by Don’t expect a potential customer to trust you right off the bat. You may be telling everyone how great your service and/or product is (and you may even be right), but your competitors will be saying the exact same thing about their own company.
Fortunately, there’s one way to help you stand out from the online noise: a plethora of online reviews.
Prospective customers gravitate to reviews. They’ll look for others like them and implicitly trust what they have to say about their experience with a business. In fact, half of your audience trusts online reviews as much as they would a recommendation from a personal friend or family member.
Luckily, this doesn’t mean you have to wait for reviews to come to you. Instead, use the following 7 strategies help you get more online reviews, expanding your online presence and credibility at the same time.
1. Ask for a Review at the Transaction Point
This works especially well for businesses with a physical, brick-and-mortar presence or in-person sales point. Letting your customers know they can leave a review when they make a purchase can do wonders for accruing good reviews.
Set up a simple sign at your register explaining how customers can leave a review. Publicly encouraging your customers to leave reviews can build credibility because it shows you’re not afraid of feedback. That confidence alone might be enough to make your customers more likely to follow through with leaving the review, especially if they had a good experience.
2. Follow Up With a Post-Sales Email
Obviously, customers who just purchased your product don’t have experience using it yet. That makes a digital follow-up so important.
Send an email one or two days after a customer purchases from you asking them to leave a review and pointing them in the right direction. You can even automate the email to go out automatically, reducing your workload.
If your customers convert online, you’ll already have their email to use. Ask for an email from your in-store customers so you can send the follow-up accordingly.
3. Simplify the Review Submission Process
Whether you’re asking at the purchase point or after the fact, one thing is clear: the less friction you create, the more likely you are to get reviews.
In other words, making it more difficult to submit reviews only increases the likelihood that those with a gripe will actually submit something. To get more (and more positive) reviews, you need to make the process as simple as possible.
Start by creating a short URL that you can use on printed materials. Explain where customers can find your business on services like Google or Yelp or send them directly to your profile.
It also doesn’t hurt to ask your customers how you can make it easier for them. As with the reviews themselves, take their feedback seriously as you look to improve your online review volume.
4. Engage With Your Existing Customer Reviews
We’ve already mentioned customers prioritizing reviews when they evaluate businesses. The only thing more important for customers to see than good reviews? Businesses actively engaging with their reviews.
Replying to positive reviews is easy. Thank them for their feedback. With negative reviews, it’s a bit trickier. But don’t let that stop you.
Ignore negative reviews, and they will become a mark against your business. If, however, you can find a way to credibly engage with whoever left the review, bad reviews can actually benefit you. If you respond appropriately, you can not only turn unhappy customers into repeat purchasers but also show prospective customers that you care about your audience.
Acknowledge the negative review and make an honest attempt to rectify it.
It’s important to note, this advice does not apply to spam or trolling. If a comment is clearly irrelevant to your business, try to have it removed.
5. Feature Positive Reviews on Your Product or Service Pages
Follow the steps above and you’ll get at least some positive reviews on your online profiles. Now, it’s time to leverage those.
Positive reviews are great because they offer social proof. You can ensure potential customers see that proof by showcasing reviews at your online purchase points and on your product or service pages.
That’s more than just great content in isolation. This can also serve as a subtle reminder to new customers that their voice and opinion are important. And, if you link to the business profiles where those reviews come from, you can make it easy for them to do so.
6. Include Online Review Reminders on Your Website
Your product and service pages aren’t the only places to showcase and ask for reviews. In fact, there’s a simple way to help you do it on all of your pages: your website footer.
This is where you;ll likely have your business information and most important links. Why not include a quick call to action and link to your Google Business Profile?
Simple language like “Love our product? Leave a review” works best here. At the very least, it is a subtle and constant reminder for happy customers to share their satisfaction with the world.
7. Ask for Reviews on Social Media
Finally, it never hurts to leverage your social media channels for online reviews. Here, you have two options:
- Ask your followers a direct question about how they like your products. Their comments can become reviews you can showcase on your other channels.
- Link directly to a page or profile where they can leave reviews. That’s especially easy with a platform like Facebook that offers integrated review functionality.
Of course, you need to be subtle. Constantly asking for reviews is a surefire way to lose followers. But the occasional review-related question, woven naturally into more organic content, can do wonders.
Closing Thoughts
Online reviews don’t just happen automatically. You’ll need a great product that customers actually want to review, and you’ll need a strategy to drive those happy customers to the right place at the right time.
Fortunately, accomplishing both objectives can be surprisingly simple. Ask for reviews during and after the purchase and on your website. Showcasing and engaging with existing reviews can also do wonders.
And, of course, you can incorporate other channels, like email and social media, to gather more reviews. Add it all together, and you can build a reliable pipeline for getting the kind of online reviews potential customers love to read.
That’s not just theoretical. We’ve used strategies like those listed above to help businesses across the country get more and better reviews. If you want to accomplish the same thing, let’s talk. We’d love to give you a free consultation and answer any review and marketing-related questions you might have.
