How Restaurant Ratings Affect Your Business
In the business world, it’s true that perception is reality. For restaurants, a high overall customer rating and great reviews can translate into many more customers, higher customer lifetime values, and a better bottom line.
Conversely, negative ratings may mean fewer people coming in and lower revenue for your establishment. The effects of bad reviews can have a significant impact on the success of your restaurant.
For this reason, it’s critical that you pay attention to your restaurant ratings and reviews. With the right strategies and tactics, you can improve your rating faster and more effectively than you might imagine.
Click on the banner below to register for our webinar, “Automating Ratings & Reviews Requests and Measuring Customer Sentiment” and learn how to automate the process of getting more positive consistent ratings, how to measure customer sentiment to improve marketing and operations. We’ll show you how to bring it all together to improve customer lifetime values, get more new customers, and increase your overall revenue.
The Numbers: Restaurant Ratings and Reviews
Here are several statistics to reveal just how powerful positive restaurant ratings can be in today’s marketplace.
According to Modern Restaurant Management, an increase of just one-star rating can give a business an approximate 5-9% increase in revenue. And an increase of just one-half star would likely fill your seats during peak business times.
They also reported that 34% of diners choose a restaurant based on peer review websites.
And 53% of 18-to-34- year-olds reported that online ratings and reviews factored into their dining decisions, as do 47% of frequent full-service customers.
The importance of online ratings and reviews has been shown to have a direct impact on revenue. Consumers are likely to spend 31% more at a business with excellent reviews. Imagine what this could mean for your bottom line.
Trust is key for restaurant customer loyalty, and according to BrightLocal.com, a whopping 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more. This shows just how important ratings are to local businesses. Restaurant reputation management is a business function that simply cannot be ignored.
What is the industry that most people read online reviews? You guessed it – restaurants. MRM reported that 61% of consumers have read online reviews about restaurants – more than any other business type.
To add to that, according to Upserve, 90% of guests research a restaurant online before dining—more than any other business type in their study. And, 57% of those guests viewed restaurant websites before selecting where to dine.
This further highlights the growing importance of garnering consistent, positive ratings and reviews.
Upserve further went on to support all of these statistics revealing that:
- 92% of consumers read restaurant reviews.
- 77% prefer peer reviews versus critic reviews.
- 33% would never eat a restaurant with less than four stars.
Start Managing Your Ratings and Reviews Today
The success of a restaurant, its owner, or franchiser is heavily dependent on the ratings and reviews it receives from customers.
In today’s marketplace, where consumers are more reliant than ever before on online ratings and reviews for their dining decisions, there has never been a better time to focus your efforts on getting positive consistent ratings for your establishment.
We hope you found these statistics insightful and want to learn how you can improve customer lifetime values by focusing on building up an excellent reputation in this competitive industry.
Our team would love to help you automate the process of getting more positive consistent ratings and reviews, as well as to measure customer sentiment so you can start improving your restaurant reputation immediately!
Which stats did you find most interesting? Let us know below – we’d love to hear from you!
To see more of what Bloom can do for your restaurant or coffee shop marketing, schedule a free demo today, or call us at 727-877-8181.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Common Questions About Restaurant Marketing
Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.
WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.
Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.
A restaurant customer data platform (CDP) is a unified software system that collects, consolidates, and activates guest data from multiple sources including WiFi networks, POS systems, online ordering platforms, reservation systems, websites, loyalty platforns, event platforms, and review sites. Unlike generic CDPs built for e-commerce or SaaS companies, restaurant CDPs are purpose-built to handle restaurant-specific data sources and create actionable guest intelligence that drives personalized marketing, operational improvements, and revenue growth automatically.
Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.
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