Two of the most powerful types of inbound marketing are referral marketing and word-of-mouth marketing because people trust their peers. 93% of customers read an online review before making a purchase decision. Hence, generating online reviews for your business should always be a priority.
But how to get your customers to leave reviews? Well, it's not always an easy task outside the food and beverage industry.
And not just any reviews - positive ones! Because it's these positive reviews that play a major role in online reputation management.
Here are a few tried and tested tips to get more reviews for your business. Let's start!
Table Of Contents:
- Ask At The Right Time
- Optimize Calls To Action On Your Website
- Respond To All Reviews
- Display Reviews On Your Website
- Use Incentives To Increase Customer Reviews
- Add A Link In Your Email Signature
- Don't Forget Your Mobile Users
- Make It Easy For Customers To Find You
- Ensure Your Profile Is Updated On Multiple Review Sites
- Ask Again
- Pay Attention To Negative Reviews
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
1. Ask At The Right Time
It's quite tempting to fire off an email asking for reviews immediately after customers buy your product. But doing so can cause your customers to ignore your request straightaway.
If someone has just made a purchase, give them enough opportunity to use your product to form an opinion. And then ask them for a review or feedback. This has to be taken care of, especially if it's an online purchase that needs shipping.
You should time your review requests when the product is in the customer's hands. You can find out this time by checking the average delivery time and deciding the date with a few days' margin.
For instance, if your standard shipping policy is 2 to 3 working days, you can send out review requests to your customers a week after delivery. This will ensure that people physically receive the goods and have enough time in hand to test them, which makes it more likely for them to leave a review and for you to get more reviews.
Want to know how to ask your customers for reviews? Check out our complete guide on 12 smart ways to ask for a review.
2. Optimize Calls To Action On Your Website
Whenever you want to ask someone to do something on your website, you call them to action.
Optimizing CTAs on your website will increase conversions. In the case of online reviews, it encourages more of your customers to leave them.
Here are some of the best ways you can optimize CTAs on your website:
- Keep the CTA design simple and distraction-free.
- Choose a suitable CTA button color to help it stand out.
- Use a reasonable button size. People won't notice if it's too small, and if it's too big, it seems annoying.
- Design your web page in such a way that clicking the CTA button appears as the next logical step for people to take after checking out the reviews.
- Keep the copy for CTA short and actionable.
See how OptinMonster add their CTA directly under their customer review to to get more reviews. This makes it the next most sensible step for readers to take after reading reviews from other customers.
3. Respond To All Reviews
Another way to make sure you get more reviews for your business is to respond to every review left on your website and other review sites.
This might seem like a no-brainer, but the review process is a two-way situation. Your customers want to know that their feedback matters and that it's essential to you. No one likes to see their questions go unanswered.
Responding to customers honestly and quickly shows them you take their feedback seriously, which promotes customer loyalty.
While it might be difficult for you to manage reviews from several different platforms, it's best to use a Google review management software like Statusbrew. It integrates your reviews from several sites into one unified dashboard, making it easy for you to reply to them quickly.
Bonus Content: 5-Step Online Reputation Management Strategy
You can even collaborate with your team to respond to and manage customer feedback and queries. Statusbrew helps you mitigate compliance issues using controlled team member access and no password sharing.
You can choose to get notified of incoming reviews to respond as quickly as possible.
4. Display Reviews On Your Website
Displaying reviews on your website serves several purposes to get more reviews for your business, such as:
- Increased social proof through shoppers.
- Extra user-generated content that can improve your search engine rankings.
- Visitors can browse as many reviews as they want, ask questions, and mark reviews as helpful or unhelpful.
- If you are going to share reviews on your website, asking them from your website makes sense.
5. Use Incentives To Increase Customer Reviews
Coupons, discounts, and other rewards are excellent ways to encourage your customers to leave reviews. Also, incentives have the added bonus of encouraging repeat sales.
Loyalty programs are another great way to track and distribute your incentives. You can incorporate points for reviews and share reviews on social media if you have a loyalty program in place.
Social mentions can be pretty cool rewards, too (just don't forget to tag them).
While incentives are an effective way to get more reviews for your business, ensure that you are not just rewarding the positive reviews. Nobody likes negative reviews, but there are ways to deal with them. You should appreciate your customers for their honest feedback because it's your customer's honest feedback that will help you in the long run.
6. Add A Link In Your Email Signature
Do you do a lot of emailing to your customers and clients? Then, you can include a line in your email signature inviting them to post a review on their preferred site. It would be easy for your customers to simply click over the link in your email signature and leave a review.
Your signature could read something like "Happy with our service? Let others know with a quick review: HERE" or "Were we successful in solving your problem? Let others know by leaving a quick review HERE" and add a link.
Once your email signature is set up in a similar way, you will be putting this review message in front of the hundreds and thousands of customers you work with every month which will help you to get more reviews for your business.
7. Don't Forget Your Mobile Users
In the last six months, almost 79% of smartphone users have purchased online using mobile devices.
Several people are switching to their mobile devices to conduct all of their business operations. That means they are browsing, buying, reading their emails, and doing much more on mobile than on their desktops.
But what does this mean for you?
Your brand needs to ensure you have created responsive content that can be viewed easily on mobile devices. So, keep that in mind while asking for reviews, be it on email or a thank you page right after purchase.
If your ask is not readable to your customers on their mobile devices, they won't understand what you are asking for, which will decrease your chances to get more reviewfor your business. Similarly, if they find it difficult to write a review from their mobile devices, you are less likely to receive reviews from them.
Make it easy to write reviews on mobile, and you will see a higher number of reviews coming by in your way.
8. Make It Easy For Customers To Find You
Ensure you have a presence on multiple review sites to make it easier for your customers to find you and leave reviews on the platform of their choice. If you stick only to one review site or your website itself, you could potentially be alienating those customers who don't utilize either of those platforms.
So, you should maintain profiles on at least two or three online review sites, such as Facebook, Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, or any popular review site in your industry. The review sites you choose will depend on your industry (for instance, app reviews, consumer products, hospitality, or tourism).
Apart from being present on different review platforms, you should ensure you link your review sites in multiple places. Include a link to review on your website, in your email signature, or where you might find it appropriate so your customers can easily find them and leave you a review. You can't rely on your customers to jump through hoops to do you a favor, so make it as easy and simple for them as possible.
9. Ensure Your Profile Is Updated On Multiple Review Sites
Every customer using online reviews has their own preferred websites. They could go to Tripadvisor, Menus, or Yelp for restaurant reviews or to Amazon for eCommerce reviews. So, the best way to make sure you get more reviews for your business is to ensure your business listing appears the same on all relevant sites. Give one person the job of updating your profile on all relevant review sites.
If you choose to be present on several review sites, it goes without saying that you should maintain your profile on all these platforms (without an excuse).
By keep your profile updated on just one platform, you cannot expect your customers to leave their reviews on other platforms. If you don't update the profile on the platform of their choice, they might not leave a review, thinking that their review will not catch your eyes.
10. Ask Again
But, we have already asked once, isn't that enough?
Well, the second time's the charm sometimes. There is absolutely no harm in asking for an honest review again (unless you are irritating your customers), especially if you have got an email automation system in place.
Follow-up emails will act as gentle reminders in case your customers missed or forgot to reply to your email. Such emails will force your customers to notice your review requests. You will also let them know that you are interested in getting their feedback.
You can check your open rates and resend your review email again to those who didn't open the first email a week or so later to get more reviews.
11. Pay Attention To Negative Reviews
You might think that the best thing you can do with negative customer reviews is to ignore them, but it definitely isn't. Here's a good process to follow for negative reviews:
- Apologize.
- Ask the upset customer how to contact you.
- Explain how you will make it right.
- If you get their problem solved and they are happy, ask them to write a new review (or edit the original review).
If you have handled everything professionally and compassionately, it's entirely possible that you have gained a lifelong customer from a formerly bad review.
Bonus Content: How To Outsmart Fake Negative Reviews On Google My Business
You can also use reputation management tools like Statusbrew to turn around the sentiment of negative reviews.
Here's how:
- Get notified of all negative reviews to get back to irate customers quickly.
- Understand audience emotions using AI-powered sentiment analysis.
- Auto-assign negative reviews to specific team members.
- Automatically route negative reviews to a particular inbox/team member to be dealt with separately.
- Collaborate with your team members in real-time to handle customer queries.
- Auto-hide spam and troll comments across your social real estate.
- Keep track of customers who constantly post negative reviews across platforms using inbuilt CRM.
- Get in-depth brand reputation insights.
- Add internal tags to reviews to categorize and organize them neatly.
Sign up for a free demo with Statusbrew today to learn how we can help! ?
Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
Here are some commonly asked questions on how to get more reviews for your business:
How to get more Google reviews for your business?
Here's how you can get more Google reviews for your business:
- Make it easy for your customers to leave a Google review
- Respond to all customers reviews
- Create a Google review email campaign
How to get more Yelp reviews for your business?
Here are the three best ways to get more Yelp reviews for your business:
- Place a Yelp badge on your website
- Put a 'Find us on Yelp' sign in your email communications with customers
- Share your Yelp reviews on social media
How do I get good reviews for my business?
Always ask your customers to review you at the right time. Ask your happy and satisfied customers to review you. Be mindful of your customer's time and don't ask them for reviews when they might be busy or at work. Instead, ask them in their free hours if you want to increase your chances of getting good reviews. This increases the chances of getting positive reviews for your business.
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