Why Are Review Helpful in the Customer Journey?

What Is a Customer Journey?

The customer journey includes all of the steps a customer takes throughout their relationship with a brand. The main steps in the customer journey are:

• Awareness: The awareness stage is when customers learn about the brand or its offerings. They may learn through social media, marketing campaigns, or recommendations from their friends and family, to name a few possibilities. 
• Consideration: In the next stage of the journey, the customer explores different options, weighing the brand’s product or service against the competition. 
• Purchase: The customer decides to buy from the brand and completes their purchase. 
• Loyalty: The customer makes repeat purchases and possibly buys additional products from the brand, cementing their loyalty.
• Advocacy: In the final stage, the customer shares their positive experience and recommends the brand's products or services to others. 

In the first four stages, you’re always trying to help the customer along to the next stage. Once they reach advocacy, the last stage, your goal is to keep them there.

Remember that the customer journey isn’t the same for every person. Some customers may spend a lot of time in a certain stage, while others zoom through all five. 

Why Is It Important?

But why does the customer journey matter, anyway? These stages are crucial to both customers and businesses, so let’s explore their impact further. 



For the Customers

On the buyer side, the customer journey helps shoppers get to know the brands they're looking at before spending their money. They don’t jump right into purchasing. Instead, they typically spend some time familiarizing themselves with a brand, its products or services, and the alternatives before making a decision. 

For the Business

For brands, the customer journey is key to understanding how people become loyal customers — the backbone of any successful business. Understanding each step in the customer journey can lead to a better customer experience, more sales, and a competitive advantage. You can examine each step both individually and as part of the full picture to optimize your marketing strategy. After all, you should have different marketing messages for customers at different stages of the journey. 

In the awareness stage, your marketing efforts should be all about exposing new customers to your brand and the products or services you offer. They may have never heard of your brand before. You need to introduce yourself and intrigue them with your marketing campaign so they choose to learn more. 

At that point, the shopper is in the next stage of the journey: consideration. Your marketing efforts at this stage should focus on how your brand stands out, like sharing a case study. Highlight your advantages over the competition to influence customers' purchasing decisions.

The following stage in the journey is when the customer finally buys something from your brand. Marketing efforts like retargeting and cart abandonment campaigns can help get them over that last hurdle. 



In the loyalty and advocacy stages, your approach should focus on providing great customer service. Encourage your happy customers to leave positive reviews on your product pages or third-party review sites. 

How Can Reviews Help?

Customer reviews play a bigger role in the customer journey than many business leaders realize. For a shopper, they can be the difference between stopping at the consideration stage and continuing on to buy something from you. 

Nearly 90% of consumers stay on the fence about buying something until they read online reviews. So try to keep your star rating as high as possible and ask previous customers to share reviews to ensure more shoppers reach the later stages of the customer journey. 

Build Trust

Reviews give shoppers insights into previous customers’ experiences buying from your brand. They provide a better idea of what shoppers can expect if they decide to proceed with your business, which helps build trust.

Since 81% of consumers say trust is a key factor in their purchasing decisions, that feedback is vital. It serves as social proof that your brand is reliable and provides strong customer service. Even negative reviews can enhance customers' trust, as long as you respond to them professionally and work toward a solution. More than 80% of shoppers actively look for negative reviews to gauge a brand's credibility since perfect five-star ratings can seem too good to be true. 



Provide Context

Reviews can help shoppers understand your products or services better from a customer’s perspective. These reviews provide insights into the features, benefits, and possible limitations, which makes it easier for customers to make informed purchasing decisions. You never know which particular details might persuade someone to buy something from your brand. 

Improve SEO

Having more customer reviews also boosts your brand’s visibility on social media platforms and in the search results. These platforms tend to favor active, engaged brands, so receiving and responding to reviews will help promote your brand. 

Help Businesses Improve Their Offerings

While it's not fun to get negative feedback, it can be constructive. These comments can help you improve your products or services in the future. When a potential customer sees that you respond to your reviews, even the negative ones, it shows them that you care about all of your customers’ experiences and will strive for better results. Around 89% of consumers are more likely to purchase from businesses that respond to all of their reviews, including the negative ones. 

Don’t Overlook the Importance of Reviews

Managing your online reviews is crucial to maintaining an effective customer journey. Many business leaders have too much on their plate to track and respond to all of their brands' reviews, though. Optimize is here to help. 

Our comprehensive reputation management services include monitoring and responding to your online reviews. If you would like to learn more about how Optimize can help you manage your online reputation, schedule your free consultation today.