Everyone likes to see those 5 stars beside their business name. It shows that your business is performing well and people are definitely willing to sing praise about your business.
Having said that, the road to achieving those 5 stars isn’t as easy. For starters, you need to put in the work to set your business apart from the rest and provide stellar service to your customers. All business owners are motivated and willing enough to do that of course! What next you might ask? The answer to that question is in the question itself. Ask! Yes, the next step in obtaining the 5-star journey is asking.
You need to ask your customers whether they would be willing to leave your business a review. The truth is people are not averse to sharing their opinions.
Almost 84% of customers look up reviews online before buying a product or service. To rephrase that statistic, it means that almost 84% of consumers are influenced by what others have to say about your business.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the number of reviews collected is also very important. A 5-star rating with 10 reviews isn’t as impressive as a 5-star rating with say, 100 ones. Therefore the process of collecting reviews from your customers should be constant and something that you do actively, probably every month.
There are many platforms out there where customers can leave a review for your business but the most popular ones are Google and Facebook. In this article, we will help you navigate how to request reviews on these platforms with some examples. We will also discuss how you can ask for constructive feedback from your customers.
How to ask for reviews?
Before you reach out to customers for reviews on a public platform, it would be a good idea to narrow down some of your most important customers and ask them if they could set aside some time to give you some constructive feedback about your business, product or service.
Asking for a general overview of your product or service is vague and may include a lot of ground to cover. The best way to elicit constructive feedback would be to narrow down on a specific area you want to gain more knowledge about.
Customers have a rich repository of information about your product that they could provide you with. You just need to ask the right questions to elicit that response. For example, if you are in conversation with a new customer, a good question to ask them could be “ How do you think the onboarding process could be improved? ”. This would prompt the customer to share their onboarding experience in detail. You can then use this information to improve upon your onboarding process.
In short, it’s better to ask questions that will prompt users to give detailed answers. Yes and No questions will leave a lot of room for doubt. You might not be clear about the customer expectations through these questions. Instead, make why, what, and how questions your companions and gather more information.
How to ask for google reviews?
Now that you’ve gathered some constructive feedback from your customers you might want to move some reviews to online review platforms such as Google. This will help you to establish your online reputation and attract more customers.
Before asking for reviews on Google from your customers, you need to make sure that your business has a google my business listing. If you do not have one, follow these steps and have your GMB listing up and running.
If you have a GMB listing, then your customers can easily leave a google review regardless of whether they have a google account or not.
To make the process much easier for your customers a good idea is to use an online review generator link. This link will take your customers directly to the page where they can leave a review for your business. This is what your customers will see once they click on the review link :
The longer alternative is asking your customers to do a google search for your business and then leave a review. Find a detailed version of how to do this here.
How to ask for reviews on Facebook?
Just like Google, Facebook is also a platform where having reviews will prove extremely beneficial. Facebook is considered the second most important review site, suffice to say it is vital that you have a business page on Facebook.
Small and local businesses can benefit greatly from the power of Facebook. It is a great place to establish your online presence and interact with customers on a regular basis.
The biggest pull with Facebook is that it is a network of friends and families. Receiving recommendations from friends and family makes the suggestion more meaningful. Aside from that Facebook has a user base of 1.62 billion daily users, it would be foolish not to use this to your advantage.
So how do you ask for a Facebook review? To get your customers to recommend your business, you need to make sure that you have enabled this function. Follow these steps to enable reviews on your business page:
- Log into your business page through the main administrator account and navigate to the home page.
- Click the “Settings” button at the top right-hand corner of your page.
- Click on the “Edit Page” option on the left-hand side menu that appears.
- Scroll down to the “Reviews” tab.
- Activate reviews for your Facebook business page by changing the slider from ‘OFF’ to ‘ON’.
Now that you’ve enabled the review function let’s look at how you can receive Facebook reviews from your customers.
- Embed a Facebook review link to your website
It’s a good idea to embed a Facebook review link on your website as your website may already have enough visitors. You can redirect these visitors directly to the Facebook reviews page and make it easier for them to leave a review.
- Send an email or SMS with the Facebook review link
Set up a marketing campaign with both Email and SMS as channels and craft a compelling message. Request a review and add a link to your Facebook page so that it’s easy for your customers to leave a review. Here’s an example of how a email review request could look like :
Hello [Customer Name],
Hope you are keeping well. Just wanted to ask you a quick favour and ask you how your experience was with [Company Name]’s [products/services]?
We are always happy to get feedback from our valued customers so that we can continue to improve our service.
If you could spare two minutes of your time to write a review, we would be really grateful and very happy to read it.
To leave us a review simply click on this link .
If you have any questions about our [products/services], please contact us at [contact link/email] at your convenience.
Best,
[Your Name]
With an opne rate of 98% SMS is a great channel to request reviews. A SMS review template can look something like this :
Dear {Customer name}, thank you for being our loyal customer. We want to continue providing you the best of our services and so we need a little help from you. Could you please take 2 mins to leave us a review? It will help us to improve and upgrade ourselves. Here is the link {insert review link}
How to ask for customer reviews through Emitrr
By using Emitrr’s review capabilities you can send review requests to all your customers. You can choose to send these requests either through email, SMS or both.
You will be able to do so by following these steps :
Go to Campaigns on the left hand side panel. You will have to options
- Start a manual campaign
- Start an automated campaign
To start a manual campaign select ‘campaigns’ from the top panel. Then select ‘ Send a campaign’
Follow the respective mentioned steps and you wil be good to go!
For automated campaigns select ‘Automations’ from the top panel.
Select Reviews from the list and set up your email or sms review request campaign!
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