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How to Generate More Reviews for your Business
Here’s a question – how often you buy anything online, without first consulting customer ratings and reviews?
If you’re anything like the other 90% of consumers out there, the answer is just about never. These days, seeing what others have to say about products and services before buying them is an instinctive norm.
But just as negative press can be a bad thing, little to no feedback whatsoever can be just as off-putting. After all, if this business knows what it is doing and does it well, why has nobody bothered to review it?
If this is the kind of question that’s being asked about your business, now’s the time to do something about it. So rather than sitting around and waiting for feedback to fall into your lap naturally, here are five simple yet effective ways of generating more reviews for your business:
1. Special Perks
First up, quite a lot of businesses have adopted the practice of handing out perks and privileges. For example, takeaway joints and restaurants across the country now offer modest discounts – say 5% or 10% - for anyone willing to review their experience on TripAdvisor. It doesn’t have to be anything particularly generous or exciting – just a little something to grease the wheels. Get it right and it can double-up as an effective strategy for nurturing customer loyalty.
2. Make it Easy
To say that the average customer these days is lazy would be unfair. Nevertheless, taking 30 to 60 seconds to complete a review seems to be beyond the capabilities of most. Nevertheless, research has shown that the quicker and easier you make it for customers to leave reviews, the higher the likelihood that’s what they’ll do. In addition, the closer to the time of the original purchase you request the review, the better.
3. Start the Conversation
One of the easiest and most effective ways of generating a ton of feedback is to simply start the conversation on social media. Post information about a product or service you offer, ask those following you to share their opinions and stay involved in the conversation. Sooner or later, you will find yourself with any number of snippets, which can then be extracted and used anywhere you like as valuable social proof.
4. Prize Draws
Another tried and tested approach for generating vastly more reviews is to simply organise something of a competition. For example, it could be that every customer willing to submit a review is automatically entered into a prize draw, which every month sees a gift card to your chosen value being given away. It’s a publicity stunt that can be made even more effective by making sure you regularly publicise the details of the winners, too.
5. Personal Emails
Last up, you genuinely cannot put a price on the value of an influential customer review. As such, the time and effort it takes to pen a personal e-mail isn’t what you would call too much to ask. If you sit down and write a personal message to one of your customers to request a review, you are so much more likely to nurture a positive response than by sending out thousands of generic and robotic emails. Even if not all personal emails are successful, it will be more than worth the effort for those that are.