews: QR codes, emails, and SMS. Why is it so important to be omnichannel in review generation?

It’s believed that to make a purchasing decision a person should see an ad seven times. Of course, it’s not the same as leaving a review because your business has already established a connection with a customer. But getting reviews is still a tough row to hoe – fewer than 25% of clients say they are likely to provide a review. The percentage of clients who actually do is estimated to be lower – around 15-20%. If you ever had asked for a review in person, you know how hard it could be sometimes. And what is the main reason why people don’t leave reviews? Mostly, They just forget!

The next steps for advanced Online Review Management

Reviews help businesses to convert more customers at each stage of the sales funnel. For a local business, it means money, and the ROI for qualitative review management is quite high. Begin with automating review generation and managing all of your reviews from one place. Start using Pluspoint now – the most vital features are free.

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