Review platforms can be great marketing tools for SAAS. They provide you with exposure and give you the chance to build trust with prospects to make improvements based on your customer feedback.
To boost your conversion rate, you’ll want to develop a strategy for growing your reviews. Start by choosing the review websites you want to focus on. Then, determine how you’ll elicit positive reviews from your happiest customers and decide how to handle negative reviews.
Benefits Of Reviews
More Visible in Online Search
For example, let’s say that you are the owner of Buildium a Property Management SAAS company. They are ranking for their main term “property management software” but SAAS review sites like G2, Software Advice, and Capterra also pop up in the search results. Getting reviewed on other platforms gives Buildium additional opportunities to show up in the search results for these high-value keywords. After all, people searching “property management software” are the perfect target market, and are quite possibly ready to make a purchase.
As you can tell from the graphic above, it’s crucial to have a strong profile on the review platforms. Additionally, software review sites have their own marketing strategies, focused on attracting and educating your target audience If used correctly, they’ll link directly to your site and operate as a free marketing team working for you 24/7.
Builds Trust With Potential Customers
For new small businesses, reviews are key to establishing rapport. Studies show 91% of people read reviews online regularly. 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
Displaying reviews on your website demonstrates your legitimacy as a company and enhances the credibility of the review itself. This increases the likelihood that readers will trust the content.
Social Proof Drives Purchases
Social proof is a key part of online marketing due to the way our brains are hardwired. When we’re unsure of something, we look to see what others have done or are doing. Most of the time, when we see what the majority has done we quickly follow suit.
2017 data from Spiegel Research Center shows nearly 95% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase. Displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 270%. The higher the product’s price, the more reviews increase conversion rate. By displaying just five reviews it increases purchase likelihood by nearly 400%.
92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading trusted reviews. Companies that claim their free listings on four or more review sites, earn 36% more revenue on average, compared to those who do not.
Reviews capitalize on the social proof theory by showing what others have done. Check out a few Pulse reviews!
Customer Feedback Can Help Improve Your Messaging
Listening to what customers have to say can help you continue to improve your product.. Responding to reviews, both positive and negative, tells your customers you are listening. If you consistently see the same things mentioned in reviews, you know what areas to focus your attention on. If there seems to be a consistent misunderstanding about one of your features, then you know it’s time to adjust your messaging for clarity.
If you find your customers are mentioning the lack of a certain feature in their reviews, you can use this feedback to know what improvements to make in future versions of your SAAS product.
How To Get More Reviews
1. Find Your Happy Customers – NPS Survey
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey helps you determine who your best customers are. The NPS index ranges from -100 to 100 and measures how willing customers are to recommend your products or services to another person.
The survey is nothing more than this simple question:
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend __________ to a friend or colleague?”
Based on their answer, each customer is then classified as either a detractor, a passive or a promoter.
Detractors give scores of 6 or below. They’re not pleased with their experience, aren’t likely to purchase again, and may even damage your company’s reputation with negative word-of-mouth.
Passives are those that give scores of 7 or 8. They’re satisfied, but not necessarily brand loyal. They’re not likely to spread negative word-of-mouth, but at the same time aren’t enthusiastic enough to promote them, either.
Promoters give scores of 9 or 10. They love your company’s products or services. They are repeat customers and enthusiastically promote you to their friends, family, and other potential buyers.
Determine your NPS score by subtracting your percentage of detractors from your percentage of promoters.
If you survey 100 people and:
- 60 of them are promoters
- 20 of them are passives
- 10 of them are detractors,
You’ve got 60% promoters – 10% detractors, for a score of 50.
Reach out specifically to your promoters to get reviews from them first.
2. Ask For The Review
Many customers will leave a review for you if you just ask them to, without any further incentive. Asking for the review tells customers you’re receptive to feedback, and lets them know they’re valued. There are a few ways to go about the ask:
- On a follow-up phone call: If you routinely call customers after they’ve used your offering for a while, don’t be afraid to ask them to leave a review of their experience.
- Through an email: After your customers make a purchase or have some other interaction with you, follow up with an email that asks for a review. Followingthem up when they are most receptive will have better results than a random email.
- As part of an email marketing campaign: Don’t want to wait for a transactional email or want to use a larger segment of your audience for a big review push? Send a request for reviews as part of a larger marketing campaign.
- On social media: Your followers have already shown you that they’re interested in what you have to share. They will be more likely to help you out than a stranger.
3. Reward those willing to review you
This is where things get tricky, because you don’t want to seem like you are paying customers in exchange for a positive review. It’s ethically wrong, and most review platforms will ban you if they believe this is what you’re doing. That said, you can offer a small gift card or service discount to people who are willing to leave you a review – regardless of whether that review is positive or negative.
In some cases, the review platform may even handle the incentive for you. Capterra routinely emails their users with an offer for a certain amount of money in an Amazon gift card in exchange for a review for any of the software on their website, up to a certain number of reviews.
But before the reviewers get the email with the gift card offering, companies get an email, too – encouraging them to sign up for their free reviews collection program. Capterra does the work of reaching out to the users and distributes the gift cards for you. You can send the Capterra email, with some adjustments for personal style, to your users, too.
4. Make it easy
The easier you make it for a customer to leave you a review, the more likely they will be to do it. Don’t leave them guessing as to where you want them to leave the review. Link to the various profiles and places you want reviews, then let them decide where they want to leave it.
List Of SAAS Review Sites
For the SAAS market, there’s no shortage of review sites available for you to claim a profile on, and it’s likely your prospects are already searching for online reviews with these platforms.
1. Trustpilot
Trustpilot is a review site for businesses. It is not limited to SAAS businesses, as companies like Wayfair, Lyft, and JustFab use this platform. Customers can search for companies or categories. Categories range from animal and pets to money and insurance, and even food, beverages, and tobacco. Depending on your SAAS niche, this website may not be as relevant to you, but if your competition is there, you should be, too.
2. Capterra
Capterra is a review platform for all kinds of software. While there are companies that pay to be listed and pay for other services, you are not required to do so to receive a listing on the site. The free accounts are not listed lower than any paid accounts, so everyone has a fair shot. As above, Capterra incentivizes reviewers, but does not require the review to be positive to earn the reward.
3. G2 Crowd
G2 Crowd is popular among decision makers looking to compare technology products. Your company’s rating is displayed in the search results. Users can rate their overall experience with your brand and company and they can also rate individual product offerings. Users can search for specific companies or a type of product, so it’s important to have both a presence on the platform and a positive rating.
If your company has limited reviews on G2 Crowd, the platform will provide a list of your competitors as the page as an alternative. Remember, their goal is to serve their customers – the people looking for the software – with something useful. If your profile doesn’t provide the information people need to make a decision, G2 will move to others that do.
4. FinancesOnline
The FinancesOnline platform is similar to Capterra because it is focused solely on B2B software. Broken down into categories like Remote Work Software, Help Desk Software, and CRM software, users can search for the software they are looking for by name, or by need. They have more than 14,000 software vendors listed. It is free to get listed on the platform.
5. GetApp
GetApp is from the same parent company as Capterra. Listing your product on either GetApp, Capterra, or Software Advice, ensures that it will show up on any of these sites as they are all part of the Gartner Digital Markets network.
6. TrustRadius
TrustRadius is another B2B platform, but it operates differently. There are no leads or paid placements for sale so there is no way for the vendors to potentially skew results. All reviews are vetted by a research team before being published, to make sure they are 100% real, from real people. It’s free to claim or create your listing.
7. SaaSGenius
SaaSGenius is a smaller platform that allows you to compare multiple software options with unbiased recommendations. You’ll get access to user reviews, guides, and blog posts from third-party sources. While SaaSGenius offers a free plan for vendors, a premium placement option is soon to be available for a monthly fee, This includes premium placement in the directory, along with multiple links to your website, and more.
