Most business owners check their star rating and stop there. Four point six, holding steady, nothing on fire. The rating is the part everyone watches, so it feels like the part that matters. But there’s a second layer to your reviews that most businesses leave completely blank, and the people deciding whether to call you are reading it closely.
Your replies are read almost as often as the reviews
Research into review behaviour consistently finds that the overwhelming majority of people who read reviews also read the business’s responses to them, with figures around 97% widely reported. Even allowing for the fact that survey-based findings like this vary by methodology and industry, the underlying behaviour is intuitive. Someone weighing up a large purchase is looking for signals about what you’ll be like to deal with when something goes wrong.
That reframes the whole exercise. A reply isn’t a private courtesy to the person who left the review. They may never read it. It’s a public statement aimed at the next twenty people comparing you against two competitors, and it’s one of the few places where you get to speak in your own voice at exactly the moment someone is deciding.
Almost nobody is doing it
Estimates of how many businesses actually reply to reviews are strikingly low, with around 5% commonly cited. Take the precise figure with a pinch of salt, since it varies enormously by sector and by how the sample was drawn. But spend ten minutes looking at competitors in your own area and you’ll likely see the pattern yourself: pages of reviews, almost no responses underneath them.
That’s unusual. Most marketing advantages require spending money or out-working someone. This one is available because the field is empty.
What the revenue figures do and don’t prove
Analyses of review data have found that businesses replying to at least a quarter of their reviews tend to earn meaningfully more than those that don’t, with an uplift around 35% often quoted. This is worth being careful about, because it is a correlation and not a proven cause.
Businesses that reply diligently to reviews are usually also the businesses that answer their phones, train their staff, and follow up on complaints. The replies may be a symptom of being well run rather than the engine of the extra revenue. Anyone who tells you that adding review replies will lift your takings by 35% is overselling it.
What the data does support is narrower and still useful: replying is strongly associated with businesses that perform well, it costs almost nothing, and it puts your side of the story in front of people who are actively looking for it.
Write for the next reader, not the last customer
Once you accept that the audience is the next prospect, the way you write changes. A reply that only says “Thanks for the kind words, Sarah!” wastes the slot. A reply that mentions what the job actually involved does real work, because it tells a stranger what you do and how you think.
Compare “Thanks Sarah!” with something like: “Thanks Sarah. That kitchen had some awkward pipework behind the units, so we’re glad the extra day we took on the plumbing was worth it.” The second version tells a prospective customer that you find problems, explain them, and don’t rush. You haven’t claimed anything about yourself. You’ve just described what happened.
Negative reviews are the highest-value slot
A calm, specific reply under a one-star review is more persuasive than any five-star review you have, because it’s the only place a reader can see how you behave under pressure. Acknowledge the specific issue, state plainly what you did or offered, and avoid arguing about details the reader can’t verify. Then stop. Nobody reading it expects perfection; they’re checking whether you’re reasonable.
A routine that survives a busy week
Fifteen minutes once a week is enough for most small businesses. Reply to everything new, put negative reviews first, and keep replies to two or three sentences. Consistency matters more than polish. A page where every review from the last two years has a short human response reads very differently from one with three eloquent replies from 2023 and silence since.
The hard part isn’t writing the replies; it’s noticing the review in the first place. That’s the piece we help with at Eirvancee, alongside making sure enquiries that arrive through those reviews actually get answered. If reviews are piling up unanswered and you’d rather that stopped being a job you remember to do, you can book a call and we’ll look at your setup together.
Either way, the point stands on its own. Your rating tells people how you’ve done. Your replies tell them what you’d be like to deal with, and right now most of your competitors are saying nothing at all.