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Social Proof: Use Customer Reviews to Drive Event Sales

One thing that we know about customer reviews is that they are a powerful tool for boosting sales. In business, customer feedback plays a significant role in ensuring business efficiency and future sales growth. According to experts, positive feedback can provide a gain of up to 70%. There are practical methods that can be used to stimulate positive feedback from customers as well as data collection and analysis. It is possible to increase your events sales through event testimonials.

What Is Social Proof?

Before we go through the social proof marketing strategies, let’s first determine what social proof is and discover the science behind it. Social proof is currently being described as a psychological phenomenon that occurs when some people cannot determine what to do in difficult situations. Assuming that others are more familiar with the situation, such people consider their decision making to be preferable to their own.

Why Social Proof Works.

Principles of psychology say that when people are uncertain, they’ll most likely look to others for behavioural guidance. In order to harness this concept for persuasion, marketers must first identify the uncertainties of their customers and then buffer accordingly with appropriate social proof. You need to realise this if you want to know how to drive event sales with its help.

Event Reviews as Social Proof.

What do we know about customer reviews? According to experts, positive feedback can provide a gain of up to 70%. There are practical methods of stimulating positive feedback from customers, such as data collection and analysis. They are powerful tools for boosting event sales. In business, customer feedback plays a significant role in ensuring business efficiency and sales growth. It is certainly possible to increase your event sales through testimonials.

Examples.

Using social walls, hashtags, comments, contests on social media as well as direct reviews from your event attendees, interviewing them live during events, and many other formats at your event are all good examples of social proof.

Where to Use Customer Reviews.

Apply social proof to increase event sales on the following:

  • Key pages
  • Search ads
  • Your customers’ voices on social channels
  • Emails
  • Other ads and marketing materials

According to a 2017 survey, 84% of consumers trust reviews just as much as they do personal recommendations.

How to Send a Post-Event Survey.

Simply email a survey to your attendees.

Just go to the Gevme email marketing section, select emails to attendees, and then customise them or choose to create a new attendee email. You can customise the message how you’d like and then paste the link to your survey in the message or simply add a questionnaire in the text body to send immediately (or at a later date and time).

How to Use Event Reviews as a Social Proof.

Ninety-five percent of buyers read reviews before making a purchase, which may help you to increase ticket sales for an event. Capitalise on this trend by using event surveys to create social proof and build strong communication with your customers and potential buyers at events. Also, discover how to increase your event sales through event testimonials, social media questionnaires, and GEVME promotional tools.

Event Reviews as Social Proof.

There are many studies that have been done on the impact of customers and customer feedback on the performance of the event business and on its growth, including sales growth, volume sold, and, accordingly, profitability growth and other indicators. All of these studies may differ in some of their figures, but they all agree that having feedback, both positive and negative, has an effect on an events business’s dynamics. Event reviews are considered to be real social proof of business sustainability and effectiveness, so there are definitely good reasons to use customer feedback for sales stimulus.

Let’s see what ways there are to gather feedback.

About Negative & False Social Proof.

Testimonials can go wrong in a lot of ways. There are people with poor knowledge or background of the event or those who have bad emotions or simply like doing wrong things. If lots of people are doing something wrong, then it feels less wrong for you to do it. You’ll notice that they try to claim that the activity is “wrong” but do so by saying that without giving much evidence. They use what’s known as negative social proof, which is mostly aimed at hating and blaming the phenomena rather than expressing true facts about the services being poor with an intention to make them better. False social proofs can be checked and minimised because they have nothing to do with the facts.

Thefts, where there was negative social proof, were triple those with positive social proof. It’s the same with events.

How to Get Feedback From Customers.

To get quality customer feedback in order to use their testimonials and reviews as ways to increase sales, consider the following:

  • Provide proactive live chat support
  • Get feedback from a live chat session
  • Provide dedicated feedback forms on your site
  • Measure your customer service performance
  • Call your customers regularly or organise three-way calls
  • Use email surveys for new customers
  • Monitor social channels
  • Ask for feedback on the order confirmation page
  • Go beyond your analytics to get a clearer picture of what’s going on

Customer feedback is a good advertisement for an event product. Various event experts say that from 20% to 50% of purchasing decisions are made based on the reading of reviews from previous buyers. Naturally, in the development of event management, PR, advertising, and other marketing and promotional activities are important, but the importance of having positive customer reviews cannot be underestimated. So how do you collect event reviews? Sometimes simply asking is the easiest way to accomplish this.

Let’s take a look at various ways to request a review, what to pay attention to, and what not to miss.

How to Collect Event Reviews.

There are a couple of useful tips for the best way to get good event reviews:

Through Email.

There are several ways to collect reviews by e-mail: reply to the letter, ask for advice through the letter, etc. You can communicate with the clients to follow up after the events and send letters with thanks or suggestions or ask them for the same. “Please share your opinion about our products and services by replying to this e-mail” is a good communication formula. It is important that you receive any feedback from the client in a free form or answers to specific questions.

Through the Gevme Platform.

Making reviews functional on the website is another direct way to collect the data you need. There are also good scenarios for trigger emails based on this message: “You’ve just bought our product. Did you like it? Add a review about the product on the website.” This is a simple and convenient approach. There’s no need to collect or edit reviews, invite reviewers to the site, and so on. The visitors write their comments on the product page on their own. Simply create an opportunity for them with the help of suitable apps and other features.

Via Online Questionnaires.

When we are preparing e-mails, we add a link to the text with a killer CTA and use Google Docs forms, which is a popular free service for online surveys and other free post event survey software to collect as much information from our customers as we can. There are required and optional fields for text answers, various options, scales, colourful designs, and so on; and all reviews are automatically saved and may be exported into Google Sheets. Here are the questions that are used most often:

  • Why did you decide to cooperate with our company?
  • What question did you contact us about?
  • What did you like the most about the product?
  • What is the main value of our product?
  • What result did you achieve with our product?
  • Who would you recommend our product to?
  • What would you recommend, change, etc.?

The sky is the limit in setting up questionnaires for social proof reviews via your website, newsletters, or event survey application.

In addition, you may use customer reviews on your website and other public platforms in a variety of forms: success stories and testimonials, case studies, video reviews, quotes, FAQ, and so much more.

Other Helpful Ideas to Drive Your Event Sales.

There are also some practical ways to encourage people to leave their feedback for you.

Look at competitors.

You need to see how the motivation and feedback from the largest market players, including your competitors, is implemented. Do not copy them, but instead take advantage of how others work and how you could do it better.

Use a convenient platform to post reviews on your site.

There are special services for writing reviews, such as Capterra. Of course, use your platforms or apps if you have any.

Use Facebook and other social networks.

It is necessary to give your customers an opportunity to not only leave feedback about your company and products but also allow them to communicate with each other while building community. If possible, the product owners can and should take part in discussions. This increases the trust of their customers and clients, motivates them to assess the business adequately, and provides more event testimonials.

Be sure to post both positive and negative reviews.

If you have only positive reviews, your customers will get the impression that you remove the negative ones in order to hide something from them, which will drastically reduce their confidence in you. The presence of negative feedback and criticism speaks of your openness, your readiness for dialogue, and your responsibility, especially if you respond to these reviews and solve the problems and questions for your clients.

Support your audience.

If any of your clients had problems with your products and left negative reviews but then you solved their problem and the client changed his or her opinion, then it’s really a gain rather than a pain. You can ask them to leave a review stating that there was a problem, but it was solved. It is even better to ask opinions on how your company solves real problems and let people share their feelings.

Do not write fake reviews.

It’s better not to have any reviews at all rather than fake reviews. Some entrepreneurs ask their employees to write something on the website on behalf of satisfied customers. First, such a review will never be sincere. And second, other visitors and your potential customers will cheat by writing false reviews, which will not bring you positive points. If there are no reviews or negative ones, this is a flaw in the event business that needs to be addressed in other ways.

Share your experience.

Positive reviews should be shared in groups on social networks. These are additional readers and your potential buyers and clients.

Create a motivation system.

There are funny contests for customer reviews where people get gifts, gift cards, and other prizes for their feedback. The motivation you choose would depend on the specific practical business conditions. All the same, reviews should come from customers and clients of their own free will.

Get reviews from bloggers and opinion leaders.

Well-known bloggers and other opinion leaders have recently become a very effective way to promote products and services when leaders among social networks write about their opinions to their readers. Hundreds of thousands of readers on the Internet listen to their opinions. Your event reviews may be among them.

How to Drive Event Sales with Gevme Features.

The software helps website owners increase their conversion rates by 10% in less than 10 minutes. With the help of Gevme’s integrated features, you will be able to highlight offers, display recent purchases, and so much more. You get an event management and event marketing software all in one that simplifies your event planning process before, during, and after your event. It is mainly used by small and medium-sized businesses for event marketing purposes, enhancing the overall event planning, organisation, and client experience, and includes reviews, surveys, and social proof.

Increase event ticket sales with the help of Gevme features and social proof. they can help you get great reviews from your loyal customers.

Reviews is a Powerful Tool to Drive Event Sales

Generally, it is enough just to give your clients and customers an opportunity, and it’s possible to drive ticket sales for an event and gather feedback from real customers all in one. You can technically organize a platform where the buyer can leave a review, such as under the description of the service, and also give an assessment of the product used.

When studying reviews, event organizers receive valuable information about what products and goods are worthy, which ones should be changed due to low demand or which have been negatively evaluated by customers, what else needs to change in their business processes, and more. When customers leave reviews on the company’s website, they most likely will use the same words, word forms, phrases, and sentences that they usually use when searching for the information they need. After analysing customer reviews, companies can optimize their sites and apps for the most frequent customer requests.

If you need a good event review sample, check out GEVME. Also, feel free to leave your suggestions and feedback in the comments below!

Level up your events with Gevme’s omnichannel event platform

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