Should I ask my customers for reviews?
So the quick answer here is absolutely yes!
It’s very important for every business to encourage their customers to support them ongoing by leaving a review for the business. We will make clear however that certain policies and guidelines for each review site vary. As an example, Yelp discourages the business from asking for reviews. Google on the other hand has no such restrictions.
Rating Bee absolutely encourages businesses to ask their customers to share the love!
This will give a significant boost to your business and reputation. This also gives you better averages to maintain a higher rating score overall. 84% of customers trust reviews before going to businesses.
What to avoid when asking for reviews
So before we get started on how to ask for reviews, I’ll give you some hints on some things to avoid:
- Stay away from giveaways for a review, this will most likely get you blacklisted or banned by many review websites.
- Focus on your customers and avoid the family and friends doing the favor of posting multiple times…. LOL
- When displaying reviews on your site, don’t re-word reviews from customers
How to go about asking for reviews
In person directly to your customer
There’s no better way to get a review from your customer than to simply ask. Many times as a business owner we’re fortunate to get a customer to come in and praise what we’re doing. This is a perfect opportunity to ask them to consider leaving a review.
Get the entire staff involved
As your staff is always serving customers, as part of their customer service responsibilities they should be asking customers when the opportunity arises to leave a review.
Directly from the point of sale
As part of the purchase process, it gives the customer the opportunity during the checkout process to leave a review quickly directly on your point of sale. It’s a great opportunity to also have customers share their experience during their purchase and after the purchase by sending them their receipt via email but allowing them to leave a review using the Rating Bee Review Widget which is part of your paid package.
Online Reviews via email
70% of customers prefer email communications with businesses. Because of this it’s a wonderful opportunity to receive feedback and reviews with a simple email or receipt as stated above. Try to avoid all of the fancy graphics, send out a simple, easy to read text email requesting a review. This could be as simple as:
“Hey there Susan, thank you for stopping in. We appreciate your business and we’d love to have you share your experience with others. Would you write us a review? Click the link here to leave us a review and share the love!”
Rating Bee has a review widget that is part of the service that allows you to gather reviews from your customers directly from your website. When sending out these emails you would send them directly to the page where you gather the review.
Business Reviews via Text messages
This is another fantastic opportunity for you to reach out to your customers quickly especially after a sale. Many modern Point Of Sale systems allow you to gather contact information about the customer, by gathering the phone number of the customer you’re able to send text messages to not only send receipts but also to post review requests. The Rating Bee Review Widget allows customers to be able to put in a review directly from their mobile phone. Awesome!
Rating Bee allows for you to gather all of these reviews and one convenient dashboard where you can respond, not just the bad reviews but also the good ones. We bring in all of the major review websites into one convenient list allowing you to quickly update responses easily.
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Rating Bee — The Better Review
