Search Scientist have long recognised the growing importance of online customer reviews for businesses. Reviews help customers make more informed purchase decisions, they help you build a better business, and help you to stand out from the crowd. Trustpilot is the leading 3rd Party Review provider in the UK and as such we recommend them to clients. We’ve witnessed the benefits of what they do and are a Trustpilot Partner Agency.
What is Trustpilot?
Trustpilot provides a global online open-review community for businesses. Features include custom, automated emails to invite customers to leave reviews, as well as custom, automated follow-up emails for customers who have abandoned shopping carts or made purchases.
The platform also provides clients with real-time customer review analytics; a custom profile page; embeddable widgets called TrustBoxes that display reviews on retailers’ websites in real time; the ability to publicly respond to customer reviews; native integration tools for Facebook and Twitter; and more.
Trustpilot was launched in 2007 – the same year as the iPhone. In 2007 businesses had yet to realise the power of consumer reviews. Facebook and Twitter were still in their infancy. But as social media began to grow rapidly, control very quickly shifted from brands to the consumer. To quote Jeremy Waite, Head of Digital Strategy at Salesforce:
Factory records boss Anthony H. Wilson once said, “If it’s a choice between the truth and the legend; print the legend”. . . Social media has changed the way we communicate so radically, that the old maxim is no longer true. These days, it is the truth that can spread half way around the world, while the myth is still putting it’s pants on…
The founder of Trustpilot, Peter Mϋhlmann, says that the idea came from his first business failure. Growing up in Denmark near the German border, he and a friend saw an opportunity in the fact that certain products were cheaper in Germany. They bought USB mobile phone cables in Germany and successfuly sold them for roughly ten times the price in Denmark. They sold a lot until they launched an e-commerce website, then they sold nothing. Muhler believed that this was because no one trusted them enough to buy from them online, presuming correctly that they were just two kids in a bedroom. It struck him then that even with Yelp and TripAdvisor, there was still a need for a trusted reviews platform for e-commerce sites.
Since then, as Mϋhlmann puts it:
We’ve gone from a small group of nerds to an international business of 300…
At the beginning we had 20-30,000 reviews a year, now we have that many a day.
Trustpilot is now seen as the leading review company for online shoppers. Trustpilot stands out from other online review sites thanks to it’s focus on transparency. The company’s 27-member trust and transparency department is dedicated to securing the trustworthiness of reviews with tools and strategies to fight misuse and fake reviews.
Consumer review power online continues to grow. According to a 2015 Bright Local survey:
92% of consumers now read online reviews for local businesses (vs. 88% in 2014), and consumers are forming opinions about businesses quicker than ever – with 40% suggesting they only need to read between 1-3 reviews (vs. 29% in 2014).
What’s more – consumers want to read honest reviews on a third party site – they want to see the good and the bad – the Testimonials page on your website is likely to be seeing less and less traffic over the years.
Key Benefits of Trustpilot
Trustpilot sum up what they can do for your business as follows:
- Showcase reputation
- Get Traffic
- Get Customers
- Keep Customers
- 13,000,000 reviews have been posted to date
- 500,000 new reviews are posted each month
- 110,000 companies have been rated on Trustpilot
- 10,000 new users sign up to Trustpilot every month
- 65 countries actively use Trustpilot reviews
And here’s a few more tangible practical reasons to choose Trustpilot:
- It allows you to easily collect customer reviews (Automatic Feedback Service) – takes out the slight awkwardness that can be felt, particulary in start up businesses, around asking for reviews. Consumers also feel more comfortable responding honestly to a third party system.
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Trustpilot has notification tools which can be used to distribute key review information based on certain criteria to people within the business – e.g. a review of a particular service will notify the head of that particular service department.
- The analytics data provided by Trustpilot on your reviews allows businesses to identify what customers like best about their business and use the findings to establish brand pillars.
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Trustpilot say you could see up to 44% in additional revenue with their reviews.
- If your Trustpilot rating is shown beside your Google listing you could see a 17% increase in CTR. (Google Seller Ratings are based on an average of scores from their list of trusted online review sites – one of which is Trustpilot)
- By adding in the TrustBox to your site, people visiting the site will be able to see the live feed of people reviewing you service and what they have to say. You will also be awarded a TrustScore badge for your reviews which can be displayed with the TrustBox.
Points to note:
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Integrating Trustpilot fully into your existing IT infrastructure to make best use of all of it’s responsiveness features may require some involvement from your own developers. For example Trustpilot is looking into deeper integration with Salesforce but currently your own developers can take action to link the two.
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You have to be prepared for the level of transparency on your business that leading your customers to an online review site will bring. Trustpilot’s projected 44% additonal revenue figure for your business will only materialise if you commit to doing something with the information that surfaces and respond to it in a positive and professional way.
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2015 reports state that 83% of online reviews written by Trustpilot consumers in the last year were positive. Also, 90% of unhappy customers will return if an issue is resolved quickly and efficiently.
As a Trustpilot partner, Search Scientist are currently offering a 20% discount membership to new sign ups. This offer runs until 29th Feb 2016. To acquire this offer simply sign up for Trustpilot through this link: 20% Trustpilot Discount
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