Do your clients always leave you great online reviews?

Do you have a ton of happy customers, but very few online reviews? You’re not alone. Many small business owners are in this exact same position. But, online reviews are still very important. This is because they are the online version of word-of-mouth marketing. Thankfully, it can be easy to get more reviews for your brand.

Before people buy from your brand, they want to know that they can trust you. They want to know that your products or services offer them real value and other people have had a positive experience working with you. Without reviews, people have no way of knowing this.

So, if online reviews are so important, why do most businesses have so little reviews? It’s because they either forget about the importance, or it’s too awkward to ask for them. Even if you did provide a customer with an excellent experience, it can feel weird to ask them to leave you a great review. This is why having a plan to get more reviews can be so helpful in gathering more leads.

Here are our five tricks for gathering more reviews for your brand. When you implement them, you should start seeing more and more reviews come in from your customers.

1. Pick Your Platform

Some platforms are designed specifically for certain industries. For example, this could be Angie’s List or Lawyers.com. If your industry has one of these specific platforms, then you should focus on these. If your industry does not have one of these platforms, then you will need to pick which one you would like to focus on. We recommend using either Facebook or Google. With both of these platforms, people can figure out who you are and what you offer. Then, they can see your reviews and decide to work with your business.

It is important that you stick to one platform to drive traffic to. You don’t want to drive traffic to several sites when you initially start asking for reviews. When you start getting more and more comfortable, then you can start to focus on a small handful of platforms. This way, you don’t burn yourself out and you make the process easier for your customers.

2. Find the Link to Your Review Page

On each reviewing platform, there is a specific link for your business’ page. For example, on Google My Business, if you go to your home screen, you will see a card that says “Get More Reviews.” This will lead you to a link for your Google My Business profile and you can copy this link to send to customers. Whereas with Facebook, you simply copy your URL and put “/reviews” at the end of it. Then, you copy the entire URL and you are ready to send it off to your customers.

3. Create an Email Template to Gather Reviews

Now, you will want to create an email template that you can send to customers to request for reviews. To do this, open up a Word document on your computer. Once you are in your Word document, you want to consider how you should approach your customers. Depending on your business, you will want to use the appropriate language. For example, a lawyer’s request should be more professional than a trendy clothing shop’s request. No matter what, it should go along the lines of this:

“Hi [first name],

I am so grateful that you are such a great client and always support [your business’ name]. I know you are really busy, so I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Would you mind taking two minutes out of your day to leave us a review? Your review can be incredibly helpful for our business and can help support us in getting other great customers like you.

To leave a review, just click this link [hyperlink your review page].

Thank you so much again for your time and I hope you have a great day!

Best,

[Your name]”

As you can see, the template doesn’t have to be long or complicated. It just has to ask your customer for their time and be professional.

4. Create Your Customer List

Next, you will want to create a list of customers that you want to send your email to. This list can be as long or as short as you would like it to be as long as it is filled with great customers who will leave you a great review. You also want to make sure you send each email individually with the customer’s first name so it is more personal. If you have a long list of customers, then you want to use an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp. An email marketing platform will help you personalize dozens of emails with very minimal time. It will also look as though you personally sent it, rather than sending it to a big group of people.

5. Automate Your Emails for the Future

Now that you have all of this set up, you will want to automate it for future customers. This way, it saves you time, and you are always on top of sending a request for a review from customers. The best time to send out this request is right when the customer is done using your services or buying your product. You can either send this manually, as long as you can keep up with it, or use an automation tool.

Automating your entire business can be difficult, but it does make everything much easier. We have several videos, trainings, and blog posts on how to automate your business. But, for now, I will give you an example of how automation works for our business. When I have delivered a product to a customer, I take their contact card in my automation software, and drag it over to our “Completed” tab. This then triggers an action in the automation software to send them the review request. Additionally, we have a link that initially asks for their rating on a scale of one to five. If they hit four or five, we direct them to our Facebook page to leave a review. But, if they hit one through three, we direct them to a feedback form so we can hear what went wrong. This helps us avoid negative reviews, but still collect negative feedback so we know how to improve.

When you are trying to get more online reviews, try the tricks above. There is a great chance your reviews will increase as soon as you start doing this. This way you can build brand trust and get even more leads.

If you are interested in more tips and tricks for your online marketing, social media marketing, website, and more, you will love our Finally Visible Academy.

We offer low-cost software that gives you everything you need to professionally market your business. We even give you a texting platform to use! So, make your life easier and check it out.

Links Mentioned In This Video:

• MailChimp