May 3, 2023
Are you taking full advantage of customer reviews to grow your business? If not, you're missing out on a key driver of trust, as well as a core asset to build your marketing engine.
Our webinar, Building a Review-Centric Marketing Engine, explored how reviews can impact areas like marketing, sales, customer success, and product development. You can now watch the webinar on demand.
Let’s recap three key takeaways from the webinar to help you unlock the full potential of reviews.
When evaluating software before making a purchase, 86% of buyers consider verified reviews to be important or very important in their decision. However, having reviews isn’t the only thing that matters - it's their freshness too. We found that 71% of software buyers focus only on reviews written in the past 6 months.
Simply put, fresh reviews can make a huge difference in convincing prospects to consider your product. We dug further into our data and found that having just one review from the last 12 months on our software comparison sites can lead to a 5.7x increase in product profile views compared to having no reviews at all.
It's not just profile views that benefit from fresh reviews. If you have an upgraded product listing on Gartner Digital Markets, click-through rates also increase. With one or more reviews from the last 12 months, you can expect to see a 33%+ increase in click-through rates compared to having none.
So don't overlook the importance of fresh reviews. By regularly gathering and sharing new reviews, you can give potential customers the confidence they need to take action.
If you're collecting reviews, it's important to understand – and take advantage of – the benefits each review platform offers. Here are the benefits you can achieve with reviews on Capterra:
Even just getting started with gathering reviews can make a huge impact. With just one review, you can see a significant boost that establishes trust with potential customers and can set you apart from competitors.
Reviews can be a growth tool for multiple functions across your business, including marketing, sales, customer success, and product development.
For example, marketing can add social proof to current web pages or create new content, which they can then pass to sales to close new deals. Likewise, customer success can analyze reviews to track customer needs and share this information with product teams to add to the product roadmap.
By gathering and analyzing reviews, you can unlock the full potential of your business and make customer-driven decisions that drive growth.
TeamUp is one such company that ran an outstanding review acquisition initiative. Not only did they gather 100 new user reviews by using our Review Collection Service, but they then used this customer feedback to inspire their product roadmap for the future. Read the full case study here.
Thank you for all of your excellent questions during the live showing of our webinar! We didn’t get time to answer them all, so here’s a deep dive into every question we received.
We work with many new startups to facilitate review collection and start building their brand reputation. One way to get started is by reaching out to trial users, who’ve demoed or tried the product. Not only will you get authentic feedback to improve your product, but you can start gathering momentum for your review collection program.
We recommend an email blast to reach out to a large number of people. Then, we recommend boosting your response rates by sending further follow-ups (a maximum of three). Try our review request email templates to get started.
One additional way to get customers to leave a review is by offering incentives, like gift cards, which can be done through our Review Collection Service.
Collecting reviews is a numbers game: the more users you reach out to, the better your response rate. It’s best practice to welcome reviews from different roles. This gives you a wider net to reach out to and multiple perspectives on how to use your product.
Yes. Previous research of ours showed that 68% of customers trust reviews more if there’s a mix of good and bad ones, and only 18% of users said negative reviews made the product seem less trustworthy. Also, receiving transparent reviews gives you an insight into your product’s strengths and weaknesses, which can inform your product roadmap.
Our research shown in our ultimate customer reviews guide shows that third-party comparison sites are key in the buying journey. Although software buyers use Google and vendor websites as part of their search, software comparison sites and user reviews were ranked higher in importance for buyers to learn, evaluate, and choose software that fits their needs.
Your user took time out of their day to leave you some feedback, so it’s crucial to respond to their review! Not only is it great for customer engagement, but it also shows current and future customers that the company is listening and actioning feedback. Take advantage of our review response templates to speed up your engagement with customers.
We publish research across a wide variety of categories throughout the year based on category popularity and the total number of reviews in a category. You can see which categories are listed in the research report publication calendar. If you have a listing with Gartner Digital Markets, check the badges tab within your portal to discover if you have earned any research badges for your relevant categories.
Yes! Leaving a review is time-consuming, so we want to thank the customer. That’s why we offer gift card incentives for customers who leave a review. 100% of the cost of these gift cards is covered by us. Learn more here.
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