Last week I spoke to RatePoint, which offers a suite of online marketing tools aimed at small businesses. Among them, the company provides “reputation management” but with a slightly different emphasis than some of the other products in the market.
RatePoint helps SMBs solicit reviews and it enables those reviews to be selectively published to Facebook and Twitter (like others). But the “hook” that will attract many SMBs to the company is email marketing.
Like Power Reviews or Bizarre Voice with retailers, RatePoint enables small business owners to solicit reviews on their sites and through other venues (e.g., Facebook). Here’s an example from a company that RatePoint uses in its testimonials (“Tea Guys”):
Detail on “Tea Guys” website:
As mentioned, reviews can then be published to Facebook (or Twitter):
Clicking that link sends users to a landing page that is itself “social”:
These “pages” are also SEO-friendly. Pricing varies by volume:
The elements here that are distinctive are the integration of email marketing into the overall product suite (RatePoint hosts the list) and the structured ability to solicit reviews with the platform.
I asked RatePoint co-founder and CEO Neal Creighton whether his SMB customers actually engaged with the reputation tool; in many cases SMBs are not utilizing these tools very heavily. He said yes, in contrast to what I’ve heard elsewhere.
The incorporation of email marketing makes this a stronger product overall, as well as one that’s “accessible” to SMBs.
June 28th, 2010 at 11:50 pm
[...] wrote earlier about how online marketing provider RatePoint helps local businesses generate reviews from [...]