Customers tend to consider a multitude of different things when it comes to buying something from your company. Among things like your company’s history, your business practices, how people trust your products, etc., they will always check reviews (especially customer reviews) before indulging in your services or getting your products.
With the golden age of door to door salesmen and enthusiastic shop salesmen gone, people can now buy or book online without ever steeping foot in your shop or talking with a sales rep, making your online presence all the more important than ever.
Simply put the best sales representatives and marketers of your company are not your own employees, but it is instead your customers. Statistics show that more than 90% of customers admitted that their purchasing was influenced by customer reviews, and about 20% of customers made their purchasing decisions based on online reviews.
As customer reviews will always be able to more effectively sway new customers, it is imperative that you are able to persuade your customers to leave reviews on the internet. However, the research found that more than 80% of customers don’t contribute reviews for what they purchased. Facing such paradox, if you happen to find yourself in a position where customers do not tend to leave reviews on your website or third-party platforms, then here are seven ways through which you can get your customers to leave more reviews.
1. Look Everywhere
Now it is true that most people will tend to leave reviews on websites like Facebook, yelp, or other third party review websites. By developing your channels on those popular third-party platforms, you make sure that your customers can learn about you no matter where when they are looking for purchasing opinions.
Make sure that you set up a proper place on your website that allows your customers to write reviews over there. This will give them a lot more options for where they want to leave their reviews, which is always helpful and working.
2. Incentivize Reviews
One of the most effective ways to get people to leave reviews about your company is offering meaningful incentives to your customers. The key word here is “meaningful”. You have to ensure that whatever incentives you are offering are worth the time that your customers will take to write and post as reviews. Offering incentives for reviews is regulated and governed by laws, so any incentivized reviews need to be revealed to the public in certain ways and incentives are handed out no matter the reviews are positive or negative.
A customer’s time is valuable, when you provide incentives, you are trying to make your customers write a review for a concrete reason and make them feel that giving the review is worth it. There are many different incentives for reviews, the most common ways include discounts, unique items, coupon codes, gift cards, adding bonus, or free goodies, but again, all of these should impel customers to write a review.
3. Be Interactive and Responding
Well other than incentives to make reviewers feel like they did not waste their time writing a review, you should reply to all the reviews to make your customers feel that their efforts and opinions are valued and their voice is heard regardless of where they put up their reviews. Even a little Thank You can work wonders for your company.
When showing your gratitude towards good reviews, don’t try to erase and stay away providing thoughtful response to those negative reviews. Study shows that addressing the issues raised in negative reviews, apologizing and coming to a solution can help to improve your business and effectively generate more positive reviews in the long run. You will find that you are getting more and more positive reviews by being interactive, transparent, and turning results of bad into good when responding to your customer reviews.
4. Optimize Your Profiles and Content
While there is no doubt that it is important to reply to your customers and their reviews on different platforms, it is also important for you to optimize your website content, social media profiles, emails , and blog pages, making it easy for customers to write reviews and giving them access to their choice of platform to leave a review.
- Adding links to your content and all of your social media posts is an essential marketing tactic as it allows new customers to instantly access your review page and read or drop a review of their own.
- You should also optimize your website for mobile devices, seeing how a majority of the internet users are now more on their phones than on their laptop. Until now, there are still many companies that fail to meet their customers where they are on mobile. Providing a seamless mobile experience to encourage mobile users leave reviews has become more and more important for a business to get more customer reviews.
- Adding review request on receipts is an effective way to get more customer reviews. On the receipt, you can provide clear instructions like ‘Please leave us a Review on Google’ or ‘Share your experience on Facebook’; or include Call-to-Action buttons or links to the various channels to review your products or service.
5. Don’t Be Pushy
Asking your customers to leave reviews is a popular way to get more reviews. However, a mistake that most companies make is that they will tend to ask customers for reviews at the wrong time. You should be very careful when asking your customers for their review, as most of them can have a short fuse and can get a little angry when you ask them for a review in the middle of, or early on in their journey. One of the best times to ask for a review is when your customer is at the end of their journey or when they are at checkout. You can also ask them for a review when they tag your company in a post, if they are spending much time on the shop, or when they re-order something.
6. Be Specific about What You Want
Among the many things that customers have to go through in order to get what they want, it is best not to beat around the bush. Being specific is always helpful to your customers. Be honest and straightforward about your want in your review, like how your customers felt about your services, or mentioning the employee who helped them, or where you would like them to put that review. If you want customers to put a review on Facebook, contact them through messenger and tell them what you want the contents of the review to be and send them a link of your page. If you want them to post a review on Yelp or any other review site, be sure to link that when sending them the email or the message.
7. Send an Email after the Customer Makes a Purchase
Sending email requests is an effective way to get more reviews. It allows your customers to do it anytime in their convenience at their schedule. Customers are not always willing to leave a review after they buy something and try it out. Therefore, to help remind them, companies can send them an email asking them to leave a review for their products. It is important to include links in the emails to the profiles and platforms you wanted to focus on, giving options to your customers to access to their choice of platforms to write reviews.
A very typical example of this practice is Etsy, an online marketplace, sending emails to all of its customers after they purchase something on its website. Based on their data, they have reported to the wall street journal that almost 25% of their sales now result in a review.
Conclusion
Getting reviews from your customers is a surefire way to get more new customers to open up and trust your company. Even if your customers leave a bad review, it is important for you to reply to them and make sure they feel heard. After all, these people are representing your company and act as a vessel for other customers to trust you.
