by Mitchell 1

If you rely on the Internet and social media to drive new customers to your business, as most auto repair shops do, you know the importance of positive consumer reviews.

Customer reviews are a key element of your auto shop marketing strategy. They not only help to increase search engine visibility, which directs more customers to your shop’s website, but also help you understand your customers’ level of satisfaction with your services. This in turn helps you manage and improve your shop’s reputation. Research shows that nine out of 10 consumers are influenced by positive reviews. So unless you have a reliable strategy for generating and capturing verified customer reviews, you could be losing business to your competitors.

With the Mitchell 1 SocialCRM auto shop marketing service, you can quickly generate a collection of positive customer reviews. Once you’ve the reviews, the key to attracting new customers is to actively promote your reviews by making it easy for prospective customers to find them.

The following techniques will help you use SocialCRM to promote your consumer reviews with a minimum of time and effort.

Review Syndication

This involves distributing your consumer reviews to multiple websites and search engines to increase visibility of your business on the Internet. SocialCRM distributes your 25 most recent reviews to local search directories.

Social Engage

This feature allows you and your consumers to share your positive review on Social Media sites which will essentially be free marketing for your business.

Fresh and Relevant Reviews

Mitchell 1 partners with SureCritic, a leading provider of reputation management that rates and reviews products and services to the automotive industry. The system validates that each reviewer has actually spent money at the business being reviewed.

SureCritic not only offers an effective tool for building a collection of credible, searchable reviews from real customers, but its reviews carry far more believability than other review services that allow anonymous or unverified reviews. In addition, customers can easily share the reviews with friends and family on their own social networks.

After every customer visit, SocialCRM sends a thank-you email automatically, showing your appreciation and inviting the customer to review their experience at your shop. If you’re missing email addresses, the SocialCRM service will call your customers instead, thanking them for their visit and asking them to review their experience via a few short survey questions.

Customers who give your shop a five-star review receive an invitation to post a review with Google as well — with a link to your shop’s Google Business Page to make it quick and easy for them to do so. Google Reviews play an important role in building awareness of your business.

SureCritic’s Review Badge

Posting the SureCritic badge on your website indicates not only that you are so confident in your service that you are willing to have everyone who walks through your door write a review about you — but also that you are willing to share those reviews. It’s a great way to spread customer positive feedback with prospective customers.

 SureCritic Review Dashboard

 Keeping track of your consumer reviews and responding in a timely manner is critical. The SureCritic dashboard makes it quick and easy to see your overall results in real time, and to drill down to individual reviews to respond and take action when needed. It is especially important to respond quickly to negative reviews because it shows prospects that you are listening and deal with unsatisfied customers honestly and professionally.

So, you should always respond to negative reviews, but don’t ignore your positive reviews. Responding to your happy customers with appreciation for their review is a great way to nurture those relationships and build loyalty.

Consumer reviews have become vital to maintaining a positive online reputation, and are an essential component of success for any auto repair business that wants to remain competitive. So the time is now to build up your positive reviews and use them to spread the word about the great services you provide.

Read more:

• How Important Are Consumer Reviews?
• Do You REALLY Need To Respond To Your Positive Reviews?
• The When, How and Why of Responding to Customer Reviews
• How Motorcar Makeovers Uses Customer Reviews To Build The Business – Part 2
• How Motorcar Makeovers Keeps Its Customers Happy And Coming Back – Part 1
• Why Customers Give Shops Bad Reviews