If you sell online, you know that reviews are of paramount importance. In addition to using an online review generation system, there are plenty of many other ways in which you can get as many online reviews as possible. Some of these ways include:
Setting up profiles on multiple review sites
There is no way that people are going to leave you a review if you don’t have profiles in the sites that are relevant to your business. The first thing you should do is to do your research and find out the sites where your potential customers hang out.
The most common ones are: Yelp, Google Local, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, Angie’s List, and many others. You should create professional profiles that reflect your brand.
Ask your customers
Most of the average customers aren’t going to bother leaving a review, unless they are looking to leave a negative one. As long as you are providing a good service or product, you shouldn’t shy away from asking the customers to leave a review.
The best time to ask them is as soon as they have come into contact with your service or product. For example, when the diners visit your restaurant, you can send them a message on their phone asking them to review the restaurant. As mentioned above, most of them won’t have a problem with it, as long as you are providing a great service.
When you are asking the customers to leave a review, you should make it easy for them to leave one. You can do this by always including a link to the review site where you would want a review. This calls for you to include a link in the email and messages that you send to the customers.
Offer incentives
Most people are likely to do something when they know they are going to benefit from it. You should take advantage of this by giving rewards to the people that leave you a review. For example, Zappos hands out points or credit to the people that give a review.
There is no harm in doing that, especially at the start.
You should note that you should offer incentives for the reviews—you shouldn’t buy the reviews. You want authentic customer reviews from people that have used the product or service.
One of the tricks you can use is to offer points in your customer loyalty program. Also, consider having entries in a monthly or quarterly draw.
Follow up with them
While many customers won’t have a problem with writing a review when you ask them, there are a few that won’t do it due to time constraints. Others might forget about it. For you to ensure that you get as many reviews as possible, you should remind them that they are yet to make their voice heard.
All you need to do is to write a short message or email asking them to remember leaving a review. Studies show that over 50% of people are more likely to give a review when you remind them.
Make use of software programs
Many business owners avoid asking for reviews as they don’t have time to monitor them. You no longer have to worry about it as there are plenty of software tools in the market that can help you with that.
The tools help you with customer interaction and online review management. The tools notify the customers about their need to leave a review. They also provide an easy to use platform where the customers can leave reviews on all the platforms in one go.
This saves the customers time as they only need to write one review and it’s posted on multiple sites. This also provides you with many reviews on the many sites, which means increased reputation and more business on your side.
While there are many review management software programs, no two of them are the same. For you to have an easy time interacting with the programs, ensure that they are easy to use. The last thing you want are systems that are going to make your life difficult. Running a business is hard enough, isn’t it?
The system should also be easy to use on the side of the customer. The customer should be able to leave a review without any complication.
