According to a recent local marketing study, 87% out of more than 1,000 respondents read customer reviews on the internet before they buy a product or order a service. What does it mean for businesses? The answer is — the more positive feedback customers leave about your brand in digital services, the more trustworthy and attractive you are to new audience. In this post, we’ll dive into the ways of generating reviews to help your company be attractive and stay in touch with customers.
Why You Should Seriously Think of Including Review Generation in Your Marketing Strategy
Why reviews are so important? Because they build loyalty and show your potential customers the most prominent positive and negative angles of your business. People can surf websites, and social media with stylish company accounts, but when it comes to the real people’s opinions it appears that they are much more crucial. Negative reviews are a subject to smartly manage. But some strengths mentioned in a review can easily influence the decision about visiting a company. Today, we want to talk about how a company can motivate customers to share reviews about their positive experience? RocketData gives five useful tools for your business to try.
5 Tools for Your Business to Generate Reviews
1. The Most Traditional Way — Email
Let’s start from the most classic way to engage customers into leaving feedback. A customer receives an email when he does a targeted action — visited a company, bought a service or a product, contacted a manager. Usually, right after such moments clients are already “close enough” to share their opinion on customer service or product’s quality. So, it’s time to ask them what they think.
What should your email contain to increase the chances a customer will leave a review:
– The right subject of an email that motivates: “Get a discount for your review”, “Free consultation for your opinion”, etc.
– A specific name of a real manager and a relevant topic: “Good afternoon, this is James from Rocket Presents. You sent a present using our service and we’re really eager to know whether you’re satisfied”.
– Catch phrases
It should be clear for customers how leaving a review will bring them benefit and it’s essential for them not to spend much time on it. Here come special phrases-amplifiers like: “help others to make choice”, “just a minute to make us better” “we improve with your reviews”, etc.
– Being grateful
You can motivate customers to leave positive reviews by expressing gratitude for their feedback. Say a couple of thankful words or even suggest a discount or a bonus for their opinion.
It will also be a great idea to include in your email a request to put a rate to the company (usually, from 1 to 5, or from 1 to 10). Create different landing pages for such survey.
If the customer puts a rate up to 7, they will drop into a landing page where they will find special feedback and will be asked to write what they didn’t like or what your business and improve. If they rate your company more than 7, they will be directed to the list of company locations where they can share their positive experience.
2. Signature in Your Email
Now, we slightly move to the last but not the least part in companies’ email communications — manager’s signature. Most of businesses underestimate such a simple but influential tool to generate reviews. Here is, why you shouldn’t.
In most cases, signature is the clearest way for customers to contact your company or a certain manager. Which can also become a reason to leave positive reviews about the service in your company. But you can go even further — add to the signature an invite to leave reviews on location-based services or on your website and insert a link to corresponding site. Use the smart approach to create a catchy call-to-action so customers have no chance to miss this out.
You can generate such signatures in the following services — Hubspot Signature Generator, Wise Stamp and others.
3. Quick and Clear — Messenger or SMS
Want to interact with customers who already familiar with your brand? Then choose SMS or Messenger. SMS is a good old and quick way to ask your client for a rate or review. Or you can also use more modern option — the Messenger.
It is a short version of an email, so you can use our advice from the previous points on how to create an appealing message. Only remember that here your thoughts and CTAs should be more direct and concise. Usually, messages are sent on the net day after a customer turned to a company and smoothly show them care and concern about the quality of product or a service they got.
Here is one more important thing — get clients’ consent to newsletters before you send any messages. In other case, you may get an irritated customer and his feedback won’t be so positive as you expect. You can get consent by a special form that notifies customers that their contact will be used to send news and messages from your company or on the special page of your website. For example, when people register gift cards or other bonuses.
4. Unexpected… — Remarketing
It may seem not so obvious, but it is a great tool to collect customers’ feedback. If you take your brand for serious and are ready to invest in your image, then this is the way for you. Concentrate on the audience that visited your website, bought a product or a service from your company, create a juicy visual, relevant CTA and free your ad out.
5. A Customer-friendly Way — QR Code
QR stands for a quick response. Ideal to follow and in a second leave a review. Customers can easily scan any POS materials (menu, banners, cash register, packs, etc.) or even a sticker with an app or smartphone and get redirected to a form for leaving review. There is no long links, so you can print QR code anywhere on materials in your locations and even on different surfaces in your points of sale. Just mind that it is should be placed where it is convenient to scan for clients.
You can generate a QR code that will lead your customers to your listing in Google Business Profile or to your website form. By the way, it may be the most ecological way for customers, cause the need to make only one step to get to a review form.
Where to Collect Customer Feedback
Depending on the region, you can find a list of location-based and review services that are the most popular. You can select two types of such platforms for your business — the main (the most popular like Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.) and the additional sites (specialized on separate industries and niches, e.g., medicine, HoReCa, sports). You should define the most priority sites for your company and take care of not only being present there, but also getting fresh and positive reviews that you can analyze and improve. Marketers can always do it by themselves, but if your business has 10+ locations it can be hard to manage all the data on your own. So, it is a good idea to turn to platforms that can collect, manage, and analyze reviews in a single account.
To Sum Up
Reviews are crucial for any company, because they build a very important part of business’s reputation — customer loyalty. To say more, if a company has rating below four on Google 53% of clients even won’t consider visiting it.
Reviews help people to make right decisions about the purchases or visits, as well as help companies improve their service and products’ quality. That shows that we should bother about the stars in location-based services and work hard to generate more positive reviews from people who interact with our companies. That is, use all the ways and tool smartly and with a thorough thought, and get the results your business deserves.
