When your company is up and running, you want potential clients to know all about your successes. You can promote them yourself, but recommendations from your customers will have a much bigger effect. Consider changing your strategy to get your business the good reviews it needs.
Be memorable
One way to encourage customers to leave a review is to give them something to talk about. Forbes contributor Marcia Layton Turner says that great attention and fast responses will give your clients great stories to pass around to colleagues or friends. Examples include working late so a customer reaches an emergency goal or helping a retail customer find a product that you don’t carry in your store. You need to do more than just the bare minimum to motivate your customers to remember you as someone they truly enjoy doing business with.
Make a landing page
If you’re looking for more reviews online, there are many outlets your customers could post to. Besides basic review areas on Google, Facebook or Yelp, your industry might have its own niche of recommendation sites. The marketing experts at Wishpond recommend you create a landing page that’s easy to get to with links out to the places where you would like your customers to leave reviews. While it means they might have to visit multiple websites to leave you feedback, it’s simpler than having them find your profiles on their own.
Remember to ask
You probably know when you’ve had a great interaction with a customer, so trust your feelings and ask for a review. Susan Ward of The Balance Small Business says that clients might not think of giving you a review for a good experience if they don’t understand that they’re important to you. To help your ask, have a business card or small flyer with the URL of the review landing page you created earlier. If you don’t have one, you could put the address of your preferred review site profile.
Be social
Consider using social media to make word-of-mouth referrals second nature. John Rampton, contributor to Entrepreneur, suggests posting content that would encourage them to either share it to their own profile or tag friends. For instance, you could take pictures of happy customers with their purchases and tell them you’ll upload it to a popular site. While social media interactions might not add to your star ratings, it will spread your influence.
Avoid incentives
A lot of advice online says to incentivize online reviews with free products or other perks. Before you move forward, consider the consequences. The Federal Trade Commission’s Lesley Fair posted in April of 2019 that the practice can break the rules of review sites and hurt you in the long run. For instance, the Better Business Review’s site has users check off that they “have not been offered any incentive or payment originating from the business to write the review.” If your customers check that box and you reward them for the post, they are technically helping you use deceptive business practices.
Getting customers to leave reviews can be a challenge, but with the right tools and strategies you can boost your star ratings and bring in more clients.