5 Ways to Get Customer Reviews March 15, 2010
5 Ways to Encourage Customers to Review your Business
These days it’s important for your business to receive positive online reviews. Potential new customers look for online reviews to determine which businesses they want to work with. They use sites like Yelp and even posts on social networking sites to make decisions about the businesses that they want to support. The more positive reviews you have online, the more potential customers you’ll be able to reach.
Here is a look at five ways that you can encourage your customers to review your business online:
1. Ask them. Many people are writing reviews these days just because they enjoy doing so. If you ask your customers to write a review for you, there’s a good chance that they will. You don’t have to ask directly (although you can). You can post a sign at your place of business or have a line on your customer’s receipts reminding them that they can review you if they like your work.
2. Bribe them. There’s nothing wrong with providing your customers with a little bit of added incentive for offering you a review online. Let them know that they can receive some type of discount or percentage off of their next visit if they bring in proof that they have posted a review of your business online. (For example, they can email you the link to their review and then receive a coupon from you via email.)
3. Link to a review site in your email signature. Make it easy for customers to review you right at the time that they are thinking about you. When you send out an email, include a line in your signature that says, “if you would like to review our business on Yelp, click here”. Link to the exact page where they can review your business. You can also include links on your business blog and website.
4. Exchange reciprocal reviews on social networking sites. The people that you are already connected to on social networking sites are great resources for reviews on those sites. You can offer to review them if they’ll review you. LinkedIn is a particularly good site for this as its set up to make reviewing one another easy. However, this can be done on Facebook and other social networking sites as well.
5. Blog about your positive reviews. Whenever a customer does review your business online, blog about it or mention it in your newsletter. This will encourage other people to do the same so that you will mention them, too.
