Category Archives: reviews

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How Important Are Reviews to Conversion?

It’s no secret that most people today use their mobile devices to search for the products and services they want. Recommendations from their social media contacts are important, but even more influential are the reviews that accompany product descriptions on Amazon, Yelp!, eBay and other popular sites.

How important are reviews in the online decision making process? One recent poll found that a whopping 85% of people said they were influenced one way or another by an online review before making a purchase.

 

What Customers Are Seeing

The poll, which was conducted by the website Influence Central, also
found that 85% of women said that online reviews were “extremely important” or “very important” when it came time to make a buy or no-buy decision. In contrast, only 1% of people said online reviews were not important at all.

The poll also found that 90% of people believe online reviews are more important than information about the product coming from the seller.

Another 87% said they use reviews regularly when search for both online and brick and mortar businesses. Other findings of the poll included:

– 88% of people said they considered polls very important when buying products from a company they have never done business with before, and 67% said reviews were important when buying a brand they’ve bought before

– 97% of respondents said they can accurately spot a fake review, and 90% said they can tell most or all of the time if the reviewer is exaggerating, with another 86% saying they can detect bias in an online review.

– 89% of people said they don’t trust online reviews that are anonymous, but 77% said they have more trust in a review that includes the author’s name and photo.

 

What This Means for You

What this means is that if you aren’t paying attention to what online reviewers are saying about your products and services, you could be losing sales – especially if you are doing nothing to manage your reviews.

The poll’s statistics indicate that it’s usually not a good idea to try to pad your products with fake reviews you wrote yourself or to pay people to write positive reviews about your products or company. Organic reviews that express genuine opinions will carry the most meaning for your customers. So your goal should be to collect as many organic positive reviews from real life customers as possible.

 

How to Get Positive Reviews

The easiest way to get positive reviews from your satisfied customers is to ask for them. To encourage people to share their good opinions about your products or company, it’s a good idea to include an invitation with every interaction, both online and in person, such as, “If you enjoyed your experience, please share it with your friends and family on social media.”

You also can include plugins on your web pages that make it easy for page visitors to give you positive social media signals such as Facebook “Likes” and Google+ pluses. Or you can include a little box for people to write testimonials or their opinions about your company, the products you sell, or the brands you offer.

This actually is one of the best ways to manage reviews because you get to choose which ones you want to share. There’s nothing that says you are required to publish negative reviews, but they do offer you an opportunity to go back to that customer and try to win them back.

Today more than ever, people are paying attention to what other people are saying about your business online. If you aren’t, you may be missing out on one of your best marketing opportunities.

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Cool New Android Apps to Check Out on Google Play?

I don’t know about you, but I download a lot of apps – mostly free but some are paid. Periodically, I have to go through and clean out my iPad and other devices because I have so many apps it’s sometimes hard for me to navigate through them all. Plus, they slow down my mobile operating
system.

Anyway, the other day I was cleaning out those apps I never use anymore and I was left with a core group of relatively new apps that I find myself going back to time and time again.

Here then – in no particular order — is my list of the coolest new Android apps that I use all the time. Incidentally, all of them are currently available on Google Play:

Tribesports

This is the year that everybody is rolling out a fitness app. From FitBit to iPhone’s Moves, tech companies suddenly think we all want to know how many steps we take per day and whether or not we should eat that last maple cruller in the Dunkin’ Donuts box (Spoiler Alert: You shouldn’t!).

Tribesports is Android’s new fitness tracking app that comes complete with a GPS tracker. It’s pretty much the same as most of the other fitness apps available today, but it’s still pretty cool. It logs how far you’ve run, walked or cycled. It keeps track of the fitness classes or sporting events you participated in. And it even gives real-time stats and can chart your progress (or in my case, lack of it) in handy, neat looking graphs.

This app comes with thousands of workouts that other people within the Tribesports community can share online, including detailed instructions about how to do specific exercises, workout plans, diets, and so on.

If you’re looking for a good, reliable fitness app that gives you everything you need to keep your weight loss or fitness plan on track, you should definitely check out Tribesports.

QuizUp

If you are still into Words with Friends, you should know that that app is soooo 2013! Today, trivia is the cool thing to do. And QuizUp lets you match your wits against your friends in trivia smack-downs online from wherever you are. You can even face off in trivia battles against total strangers located all over the world.

This is a really hot app right now. In its first week of release, it was downloaded by more than a million users!

CALCU

You wouldn’t think that an app that served as a pocket calculator would be all that exciting. And, well, maybe it’s not. But it’s one that I use all the time.

Now, I get it, most smart phones come with a calculator built-in. But CALCU performs all the same functions, but also allows you to change to various themes and screen colors. It also lets you look at your calculator tape, or all the calculations that you’ve done historically, which can be pretty handy when you are balancing the checkbook or calculating how much you spent on gas last month (two things I actually just did using CALCU this morning!).

If you want a cool-looking calculator and a whole lot more, CALCU is the app for you. Too bad it doesn’t come with a plastic pocket protector!

Timehop

Did you ever wonder where your Facebook and Instagram friends were getting all those “Throwback Thursday” photos or resurrecting stuff they posted online from years ago? They’re probably using Timehop, an app that collects all of the stuff you posted using your smart phone on Twitter, Instagram and Twitter then replays them for you whenever you want to see them.

It’s like having a little time machine right on your smart phone.

So that’s it, my new favorite Android apps. See you next time I clean out my smart phone screen!