How do online reviews impact revenue for quick serve food and beverage businesses?

It's clearly important for quick serve businesses to claim their listings on as many review sites as possible, but they should also focus on engaging their customers via reviews.

68% of quick serve businesses in our study hadn't responded to even a single review, which goes to show just how few businesses are taking advantage of this beneficial practice.

Let's see how responding to reviews impacts revenue for local quick serve businesses.

As you can see above, quick serve businesses who don't respond to reviews earn 8% less than average, while those who responded to even just one review earn 7% more than average. This shows a little goes a long way when it goes to engaging with customers online.

Quick serve businesses who responded on a more regular basis, up to 25% of the time, earn 20% more than average. However, as reply rate climbs to more than 25%, revenue dips slightly.

This is likely because quick serve businesses with a large number of total reviews may be more popular and established, and may be likely to earn more money than average. However, they may also be more likely to have a much lower review response percentage.

This becomes clear when you look at revenue by total number of review responses:

Quick serve businesses that respond to at least 1 review respond to a total of 26 reviews on average.

Again, even quick serve businesses that respond to just one review earn 7% more than average, but you can see the averages climb as a quick serve business responds to reviews.

By the time you get to quick serve businesses who reply to more than 100 reviews, they are earning an astounding $113,000 more each year than average.

When it comes to responding to reviews, it's clear that quick serve businesses should focus primarily on giving genuine responses to both negative and positive reviews.

As we'll explain in the sections below, getting more reviews is clearly important, but staying engaged with customers in a genuine way can make a real difference.

Quick serve business owners often stress about their star rating, but as we explain in the section above, chasing a perfect star rating probably isn't the best way to increase revenue.

On the other hand, our findings suggest that quick serve business owners should perhaps focus much more on increasing their number of reviews than almost anything else.

Quick serve businesses in our analysis average a combined 184 reviews per business across all review sites. This is more than twice the number of reviews for the average business across all industries, suggesting that a large number of reviews may be more important for quick serve businesses than other types of businesses.

We analyzed revenue at quick serve businesses whose review counts fall above and below that average 184-review threshold.

As suspected, total number of reviews is definitely quite important for local quick serve businesses.

Those who have more than the average 184 reviews earn a substantial 44% more in annual revenue than the average quick serve business.

Those with fewer than the average total number of reviews, meanwhile, earn 18% less.

Looking closer at the numbers helps further clarify the relationship between the number of reviews and average revenue for local quick serve businesses.

Quick serve businesses with fewer than 50 reviews earn a 30% less than average, and those with up to 100 reviews didn't earn much more. Once quick serve businesses get into the 100 to 184-review range is when revenue starts to climb above the average.

Then, as you can see, the more reviews a quick serve business gets, the more money they earn.

Average revenue jumps all the way to a 32% increase when you get to the 184-300 review range, and climbs even higher from there. To punctuate how important a lot of reviews can be for quick serve food and beverage places, those with more than 500 reviews earn a substantial $166,000 more than average.

This strongly suggests that when a customer searches online for a place to grab a cup of coffee or a quick bite to eat, a large number of reviews may outweigh a high star rating.

Once again Google is clearly the most important review site for quick serve businesses, as those with an above-average review count on the site earn 42% more than average—far more than the boost from any other review site.

But still, local quick serve businesses would be smart to get as many reviews on as many sites as possible. Some bar owners worry that pushing for reviews may expose them to getting more bad reviews, but as we'll explain in a section below, bad reviews can actually be a good thing.

It's clearly important to get a steady stream of fresh reviews, but how important is the ratio of positive to negative reviews?

On average, 21% of the reviews posted about a given quick serve business were negative. This puts quick serve businesses right at the average negative review rate across all industries.

Does this mean revenue at quick serve businesses is more or less impacted by a large number of negative reviews? Let's find out.

As the charts above reveal, quick serve businesses aren't severely impacted by a large number of negative reviews.

As with other industries, quick serve businesses with a healthy mix of good and bad reviews earn the most on average. The ideal spot is a negative review rate between 20 and 50%, with quick serve businesses whose reviews are 25 to 35% negative earning 25% more than average.

Surprisingly, even quick serve businesses whose reviews were 75 to 100% negative earn more than average. Now, this is quite likely due to a variety of unrelated factors such as the type of quick serve businesses who fall in that sample size, and we wouldn't claim a 75 to 100% negative review rate to be ideal for any business.

However, when customers browse quick serve business listings on review sites, they likely expect to see some negative reviews. In fact, many customers actively seek out negative reviews first, and a business with little or no negative reviews might appear untested or even a little "too good to be true."

Our takeaway: quick serve businesses that focus on getting as many real and authentic reviews as possible reap the rewards.

Next we looked at which states' quick serve businesses were the best at managing their online presence. We started by analyzing the percentage of quick serve businesses in each state that had claimed at least one review site listing.

*Note: There was insufficient data for quick serve businesses in the following states: Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

96% of North Dakota's quick serve businesses have claimed at least 1 review site listing, which was good for the top of our list. Kansas, Wyoming, Minnesota, and Iowa also had over 90% of their quick serve businesses claim at least 1 review site listing.

On the other end of the spectrum, only 57% of the quick serve businesses in our analysis from Alaska have claimed a single listing, putting them at the bottom of the list.

Lastly, we looked at how frequently quick serve businesses in each state responded to reviews.

North Dakota quick serve businesses were also the most engaged, with 70% of local quick serve businesses responding to at least one review. Hawaii came in second with 63%, and Minnesota, Arizona, and Wyoming all had over 50% of their quick serve businesses respond to at least one review.

Montana quick serve businesses were the least engaged, as only 9% of the quick serve businesses in our study from Big Sky Country responded to at least one review.