Reviews are the looking glass into a business. Unfortunately, negative experiences compel people to leave reviews more than positive experiences do. Your business may satisfy 99/100 customers, and guess who will leave a review? The person who has something bad to say. Now of course, some people just love leaving good reviews and will do so after interacting with your business. However, chances are you’ll have to proactively pursue those people. To assist in your effort, here are 4 ways your business can garner more reviews.
Ask For Reviews
One of the easiest ways to get more reviews is to ask for them. And although it sounds simple, it’s often the tactic that business owners overlook the most! Asking for reviews doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require business owners to take a proactive role. It can be as easy as asking a satisfied customer if they would leave a review after they purchase in your store. Or sending an email or text to a customer with a link to where you want them to leave a review. According to a BrightLocal survey, out of 74% of customers who were asked to leave a review, 68% were willing to do so. Your customers are more than happy to help you, all you have to do is ask!
Respond to Reviews
When you respond to any review, it shows you value your reputation and your customer base. Responding to negative reviews can be particularly helpful. It can give you the chance to apologize, contest, or otherwise pacify your customers. If the review was totally unfair or a lie, you can set the record straight. If the review was honest and your business messed up, owning up to the mistake and apologizing shows your willingness to accept criticism. Responding to positive reviews is easy. Just thank them for choosing your business and invite them back. This is a great re-marketing tool. Make the customer feel valued and they will come to you again.
Run A Review Campaign
When it comes to reviews, keeping them updated is important! 77% of consumers think that reviews older than 3 months aren’t relevant. If asking for reviews is something you can’t fit into a daily routine, perhaps running a periodic review campaign to generate lots of reviews at once is the way to go. This can be sending texts, emails, and surveys to a mass group of people instead of doing it one by one. You can run this campaign once a month or as often as you’d like! This can help shorten the amount of time you have to dedicate to gathering reviews.
Automate with a Reviews Platform
Despite all these tips, the hardest part is to actually ask a customer for a review. When do you ask? In person? Even a card in the mail requires multiple steps for the customer to actually place the review. A better way to gather reviews is through automation software. Here’s how Jump software does it:
Make it easy to ask your customers for reviews.
- Send one-off reviews or upload a CSV file to send a batch of review requests.
- Choose how they will receive the review invites through email or text.
- Choose where you would like them to leave the review, on Google or Facebook.
- Create templates for review invitations.
Make it easy to monitor all your reviews.
- See and filter your reviews from 30+ review sites all in one place.
- Once a review is sent, check the progress and send reminders if necessary.
Make it easy to respond to reviews.
- Get notified of new reviews from different platforms like Google, Facebook, Yelp & more.
- Respond to any review from within the app no matter which platform it was posted.
- See location-specific reviews if you have multiple locations.
This decreases the amount of steps the customer takes to actually write a review. It’s much easier to develop a review gathering strategy using Jump.
Take an active approach to gather new reviews. You’ll see more business and better search results on Google. For example, a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue. Reviews are free marketing. Take advantage of it.