Incentivized Customer Reviews and Your Online Reputation

With online reviews fast gaining traction as the preferred dealer research option among prospects, marketers are often tempted to incentivize reviews to improve their dealerships’ online reputation.

However, incentivizing online reviews may violate rules, lead to penalties, and cause serious harm to your online reputation.

Thankfully, there are ways to get customer reviews without offering incentives.

How do you find out if online reviews are incentivized?

Reviews that are too positive, quite generic, vague, or too negative about a dealership are likely to be motivated and less trustworthy.

Best practices to follow about incentivized customer reviews

It is best not to incentivize online reviews. If it’s not possible to avoid it entirely, then try to practice the following:

• Ensure that your reviewers have used your vehicle or service.
• When you are requesting for incentivized reviews via coupons, discounts, etc., then it is best to request true reviews.
• Do not delete negative reviews or use fake ones

Best practices to follow about non-incentivized customer reviews

It’s possible to get customers to write reviews without incentives. Here’s how.

• Request in-dealership. Use an app like Buyerater to make the process seamless and easy.
• Use email and test messages
• Engage on social media platforms and request reviews through these channels
• Respond to every review that you receive
• Include review request links on your car dealer website
• Highlight good reviews and showcase them on various platforms

Consumers make their decisions based on reviews and they expect authenticity. Since incentivized reviews may not be entirely trustworthy, it is often flagged as unacceptable by many consumers.

For more insights into the impact of incentivized online reviews on your online reputation, Contact Us.