Email and Text Lead the Way.

Hootvox is an eCommerce based solution adapted for Healthcare.

Lots of great and lengthy articles have been written about the benefits of authentic customer reviews in the eCommerce World, here are some of the highlights in bite sized chunks for your enjoyment.

There can be no sales and no business without trust. 
The larger the ticket price and more considered the purchase the greater the need for trust between a vendor and their customers. Only 17% of people will buy a new product or service before they have read reviews that they trust. 

Trust drives action.
Once customers are on a website, trusted reviews give them the confidence they need to pick up the phone, request more information or make their purchase. 

Bad reviews are good for business.
65% of customers make a purchase on a website when they trust the reviews they read there. Only reviews from genuine verified customers give consumers the trust they need to make their purchase. When reviews are unfiltered and all reviews are from genuine verified customers, trust between a shopper and a business increases. Bad reviews evidence authenticity and earn trust.

Trust is everything
Fake, filtered and gamed reviews and testimonials are not trusted and do not contribute to a significant increase in the number of sales. When customers only see positive customer reviews and no negative feedback they suspect foul play and rightly treat the business with suspicion. 

No business is perfect! 
Even the very best of products and services will get their fair share of critical feedback, for example the best restaurant may be criticised for having ‘the wrong wines on their wine list’. The best cars in the world may be criticised for the tiniest of issues. Meanwhile other people will heap praise on a gastro pub and the average family hatchback.

Wherever a business sits, it will have it’s fans and it’s critics. Reviews are not usually taken out of context, so whether the review is full of praise or scorn, the person reading it will give the review the amount of weight and attention they feel it deserves.

Ratings and reviews are good for SEO.
A quality verified review platform will survey all the customers of a business and can expect on average between 10 and 20% of their customers to provide reviews. That creates a lot of user generated content with very little effort.

Each review is fresh original content for Google to index. Google likes websites that provide their users with fresh content, it’s a reliable sign that the business is still active. The more often a website keeps making changes to their content the more often Google will keep coming back to index that content.

Every customers review is unique content which is often filled with relevant keywords and long tail phrases which are all great for organic search.

Reviews save you money on your PPC campaigns.
Reviews help Google to understand the relevance of your website to the search terms that you are bidding for in their paid search results. If your relevance is good you pay less to appear higher in the paid results. 

Review stars increase your websites click through rate.
If you ask your programmer to highlight your Hootvox star ratings using Google’s ‘data highlighter’  you will be able to display your star ratings in Google’s natural search results. It’s proven that when people see star ratings in the search results signifying customer feedback that the click through rate increases significantly.

What is the ROI of trust?
When a business earns the trust of it's customers, it makes fans and advocates of them. Customers don’t just recommend a business - they go out of their way to tell their friends how great a business is.

A complaint is a gift.
Only by listening to our customers can we hope to improve our business. A complaint is an opportunity not only to improve something for a single customer, but an opportunity to make a positive change that will affect all of our customers.

A customer complaint really could be your last chance to shine so make the most of it.
Lots of people won’t complain. In fact, many would rather tell all their friends about a bad experience and then boycott the offending business. 

If our unhappy customers have a chance to tell us what we’ve done wrong and we put things right for them, that is what they will be telling their friends about. That is how you build advocates of your business. 

Content marketing is the new spam.
Content marketing is the new big thing. It’s the direction almost everyone in the SEO world is taking in a near futile attempt to have enough people ‘like’ and refer to their article so they are seen as an authority on a chosen subject. This means that competition to become the authority has sky rocketed and while some people go for quality, others concentrate on quantity. Soon you won’t see the wood for the trees as content becomes the new spam.

Conversation is the new content.
Feedback left by customers and embedded into our members websites is fresh, plentiful and keyword rich. This is content marketing that’s loved by all the search engines and trusted by all of your potential customers. Genuine customer feedback is the content that will be read again and again.

Social signals.
Social signals are an enormously powerful ranking factor and genuine feedback from verified customers is amongst the most trusted content that is generated online. When real people are saying something about a business, Google listens. To capitalise on this we encourage people to share the feedback they leave on their social media platforms of choice. We also encourage our members to share it with their social media followers fans.

Customer feedback is content marketing that writes itself
No more staring glassy eyed at a blank page willing inspiration from your fingertips! Customers will be writing content for you that magically appears onto your website.

People who read reviews and found them useful as part of their decision making process are much more likely to leave their own review when prompted to do so. More people are reading reviews therefore more people will be writing reviews too. 

Online content that’s great offline too.
We generate a live stars and ratings score for all of our members businesses that they can print off from our website any time they like to display in their bricks and mortar business. It’s dated so the public know it’s current, but of course no longer ‘live’.