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Education

Help merchants claim their One of the key ways you can help

merchants increase revenue – and
online review profiles your residuals – is by assisting them in
taking control of their online business
presence on review sites (Google, Yelp,
TripAdvisor, Facebook, OpenTable for
restaurants, etc.). The advantages of this
approach may seem self-evident, but it
wasn't until recently that the financial
impact of this practice was examined
in detail.
Power of online reviews

I first broached this topic in "Merchants'
online reviews are impacting your re-
siduals," published in The Green Sheet
Aug. 12, 2019, issue 19:08:01. In that ar-
ticle, I revealed recent research data in-
By Peter Shenk dicating that one of the best ways MLSs
Womply can help merchants increase transac-
tion volume (and their own residuals)
've often stressed the importance of ISOs and merchant level salespeople is to educate merchants on the relevant
(MLS) moving from simply providing processing into a more consulta- points of online review management.
tive role with merchants. Such an approach helps create stickier relation-
I ships and can help merchants survive in today's turbulent marketplace. I discussed other findings from Wom-
ply's report How online reviews impact
small business revenue, including eye-
opening facts such as merchants with
more than nine reviews posted within
the last 90 days process 52 percent more
revenue than average, and merchants
with 25 or more recent reviews process
108 percent more than average.
Highest-ROI, lowest-lift

This article shares additional find-
ings from the report and describes
how merchants (and other business
owners) can take control of their on-
line business presence on review sites
– and why they should do so. To find
out which online reputation manage-
ment techniques correlated with the
largest increases in merchant revenue,
Womply's data science team analyzed
transactions and online review data for
nearly 210,000 merchants across dozens
of industries in all 50 states.

If you had to select the single, highest-
ROI, lowest-lift task to encourage mer-
chants to do that correlates with higher
processing volume and residuals, it
would be to claim all their relevant
online listings. The process takes mere
minutes, and the benefits are many and
varied. Let's talk numbers

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