How Important Are Star Ratings?

Consumers these days are hard to please, and with so much information at their fingertips, they’ll look to star ratings and online reviews when making purchasing decisions.

How much does it matter?

Take two businesses that offer the same services at the same price with the only difference being their star rating. Which one are you going with?

A high star rating will help you generate more interest and trust in your business and offering.

In this post, we’ll talk about the impact of ratings on your business in more detail and explore whether a 5-star rating is all it’s cracked up to be.

Let’s get started!

The Relationship Between Ratings And Customers

If we’re to trust the surveys, there are two main things that customers look for when doing research online:

1. Positive reviews/positive experiences

2. Star rankings

About 75% of the consumers revealed reviews are the most important, followed closely by 58% of those who hold the star rating as a top review factor when deciding on a business. This means that more than half of consumers would simply take a look at the rating without considering the content of the reviews. 

Naturally, you can conclude that having a positive rating is a must if you want to close more sales, but can a score be too high? 

Are 4.5 Out of 5 Stars Better?

While the perfect star rating looks good on paper, in reality, it might look a bit too perfect. According to research, customers often use filters to zero in on the businesses they want to purchase from or work with. 

The most commonly used filter is the one that shows businesses with a 4-star rating or higher. On the other hand, 10% of consumers use a filter that isolates businesses with a perfect rating.

How weird is that?

Additionally, another study has revealed that most purchases were informed by ratings around 4.2 to 4.5 out of 5 stars.

While it all seems counterintuitive at first, it does make sense when you consider basic human psychology. A perfect score has an uncanny valley sort of effect on consumers who perceive that rating as too good to be true. They aren’t that easily fooled and most of them (especially the younger crowd) have a healthy dose of skepticism, valuing authenticity over unnecessary polish.

Now, don’t get us wrong - we believe that all businesses should strive for perfection. However, it’s more important to meet the expectation of your average consumer. 

So is the 4.5 out of 5 stars the absolute lowest you should settle for?

How Low Can You Go? 

The sentiments of consumers regarding low ratings are not good.

While those who look for a perfect star score are a minority, about 40% will only consider purchasing if the business has 4 starsm-font-size-13" style="display: initial; font-family: Lato;" no_space_b="true" no_space_e="true">   . A lower number of customers will settle for 3 stars (16%), while 10% will whip out their credit card if the business has a minimum of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Only 3% of those participating in the survey will use a business with 2.5 stars, with lower scores being almost negligible. 

There goes your answer! Our advice is to not settle for anything less than 4 stars and work hard towards achieving 4.5 out of 5 stars while keeping room for improvement en route to the perfect rating.

Before we talk about how to do that, let’s take a deeper look at the same survey and consider some additional factors that the average consumer is looking for in online reviews.

Ratings Aren’t Everything

As we described earlier on, most consumers will look at the content in customer reviews before they make a decision. So naturally, having an ample amount of positive reviews is crucial along with the 4.5 out of 5 stars to convert new customers. 

Yet, it’s not only the scores and praises that matter. About 26% say that a business needs to have between 11 and 50 reviews to appear trustworthy, while more than 18% revealed that they have higher standards. They expect the business to have between 50 and 100 reviews if it’s to get their money.

Furthermore, 26% of consumers revealed that a review needs to be posted within the past month while 22% expect those reviews to be only two weeks old.

Finally, 30% of customers want to work with a business that responds to all reviews while 22% will avoid businesses that don’t respond to reviews.

How to Improve Your Rating

With that out of the way, it’s time to talk about simple strategies that may help you bump up that rating to 4.5 out of 5 stars and attract more customers. 

You can try the following:

1. Generate new reviews

The easiest way to improve your rating is to inspire your customers to leave new reviews. At the same time, you might be able to attract new ones because you’ll check multiple boxes.

The reviews new prospects see will be fresh, and you’ll have plenty of them, which will inspire trust. 

How you go about it is the challenge here. Stats show that 30% of consumers have left reviews in 50% of cases when they were prompted to leave a review with 12% always doing it. Do note that 60% of these prompted reviews were 5-star ratings.

What about the prompts themselves? Well, over 40% received them via email and 27% received them over text. 

The most important nugget of information here is that 80% of online reviews come from follow-up emails. So, the most sure-fire way to generate new reviews is to send email and text review requests.

2. Respond to every review

Customers also see responding to feedback as a huge green flag. You need to make sure to thank every customer for leaving their review, even if the review is not that positive. 

Apologize for their negative experience and invite them to resolve the issue with you offline. 

Leveraging Software

To make a 4.5 out of 5 stars rating easier to achieve, you should use software that allows you to do two things:

1. Automate review requests via email and text

2. Simplify the process of responding to feedback

You can easily do both with ReviewArm. 

With our reputation management platform, you gain access to an intuitive dashboard that sends out a review request every time a customer makes a purchase. You can also receive notifications that allow you to monitor different review platforms without logging in to each one.

That way, you are able to respond to reviews from one place. Pretty neat!

To schedule a free demo, fill out our contact form and you’ll be on your path to a 4.5 out of 5 stars rating in no time - without even breaking a sweat!