Reviews are hugely beneficial not only for you but for your customers as well. We’ve compiled a list of 6 tips to help you get more reviews from your customers!
Ask for reviews
In order to fully reap the benefits of what reviews can do for your business, it’s important to receive positive reviews on a regular basis so that you can be using those reviews to your advantage. It is important to be consistently asking your customers for reviews in places such as your Google My Business listing or on Facebook.
The best way to get more reviews from your customers is to ask! Ensure you are sending review requests to all your customers via email and SMS. It doesn’t hurt to follow up, however it’s important to not be pushy.
Explain why reviews are important
There are 2 things you should educate your customers on before sending them a review request.
Communicate that you are always striving to make your customer experience better and that feedback in the form of reviews are very much appreciated and valued. Communicate to your customer that if they were happy with your service and would like to support your small business, a thank you in the form of a review would be a great way to show support.
Secondly, explaining that this isn’t just important in order to meet customer expectations but that their feedback helps other consumers to benefit by finding quality service providers online.
Make writing a review as simple as possible
Many times your happy customers want to leave you a review but a few factors can come into play that may sidetrack them along the way. Just like you, your customer is most likely busy and doesn’t have the time to figure out how to leave a review. Perhaps they wanted to leave a review and they got busy and forgot to leave one. There may also be some confusion about where to leave a review since there are many places to leave a review, from Google, Facebook, Yellow Pages etc. Unless you are crystal clear about what platform you would like your customer to leave a review for you on, chances are they won’t take the time to leave you feedback.
It’s your job to make this process super easy for your customer! The most effective way to get a review from your customer is sending them an email or text review request with a link that easily guides them through the process of leaving you a review on the platform(s) that you would like a review on. A simple message asking ‘How was your experience?’ with a link guiding your customer to the ‘leave a review’ page on Google is a pretty effective method. Did you know that text messages have a 98% open rate and a 45% response rate making them a pretty effective way to collect valuable feedback from your customers?
However you choose to contact your customers, just make sure you remove the friction from the review process and you will increase your odds of receiving them.
Write reviews for your customers
Once you get to know your customers and depending on your industry, chances are many of them are business owners. By showing genuine support by using their services and leaving them a meaningful review, they might decide to leave you a review in return.
It’s important to not only leave reviews for the sole purpose of hoping to get one in return. Leave an honest review of a business that you enjoy using and by giving out reviews you may find that your network contacts want to support you too.
Create a process for asking for reviews
An effective way of getting more reviews from your customers is to put a simple process in place that ensures you are asking every happy customer for a review.
At the end of the service or job you could start the review process by verbally mentioning if you were happy with your experience we would appreciate it if you left us a review on Google.
Then follow up by sending your customer an email or text review request with a link to leave you a review.
Bonus points for automating this process by using review management software! We’ll touch on this more below.
Set-up Automation
Did you know that by utilising review management software, such as Review Robin, there is a way to put your review requests on autopilot? This makes the process of sending review requests effortless and ensures you never forget to ask a customer for a review. By setting up automation this helps free up both time and mental space and allows you to focus on other tasks in your business, while helping boost your SEO and online reputation.
You can easily hook Review Robin into software you use everyday (such as Quickbooks) which automates the process of sending review requests out to your customers. Reviews are a numbers game and it’s important to request reviews from every customer to increase your number of reviews.
In Conclusion
We feel pretty confident that if you put these 6 steps into action that you will gradually see your reviews begin to increase over time. Remember review management software is a helpful tool that will offer you big value and time savings by making the process of getting more reviews from your customers super easy.