Surefire Tips for Getting More Reviews

Marketing is a term that seems to constantly expand and evolve. It includes email, social, SEO, paid advertising, analytics, automation, technology and much more.

Marketing ‘gurus’ that pop up on your Facebook feed are a dime a dozen these days. There are countless tactics you could choose to try to see what sticks.

Our advice? Always start with a strategy, and, most importantly, best practices. These are tried and true over time, and have been proven to work. Just like with any effective business practice, certain guidelines followed correctly, WILL produce better results.

The review collection process is no different. When you break it down, there are best practices for success. Here are three simple best practices to generate more quality reviews.

Prime Your Customer Before Asking For the Review

You know your business better than anyone. Keep doing what you do best, but begin to prepare your customer for the upcoming review request earlier in your engagement with the customer.

Coach them towards expecting to give a review as part of your service agreement. Let me give you an example.

“Ok John, we are going to work diligently to provide the best service possible. And by the way, when we are completed, and if our work was up to your expectation, would you be willing to leave us a five star review? Of course, if anything was not to your satisfaction throughout the process we would ask that you reach out immediately so we can fix any issue.”

If John says, “Yes, I’ll leave a review”, you’ve just significantly increased the chance that he won’t ignore the review request when he receives it.

Depending on the length of your sales process, it may be appropriate to soft close more than once, only upping the chances of this working to your benefit. As an example, if you’re providing a home or professional service, you can remind them again of the importance you place on reviews as you’re delivering the final product or walk-through.

For example, “Hey John, as you may recall, we said we would be asking for a 5-star review if we lived up to your expectations. We’ll be sending out a request for a review and would ask that you take a minute to respond.”

Ask at the Right Time, and Ask Multiple Times

The strategy around the appropriate time in the sales process to actually ask for the review is very important. This can obviously vary depending on your industry, but in general within 24 hours is appropriate so the experience is fresh on the mind of the customer.

For instance, if you are a home builder, you won’t want to ask for a review before the build has even begun. If you are a dentist, you definitely shouldn’t wait to ask for a review 2 weeks after the dental work has been completed. If you’re selling a car, the best time to ask for a review is right after they’ve driven off the lot in their brand new car.

Spend some time with your team discussing when the perfect time is for this integral step.

Pro tip: Sending a review request one time may not always get you the results you are hoping for. If your customer can have two or more opportunities to leave the review, the opportunity for feedback will increase greatly.

Make it Simple and Accessible

In a world full of complexity, you need to strive for simplicity. The easier the process for leaving a review, the higher the chance you will receive one.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of one of your customers. If the opportunity to leave a review is not simple and convenient, you probably won’t follow through.

One necessary step would be to make the review process mobile friendly. Just about everyone owns a smartphone now. The majority of people don’t leave home without it.

This makes SMS and Messenger an ideal medium for customer contact!

In our experience, we’ve seen a substantially higher response rate when a review request is sent over SMS vs email. And up to a 50% response rate when a customer can respond to the review directly within the text conversation* (without having to click a link to go somewhere else). All they do is answer questions right within the text, making the process completely frictionless.

This doesn’t discount the power of email as there are still many that live in their inbox, but it makes the case for making your review process mobile, and as simple as possible!

What Are You Waiting For?

Get ahead of the competition while simultaneously strengthening your brand. Reviews matter, so start growing yours today by starting with these three steps. Happy collecting!

*Text to Review is a unique feature to Spark Reputation.