According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust suggestions from friends and family more than advertising. Also, 88% of consumers trust online reviews from complete strangers as much as recommendations from people they know. Researching a business and its products is very easy to do, and so most people will take the time to vet a company before making a purchase. Simply put, positive reviews can drive sales. For example: If I\'m looking for a new desk, and I see one product that has 2 stars and another product that has 5, I\'m going to buy the one with 5 stars. I may even overlook a few things I don\'t like about the 5 star desk that I do like about the 2 star desk simply because it has better reviews. Reviews are that powerful. While getting positive reviews should be a goal of any business, getting negative feedback can also help businesses to understand better what is going on, and find more direct ways to make improvements; a bad review should be looked at as an opportunity to get a good review. Why is it difficult to get positive reviews?

1. Once a customer completes their transaction with your business and they\'re happy, they generally just want to go on their merry way.
2. Your customers are busy and don\'t have the time to go out of their way to say that you\'re product or service worked as expected.
3. Your customers don\'t know where to go to give you a review, and don\'t feel like searching.
4. Oftentimes, your customers just forget to give you a review.

On the other hand, if someone has a bad experience with your company, you may find that they will pull out all the stops to leave your business a long and detailed negative review. How do you get more reviews? The trick to getting more reviews is to make it easier for your customers to write them. The first thing you want to do is to make sure your business is listed on the review sites that you care about with accurate and up-to-date information. The next step is to ask your customers for a review, and then to remind them. The most efficient way to ask your customers for a review is through a platform that automatically emails or text messages your customers with a review request, and then reminds them later if they haven’t completed one. There are some very reputable services that will set up this automated workflow for you, along with a link to a landing page designed to collect and funnel your positive reviews to the review sites that you care about. You can even generate a QR code to put on print media that when scanned by a smart phone will send people to that same landing page. It doesn’t hurt to incentivize your customer a little bit. A positive review is very valuable to your business. You can offer people a gift card in exchange for a review. The amount of the gift card depends on how valuable these reviews are to your business. How do you stop negative reviews? When someone wants to write you a negative review, you want to divert them away from review sites, but how? In the last section we talked about automatically sending people to a review landing page via text or email. As it turns out, this landing page does more than just collect reviews and pipe them into review sites. This landing page first asks for a star review between one and five before giving your customer any other options. When a person leaves a four or five star review, then that person is given the option to share that review on whatever review sites you’ve connected to the platform. But if they leave a three star review or less, then  you would not give that customer the ability to share their review on review sites, but instead the landing page will ask the customer for more details about their experience, and notify the appropriate person in your company. From that point, you can contact the customer directly. You now have the opportunity to do right by that customer and turn what could have been a scathing review into a glowing one. What are some other important aspects of review acquisition? From the customer’s perspective, which some might argue is the most important, your review requests should be clear, easy to interact with and must be mobile-friendly. From the business’ perspective, there needs to be a system in place to  respond to reviews and take care of customers. To that end, businesses need to make sure the right people are clearly notified in a timely manner. A business\' response time as well as the response itself are both critically important. You want the ability to show off your positive reviews not only on the review sites themselves but also on your own web page and social media channels. There are so many places your customers can interact with your brand; leveraging your reviews in all these different places provides a great opportunity to improve the way people view your brand. A good platform will give you the ability to utilize widgets to help you put your reviews on sites where you have some control. You can even get something called schema markup so you can graphically show off your review score with stars directly in search results, which is a huge advantage. You want to be able to see all of your reviews, your progress and efforts to respond all in one easy to read dashboard. This will help you develop a clear picture of where you are, as well as where you’re headed. When you can correlate your improvement in online reviews with a bump in sales, you will realize how powerful a tool positive reviews can be. WebiMax’s Solution WebiMax\'s review acquisition solution actually provides most of these services along with a strong emphasis on both transparency and communicating with the businesses that partner with us. You can get a free demo and consultation. WebiMax will look at your current reviews across all of the most important review sites and give you a detailed report. They will also tell you how they can help you going forward. WebiMax will give you a price quote to have them increase your positive reviews. All WebiMax clients are on a per month basis, so it\'s a simple process to discontinue services. There\'s no obligation to utilize WebiMax\'s review acquisition platform, you can book your free demo to simply see where you stand, so there’s nothing to lose. Click here to book your free demo today!   About the author: The WebiMax team brings years of digital marketing experience providing proven results to help our clients succeed online. WebiMax prides itself on its customer first approach in communicating and educating our clients on the best practices for all aspects of digital marketing.