5 Reasons Why SaaS Companies Should Focus On Customer Reviews

Reviews have become one of the most important factors companies need to address when it comes to growing their business. 

Consumers are smarter than ever and now have the power to make or break a business. Happy customers can flood a site with positive reviews of their experience with your service or product, encouraging others to follow suit, and promoting growth and brand exposure. 

Bad reviews, on the other hand, can cause a huge amount of harm to both your brand image and profit.

We can all agree that positive customer reviews bring big benefits, regardless of the industry you’re in. 

So what does this mean for SaaS companies? Do they rely on reviews as much as other types of businesses? Are there any differences in how to approach SaaS customer reviews?

That’s what we’ll be answering. Let’s take a look at what role customer reviews play in the world of SaaS and how you can leverage reviews to accelerate growth for your business. 

Why Do SaaS Customer Reviews Matter?

All customer reviews matter. But why are they specifically important for your SaaS company?

When someone is looking to buy SaaS or business software, one of the first things they will do is ask their colleagues or friends for recommendations. Some people may just go ahead and purchase SaaS based on this basis alone. 

However, if this isn’t enough to convince them, they will likely sift through review sites to back up their friend’s recommendations. If both of these boxes are ticked, then they are far more likely to buy into the software.

But why is this? What elements in this buyer’s journey ultimately convince them to buy into a software service? 

Let’s take a look at the makeup of customer reviews and why they matter for SaaS companies.

1. SaaS Customer Reviews Help Build Trust

Trust is a crucial part of what ultimately convinces people to buy your product over anyone else’s. Whether this trust comes in the form of personal recommendations or review sites, social proof plays a huge part in their decision-making process.

2. They Provide a Platform for Feedback

SaaS customer reviews offer valuable insights into how your customers interact with your business and their overall experience with it.

Positive reviews provide confirmation that your product or service is being well-received, whereas negative feedback offers insights into how your offering can be improved. 

In other words, reviews are a form of customer feedback. It’s just in a public format.

Sure, no one likes receiving bad reviews, but if the review is answered and actioned to enhance their experience going forward, this improves your product and gives you a chance to win around that customer.

It’s important to respond to your customer’s feedback, too. Considering over half of customers (53%) expect brands to respond to negative reviews within 7 days, while one-third expect a response in 3 days.

3. Increase Online Visibility

With Google still the reigning king of search engines, having positive Google reviews is pretty important for online visibility.

Positive SaaS customer reviews, whether it’s Google reviews or any big SaaS review site like Capterra, help boost your brand reputation and online visibility. 

Similarly, those shiny gold stars that pop up in your search engine can not only drive more traffic to your website, but they can improve your clickthrough rate by as much as 35% in organic search.

Plus, Google tends to award businesses with a bigger number of positive reviews by placing them in the Map Pack at the top of local search results.

4. Positive Reviews Can Boost Website Conversions

Again, this goes back to social proof. Consumers are now just as likely to trust online reviews as they are their friend’s or family’s recommendations. 

Following this, our study discovered that when website visitors were shown customer reviews on the website, the eCommerce conversion rate increased by 67% compared to customers who did not see reviews.

5. They Offer SEO Benefits

There are many ways reviews and managing your online reputation can help boost your organic rankings in search. 

These include how recent the reviews are, what keywords your customers are using (the more relevant they are to your product, the better), how frequently you’re receiving reviews and the format (text, video, images, star ratings etc).

There’s also testimonial link building, where, you give a positive testimonial to another business, which they post on their website, linking back to yours.

All of these factors help contribute to your organic search engine rankings. So make sure you’re ticking at least a few of these review boxes!

SaaS Review Websites to Use

Having a reliable and trustworthy list of review platforms is essential when it comes to making the decision to buy or simply providing more information on a certain product.

We’ve collated a list of the most trusted review sites below:

G2

G2 has become one of the biggest software marketplaces on the market. They’ve helped over 80 million people make smarter software decisions based on SaaS customer reviews. 

Trustmary makes it super easy to request reviews from G2 (and the benefits speak for themselves). Follow the simple guide below or head over to our full guide to collecting reviews for G2.

• Step 1: Connect your G2 review page

After signing in to Trustmary with your business email, connect your G2 review page by adding the URL link.

• Step 2: Set up your campaign

Set up your review request message, the review form, a reminder message, and other settings on one page.

• Step 3. Send to customers

Distribute the review form to your customers via email, QR code, URL link, or website embed, and wait for reviews to pour in!

Capterra

Capterra is another big name in the software reviewer world. With over 2 million certified reviews and an easy and accessible interface for customers to find and review software for their businesses.

Collecting reviews for Capterra with Trustmary is extremely easy. Take a look at how to do this using our Capterra review collection guide.

SoftwareSuggest

Trusted by over one million customers, SoftwareSuggest makes selecting the right software for your business easy. It provides unbiased software comparison and allows you to easily compare features and prices to make informed decisions. 

They also offer free consultations to help you find the perfect software match for your business.

Here’s how to collect reviews for SoftwareSuggest with Trustmary.

Sourceforge

Sourceforge provides essential tools like code repositories, bug tracking, and version control. They’ve created over 500,000 software projects and have over 2.1 million registered users. Plus, its intuitive interface and easy sign-up process make searching for software a breeze.

Ask Sourceforge for ratings and reviews, using our easy 3-step guide.

GetApp

Ideal for finding the right apps and software products for your business. GetApp does what it says on the tin. It’s a platform dedicated to finding and providing reviews for a range of different apps. From ERP systems and CRM software to mind mapping and social media management tools. 

If you’re looking to ask GetApp for ratings to enhance your brand’s authority and trust, follow our three-step GetApp guide.

Software Advice

As their name suggests, Software Advice helps businesses in the UK save time and stress by identifying the right software for their needs. With over 11,000 products across 600 categories and side-by-side software comparison options, it’s yet another fantastic platform for finding software.

Take a look at our simple guide to find out how to ask for Software Advice ratings.

Best Practices for Requesting Reviews from SaaS Customers

By this point, you know how important SaaS customer reviews are.

However, we haven’t discussed how to obtain reviews, aside from customers being willing to provide them on their own accord.

Let’s take a look at some helpful ways to request reviews from SaaS customers without sounding invasive or annoying.

Ask them!

You don’t ask, you don’t get. Asking for reviews is still a powerful yet simple tactic to boost your business’s brand exposure and authority. 

This can be especially beneficial for smaller companies, as obtaining positive reviews early on is always a massive bonus. Plus, your customer pool will likely be smaller, so gathering reviews should be easier and faster at this stage.

Ask at the Right Time

There’s an art to asking for a review at the right time. 

In most cases, as soon as a customer buys something from you or has a positive experience with your brand, you should ask them for a review.

Their experience is still fresh in their memory and you want to seize this moment as quickly as possible to get the most accurate response. 

To make this easier, you should consider automating this process. Manually collecting and responding to reviews takes up a lot of time and effort, but automation makes this 10 times easier.

Use Incentives

In the event that you ask a customer for a review and they don’t respond (or say no), there’s no harm in following up with an incentive.

Offering an incentive from the start also helps sweeten the deal, as they’re now getting something in exchange for a review.

Again, this is ideal for new businesses looking to gain favorable reviews early on – but works just as well with bigger companies too.

A small gift card, a discount code, a free trial of their product or service, or something similar are good ways to persuade customers to leave reviews! 

Send an Email Request

Emails are one of the easiest and most common ways to ask for reviews. 

Most companies collect their customers’ emails, so you should already have a list of people to contact for reviews. When emailing your customers, be sure to personalize your email to increase your chances of connecting with your customers and getting a response.

We’ll talk a little more about this below.

Personalize Your messages

Personalization is crucial in pretty much every context of marketing. The more personalized your message is to your target audience, the more likely they are to respond. 

In fact, 71% of customers want businesses to provide personalized experiences, and when businesses don’t do this, it leaves 76% of customers feeling frustrated.

But again, sending personalized messages to customers asking them for reviews takes up valuable time. So this method is rarely used. 

Trustmary allows you to create your own personalized form and message to better connect with your customers and gather insights into their experience.

Make it Easy and Fast for Customers

No one wants to spend more time than necessary filling out a review form. Making customers jump through hoops for your own benefit isn’t exactly a strong sales pitch.

For a customer to leave a review, you need to make the process as quick and painless as possible.

Decide what is the most important review site you possibly want reviews.

A good example is Google reviews.

Are they really relevant for SaaS? If so, just copy-paste the review link to Google reviews to the end of your Trustmary survey, and the survey flow enables respondents to decide where they want to leave the review.

Short, snappy and easy questions or something as simple as using emojis to rate their experience can be the difference between receiving a review or having them bounce from the page.

Automate the Process

Automation plays a huge role in today’s marketing landscape and the benefits it brings cannot be ignored. 

Ideal for bigger companies who don’t have the time to manually write emails or ask customers for reviews, automation speeds up the manual labor work by automating the processes. 

For example, as opposed to manually following up with a customer after a purchase, you could use Trustmary to send an automated and personalized follow-up. 

This can save you thousands of hours, time which can be better spent growing your business in other ways.

And if that wasn’t enough, you can read our guide on how to get more reviews from customers. 

Add SaaS Customer Reviews to Your Website

Remember what we said about the power of reviews and the benefits they bring to your business?

Well, what better place to place them than on your website?

Consumers are more likely to purchase if they see photos and videos of other customers. So if reviews are missing from your website, it’s time to address that problem.

Adding reviews to your website is made easy with Trustmary. We accept all review formats, whether they are text-based, video, or images. 

You won’t need any coding skills either, just knowing how to copy and paste!

How to Add Reviews to Your Website

Here’s our three-step guide to adding reviews to our website using Trustmary.

Step 1: Import reviews from the desired source

You can import your SaaS customer reviews from G2, Capterra, and Google by just giving the review page URL.

Step 2: Get a widget tailored to your needs

Trustmary generates a beautiful review widget with your best reviews. You can use the automatic design alignment to match the widget to your website’s style, or you can modify the widget manually to your liking in an easy widget editor.

Step 3: Copy and paste the embed code

Lastly, just copy the widget embed code and paste it to the desired spot on your website. Anyone who has access to the website admin can do this in just a few seconds.

40% Review Rate with Trustmary Method

Traditional surveys are dead.

Learn how you can streamline your review collection efforts with Trustmary Method.

Results include:

• Omnichannel review collection
• 40% Review rate
• 38,5% improvement to purchase path by using collected reviews

Hearing what your customers have to say about your business is crucial for its growth and development.

Positive SaaS customer reviews can help boost rankings, increase conversions and find new customers through referrals and recommendations. 

Even bad reviews can help tweak your offerings and learn more about your customer’s pain points to improve their experience next time.

Most importantly, make sure you sing loud and proud about your positive reviews! For more information on how to use reviews in the right ways, Trustmary is here to help.

Further Reading

You might find these blog posts helpful:

• 20 Tips on How to Get More Reviews From Customers
• Reviews that Matter: Grow your Business with Reviews
• How to Ask for Reviews: The Dos and Don’ts
  

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