Your leads are skeptical – maybe more so than they’ve ever been. As a result, your sales and marketing strategies aren’t enough anymore. To turn new leads into customers, you need to show them real-life results and get unbiased sources to vouch for you.
Luckily, there are quite a few ways to get this third-party stamp of approval – including testimonials, user-generated content, case studies, social media chatter, and word-of-mouth referrals.
In this piece, we’re going to focus on SaaS product reviews as a core piece of every SaaS marketing strategy and offer a few suggestions for improving your current ratings on popular software review websites. Let’s get started.
What are SaaS Product Reviews?
SaaS product reviews are online reviews created by real product users that detail the notable pros and cons of SaaS products. They offer insight into everything from interface functionality and ease of use to customer support and pricing. And they’re often accompanied by ratings of the SaaS platform as a whole.
These user reviews generally supplement B2B SaaS company profiles and comparisons on third-party review websites like G2 Crowd, Capterra, TrustPilot, TrustRadius, GetApp, Software Advice, SaaSGenius, SoftwareSuggest, and FinancesOnline. And in many cases, the ratings can be earned with little to no cost on your part.
Why Do SaaS Product Reviews Matter?
B2B software buyers are incredibly risk-averse, especially when it comes to long-term subscriptions or expensive purchases. For good reason too. SaaS products can cost hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars annually – and when each department has its own tool stack, the costs add up quickly.
Given that, it’s not surprising that 67% of buyers consider reviews a “very important” factor in their purchase decision. Or that 59% of enterprise buyers turn to product reviews before making a final decision on a SaaS purchase. They need to get past the idealistic marketing messages software vendors promote on their websites and social media channels and get an unfiltered, realistic perspective on the software solutions.
Since product reviews on third-party platforms are designed to be objective, they offer a more trusted argument for and against the software. Users and beta testers can reaffirm the benefits highlighted in marketing campaigns and point out cons they see to the SaaS product. And all of this helps new leads qualify or disqualify themselves from the company’s marketing and sales efforts.
4 Simple Ways to Improve and Increase Your Product Reviews
Investing time, energy, and resources to improve your product reviews can have a major impact on your potential customers’ decisions to upgrade their plan or purchase a subscription, so it’s important to get it right. Here are a few suggestions to help you with that.
Respond to Negative Reviews, Positively
No matter how fine-tuned and well-loved your product is, you’ll always find someone out there who isn’t a fan. And the unfortunate reality is, these software buyers are far more likely to share their opinion than those who would generally land in the promoter category of an NPS survey.
You can mitigate the effects of negative feedback by responding to it, though. In fact, by responding to criticism on these product review sites you can both correct untrue statements and build rapport with your audience. If your responses are empathetic and helpful, you might also be able to win back some of your users, as well.
Take Customer Feedback Seriously
There’s a reason that unbundling is predicted to take off in 2021. Not all SaaS products act as plug-and-play solutions. In some cases, your customers need more or less than your standard offering.
You don’t have to unbundle your solution to make users happier, though. By making adjustments to your subscription plans, fixing bugs, creating new features, streamlining customer service, and generally finding ways to improve your customer experience, you can make a positive impact on your customers’ perception of your brand. And the better they feel about it, the more likely they are to advocate for it on online review websites.
Encourage Happy Customers to Leave a Review
Often, there’s a large segment of happy users who don’t leave reviews. Not because they’re unwilling, but because they’re busy and don’t think about it.
You can easily remedy this by reaching out to customers personally and asking them to leave an online review, though. The key is to find users who will provide valuable feedback for your platform, so your lead generation and conversion rates are positively impacted.
Share Your Product Reviews Everywhere
While many users will intentionally go to software review platforms first to check out your SaaS product, not everyone does. Some will come across one of your ads on Instagram or LinkedIn, and others will go directly from Google’s SERP or a software comparison blog post to your website.
Regardless, you want to make sure decision-makers have all the information they can reasonably ask for in one place, including customer reviews.
Luckily, reviews can easily fit anywhere. You can plug them into your website as social proof the way Freshbooks does or create a dedicated software comparison page like Nutshell. You can add your ratings to your social media profiles or create entire ads dedicated to a single positive customer review. You can even add ratings to your metadescriptions to generate greater appeal for your product.
Just make sure you get permission to use the reviews promotionally before you do so.
Whether you’ve got hundreds of good reviews, dozens of recent negative reviews, or nothing at all – there’s always more you can do to improve. And given the fact that the SaaS business model depends on it, improvement really should take a priority spot in your marketing efforts.
Making SaaS reviews work for your company doesn’t have to be difficult – you just need to find the right gaps and opportunities and take advantage of them.