How to get more reviews

Online reviews are an essential aspect of any business’s online presence. Positive reviews can influence potential customers’ purchasing decisions, while negative reviews can harm a business’s reputation.

However, getting customers to leave reviews can be challenging, and many businesses struggle to collect a significant number of reviews, creating a scenario where any one review can have a drastic impact on their overall rating. The easiest way to avoid this is to get the happy and satisfied customers to leave honest reviews. Here we will discuss a few tactics that can be used to gather reviews.

Make it easy for customers to leave reviews

Make sure that customers can easily find where to leave reviews. This can be achieved by adding links to a business’s website, social media profiles, and at checkout to direct customers to review sites like Google and Facebook. Businesses can also create a page on their website dedicated to customer reviews. Here, customers can leave feedback directly on their site and can be encouraged to share the same review on a review site. However, businesses should avoid review gating, which is the act of only letting happy customers leave reviews on GBP. Review gating goes against Google guidelines and if caught Google may decide to remove reviews. For businesses using an online method to encourage reviews on Google or other sites, ensure that all customer, happy or otherwise, get the option.

Ask for reviews

Asking customers for reviews can be an effective way to get more feedback. In fact, 86% of consumers would consider writing a review and 77% of consumers will leave a review if asked. This means that businesses can get a lot of reviews simply by asking, which is low-hanging fruit business don’t want to miss. There are 3 tactics that businesses should use when asking for reviews:

• • Train staff to ask customers to leave a review at the end of their visit or purchase.
• • Place a sign at the cash register asking people to leave a review. Including a QR code linking to the review site can help make it easy.
• • Ensure all purchases that leave an email, whether online or in-store, after purchase they should receive an email asking them to leave a review online.

 
One of the easiest ways to boost your review score is to simply, get more reviews and asking your customers to leave one should part of the sale process, regardless of how the sale is made.

Respond to reviews

Responding to customer reviews shows that a business values the feedback their customers give and are committed to improving themselves. It can also reinforce the trustworthiness of the business. Consumers find a business 70% more trustworthy if they are responding to reviews, and, business that don’t respond see 15% more customer churn. Businesses should respond to both positive and negative reviews, thanking customers for their positive feedback and addressing any concerns raised in negative reviews. In negative reviews, a phone number or email should be provided so that the conversation can be taken out of the public eye and get resolved. This will also show to future reviewers, where they should go to have concerns addressed possibly avoiding some future negative reviews.

Monitor online reputation

Monitoring online reputation is crucial for understanding how customers perceive a business. Using reputation management software that aggregates the reviews across all of a business’s locations to one place makes it more efficient to respond in a scale for brands with 100s-1000s of locations. Businesses will want to make sure that their reputation management software does the following:

• • Aggregates all reviews from applicable sites. This should include review rating and content for each review, and should be displayed at and location and client level.
• • Uses automation to eliminate repetitive work.
• • Uses analysis tools to provide sentiment feedback on the review content (not just whether a review is positive or negative, but what it actually says).

This might appear as a good review when only considering star rating but has critical information that can be missed without software to analyze minute details.

In conclusion, getting more customer reviews for businesses online requires a combination of excellent customer service, effective communication, and proactive reputation management. By executing on these three things—especially at scale—businesses should start to see their review count grow, and with that, improved ratings across the different review sites.