Customer reviews are essential to growing your business. Reviews build trust and help customers discover you in searches. Besides that, people expect to read business reviews while researching potential purchases, especially when buying something as large as a vehicle.
If you’re not soliciting your customers for reviews after they’ve bought a vehicle from you, you’re missing out on future business opportunities.
Why Are Reviews Important?
Reviews are critical because they build trust. Humans are social creatures and we look to others for guidance on our decisions. In 2021, Statista found that more than 70 percent of online shoppers read between one and six customer reviews before a purchase.
And today, online reviews carry nearly as much weight with customers as personal recommendations from friends and family. In fact, 91% of 18-34 year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 93% of consumers say that online reviews influenced their decisions.
Plus, the younger the customer, the more they expect to be able to read reviews on their customer journey.
Even the occasional negative review online is acceptable and in fact, can be a good thing.
Having some negative reviews demonstrates authenticity and credibility. According to researchers at Northwestern University, if all your reviews are glowing, people may actually have less trust in them. So don’t sweat a slightly imperfect record.
Besides influencing others in their purchase journey, reviews help you climb up in Google local search rankings too. This allows you to be found when people are searching for cars in their area early on.
Mistake #1: Not asking for Reviews
So how do you get positive reviews from happy customers? Just deliver great service and they’ll simply roll in, right? Wrong.
You have to ask for reviews.
As many as 70% of customers will leave an online review if asked to do so. It’s a big mistake to not prompt your customers to leave you a review.
Mistake #2: Not Automating Your Review Requests
Besides not asking your customers to leave a review, failing to set your request process on autopilot is another big mistake.
It’s critical to ask your customers for a review shortly after they take ownership of their new vehicle. They have synthesized their emotional experience and it’s fresh in their minds. They’re ready to tell you, and others, what they think.
But manually asking for reviews is a pitfall. It’s time-consuming and can be difficult for the designated team members to remember to email a customer the day after they drive off the lot. Your sales team should be chasing the next lead, not following up on the last customer’s experience.
Automate the review prompt to be sure it gets done.
Using your CRM, you can automatically send an email to a customer shortly after their purchase, asking for their feedback by way of a review.
This serves a few purposes:
- It allows you to easily capture positive reviews from satisfied customers, which they can post directly on Google, Facebook, etc.
- It lets you get in front of negative feedback and address dissatisfied customer concerns as quickly as possible
- It gives you the feedback you need to keep improving your all-important customer experience.
Automate Easily with AutoSweet
AutoSweet automates the review process for customers, making reputation management turnkey. We email customers within 24 hours post-purchase, prompting them to generate a review.
This process helps dealerships promptly address dissatisfied customers’ concerns while helping to generate more positive customer reviews on the review websites that matter the most, sites like Facebook and Google.
AutoSweet can then aggregates these testimonials from the sites where they’re posted (Google, Yelp, cars.com, dealerrater.com, etc.), and can frame them right into a dealership’s website.
And best of all, dealers can use AutoSweet’s dashboard to:
- Instantly receive email alerts when a review is left
- Respond directly and quickly from a single dashboard
- Monitor analytics, traffic, driving direction clicks, phone call clicks, and more, in real-time
When harnessed correctly, reviews are a powerful way to drive trust in your brand, be found where customers are searching, and net future sales.
Ready to start automation review for your dealership? Schedule a FREE strategy session with one of our digital marketing consultants!
