How to Get Regular Reviews from Happy Customers

Intro

If you have customers, it’s almost criminal not to ask for a review.

But we’re not concerned about just any review. We want to get testimonials from _happy _customers.

Genuine customer reviews help legitimize your brand in the eyes of prospects. They can refer to the reviews to see if picking up your products or services is worth the risk.

Granted that these are glowing reviews about your business, there’s a good chance you’ll convert non-believers into buyers.

At the same time, Google considers reviews as ranking signals. While they don’t weigh as much as content and backlinks, testimonials help strengthen your brand and give it more authority.

This results in search engines giving your business its due by ranking it higher on search results.

That’s why, in this post, we’ll discuss the different ways you can get more positive customer reviews for higher sales and rankings.

Remind Them to Leave a Review

After purchasing from your business, you can send an email immediately after receiving it. In the email, place a link that lets them rate the service and actual product.

Granted, not everyone will be able to provide a review immediately for various reasons. And they might forget to leave one over time.

That’s why you need to send a follow-up email or give them a call asking for the review. The follow-up should be done days after sending the initial request.

(Image source: reallygoodemails.com)

You can set up the emails using your automation platform of choice.

Regarding following up, there’s no single answer on how long you must wait. Some say that two to three days is ample time for you to send a follow-up request. But it’s best to monitor the results and change the follow-up date to increase the response rate.

When asking customers to leave a review, remember that they are not obligated to do so. You can’t force them to leave one or get irate because they haven’t written a review. Doing either reflects poorly on your brand.

That said, ask for a review with a gracious tone. Successfully securing a review for their orders is a bonus to your business.

In doing so, you don’t burden customers with the unnecessary weight of giving their reviews of your product.

Also, you want to establish a brand as one whose products customers trust so much. So, allowing people to review your products by choice proves that your products speak for themselves.

Allow Customers to Write a Review on the Page

If customers are happy with your product, they’ll be willing to write a review without you telling them.

For this to happen, you must make it easy for them to leave a review on their own.

So, another way to collect product or service reviews from customers is to allow them to send one from the product or service page.

The key to getting more reviews from your product page is to optimize your call to action (CTA) button.

Having an easy-to-find button that will generate clicks is easier said than done.

You must decide the button's best color, size, and copy.

In this case, you will have to test different variations over time to see which version gets the most clicks.

Clicking on the button should open a small form they can fill out.

Once sent, you can either moderate the reviews to keep away spam and verify the review’s integrity. Normally, it’s best to run the review first before approving it to appear on your site. Moderating the review with a plagiarism checker ensures that it isn’t copied and pasted from another website.

A way to deal with reviews is only to allow users of your site who purchased the product the ability to write a review,

Once approved and published, the review should show on the same page so other people can see what customers think of them.

Consolidate Reviews from Multiple Sources

Even if you want customers to leave a review on your site’s product page, some will probably write it on sites like Yelp, G2, Yellowpages, and others.

There’s nothing wrong with this since a review is a review, wherever it may be published. In fact, you can generate 600% more reviews by taking a multichannel approach.

But you need to collect the reviews from different sources and display them on the product page.

To do this, you’ll need software for collecting reviews to help you consolidate product and service reviews and feedback.

By consolidating all your reviews, you can showcase the best ones in a single place and get more people to convert into customers.

Beaches of Normandy Tours, a WWII-focused travel agency, provides a great example. Their website includes a landing page with 400+ reviews from past travelers, on which they also show their Google Business Profile, allowing visitors to read reviews and quickly leave their own feedback.

To give potential customers a better sense of what to expect, they share videos from previous tours showcasing real traveler experiences.

It also lets you reply to customer reviews if they have been less than glowing. This allows you to smooth things out with the customers without having to jump from one site to another.

Swiftly addressing their concerns makes them happy and reflects well on your customer service in the process.

Incentivize Your Review

First off, offering discounts, coupons, or money for a review is a serious risk to take.

Google is vague in its policies regarding incentivized reviews, while Yelp has clarified that reviews in exchange for something of monetary value are against their terms and conditions.

Nonetheless, it hasn’t stopped businesses from incentivizing customers to give positive reviews to their products.

So, where should you stand on this?

On the one hand, you’d want to keep within the right side of things.

The last thing you want is for your reviews to vanish without a trace and get your Google Business Profile and Yelp accounts canceled because they found out you incentivized the reviews.

So, do the tips above, which don’t require you to compensate customers for their reviews, to get the most reviews from customers possible.

On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt if you can shell out a few cents or a full dollar for each positive customer review.

As mentioned, other brands did it in the past year, which saw an increase in positive reviews between 40% and 70%, according to HBR.

If you plan on incentivizing reviews, compute how much you should give away for each positive review. Discounts are the most popular option since this encourages customers to buy from you again.

In the same study above, some brands found that incentives are ineffective, especially if the purpose is to make prospective customers believe that your product is good when it’s not.

While it’s tempting to use incentives to get positive feedback about your product, proceed with caution.

What you can do for now is check how your prominent competitors are getting reviews from customers. Then, you can purchase a product and see in their emails if they’re asking for positive reviews in exchange.

If most of them are, you should probably do the same thing. As the saying goes, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

However, if Google and Yelp somehow smarten up and penalizes all your sites, you had it coming. So, again, tread the matter of incentivizing reviews carefully.

Conclusion

Getting customer reviews, let alone _positive _ones is difficult.

Your business must be firing on all cylinders to gather the most user reviews. Aside from implementing the methods above, your products and services need to be good for people to give them positive ratings.

However, there’s nothing better than getting raving reviews from happy customers. It validates all the hard work you put into your business. More importantly, you potentially get more customers as they get to read how good your brand is based on the feedback.