Everything a Wireless Retailer Should Know About Store Reviews

The following blog was written by iQmetrix integrated partner, Tracpoint. 

Are you struggling to get good reviews? Don’t know how to deal with poor reviews? Can’t seem to increase your Facebook followers? We’re here to save the day. Working with thousands of wireless retail stores has given us some insight into how to increase reviews, how to respond to them, as well as tips on how to grow your following.

The Importance of Reviews and Their Impact on Your Business

What do reviews do for your company?

1. Creates a strong brand reputation

2. Effects your local SEO — the more reviews and engagement you have with your customers, the more likely you are to show up at the top of the local search. Consumers now flock to social media review sites, with more than 90% of consumers saying they will check reviews before any purchasing decision.

3. Gives you a good reputation which helps with your local staffing and recruiting to validate that your business is a great place to work!

4. And lets not forget…an increase in sales! The bottom line is that people shop and spend more with trusted retailers.

It’s All About the Social Platform

Which is the most popular? While there are various sites that customers can leave reviews on, the top three are Google, Yelp, and Facebook — in that order. Google surpasses all sites by a long shot, with 93% of customer’s reviews being posted here. Yelp and Facebook have a mere 4% and 3% of these reviews. So if there is one takeaway, drive your customers to leave reviews on your Google pages, as this is where other potential customers will most likely look first.

So, How Many Reviews Should You Have?

On average our best performing wireless retailers have an average of 150 reviews per location. The more reviews you have, typically the higher score, so the more the better! Here are some numbers captured from working with thousands of locations:

• The average Wireless Retailer has less than 40 Google reviews per location and an average 4.0 star rating.

• Locations with less than 40 reviews most often have review scores in the 3​’s.

• While top performing locations have a minimum of 150 reviews per location with an average 4.6 rating.

• And our very best performing retailer has a whopping 400 reviews per store average with a total average review score of 4.8! You can imagine what the impact is when a customer views one of their pages and sees that kind of activity. So the correlation here is if you can focus on driving more reviews, your overall brand reputation and review score will go up significantly along with your local SEO. Here are two ways to help drive activity:

1. Be more interactive and engage your sales staff to encourage a happy customer to leave a review. Also, make sure you’re responding to all your reviews. Handle the negative ones, and thank the people who took the time to leave you a great review! This will give consumers more of an incentive to interact with your company as they see you are reciprocating.

2. Use our Reviews Generator Platform — we offer a service that helps increase your positive reviews while decreasing the negative ones. Our customers using this service have seen an average increase of positive reviews by over 300%, while reducing negative reviews by 70%!

How Do You Respond to Reviews?

Engaging with and addressing your customer’s problems is essential! And not only their problems, but their praise as well. If your customer took the time to give you positive feedback, you want to be sure to thank them. Here are some tips on how to respond to reviews:

1. First, be sure to respond to ALL reviews!

2. Be sincere and personalize your response — you want to convey that you really care about the customer’s complaint and want to help in any way you can.

3. Offer solutions — ask if they would like to be contacted to discuss the problem further. This will show them that you are serious about righting the situation.

4. Keep it short and sweet — you don’t want to overwhelm them with a long response. Get to the point as quickly and pleasantly as possible.

And What About Followers on Facebook?

Our largest wireless retailers have an average of 316 Facebook followers per location. Again, this will depend on how big your company is, so there is no real magic number. Obviously, you want to get as many followers as possible and engage with those customers as well. How do you do this? Here’s a few tips:

1. Be visual-focused — having captivating images on your pages will likely attract more attention and engagement.

2. Promote your local store pages on your website, other social sites, your email marketing, and with Boosted posts around the buying radius of your stores.

3. Post often — no one wants to follow a page that barely posts content. Posting often will keep you on their radar and keep them interested. However, make sure you aren’t posting on the same platform more than once a day. Don’t be overkill! Find a balance.

4. Use contests — this is a great way for engagement! Be creative and keep it fun so people will be interested in participating.

5. Create local Content — engage your local staff to promote local events, grand openings, new employees, smart phone training classes and more!

6. Encourage every customer that visits your location to check in and follow your page. This is by far the best way to drive massive page growth, with many retailers adding 100-200 followers per month per store.

7. Just like reviews, be sure to respond to all your facebook customer messages, comments, and questions!

Congrats! Now you’re a reviews pro. If you take everything you’ve learned here and apply it to your strategy, you’ll likely see results — and fast. So, get to it!