Review generation is hard! And if you’re running a business, you sure do know how difficult it is to get more reviews for your business!
Today, people totally rely on online reviews to purchase a product or avail a service. Put short, online reviews have become an individual’s deciding factor.
A statistic from Trustpilot says that 89% of people read online reviews before they make a purchase. That’s nearly 9 out of 10 people!
And not sure if you knew this already but a massive 79% of people consider and trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That’s how important online reviews have become today.
So, in this article, we’ll be looking at the ways that can help you generate more reviews online for your business with ease. We’ve also included a couple of review generation templates that can help you bag a customer review with ease.
Before we start discussing the ways to get more reviews for your business, we’ll quickly discuss the impact review generation can have on your business!
How Do Reviews Help Businesses?
In a sentence, reviews can be a game-changer for your business!
How? Let’s break it down for you!
1. Reviews Drive More Purchases
Online reviews are the social proof that drives customer decisions today. Here’s an example to help you understand better.
Let’s assume you’re searching for something on Amazon. You’ve come across a product. The first thing you’ll be looking for is the reviews (sometimes the price).
You’ll be looking at the total number of reviews, the number of 5-star reviews and a couple of written reviews as well. It’s only after this you decide whether to make a purchase or not!
Like you, all potential buyers out there look for reviews before they make a purchase or choose a service. The positive reviews are a clear sign that other people have purchased the product and they’ve found it useful, paving the way for more new purchases.
Having positive reviews will not only attract customers but will also influence their purchase decisions and increase sales figures.
2. Positive Reviews Build Trust
When a customer leaves a positive review for your business, it means they’re totally satisfied and are expressing it in the form of reviews. What this also means is that they trust you and you’ve just acquired a loyal customer for your business.
As for the trust factor, the more positive reviews you have, you get to build trust in the community as well. Anyone who comes across your business and gets to look at the positive reviews immediately knows you are doing some good work – the trust factor passes on.
It’s even better if you could get your customers to share their positive reviews on external websites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, or whatever you find appropriate for your business.
3. Free Social Proof Materials
If you’ve got the reviews, why don’t you just go ahead and flaunt them? After all, it’s something you’ve earned!
Reviews aren’t something you acquire and forget! Like we already said, they are the social proof that drives customer decisions.
You can use the reviews to showcase how good your services or products are. Showcase them on your website, social media channels, or any other place that would do your business some good – visibility, traffic and conversions!
4. Reviews Improve Search Ranking
This is one of the best benefits of getting more reviews for your business!
Moz stated that reviews are one of the top three factors in local search ranking. So, if you’re running a local business, you probably should get more reviews for your business.
When the ratings are high on Google and other relevant review sites, it’s a clear indication that you’re offering good service and this will improve your search rankings.
Better ranking means better visibility. And better visibility means more customers.
Now that you’re clear about the impact reviews can have on your business, let’s look at the ways to generate reviews online!
Review Generation – How to Generate Reviews for Your Business
1. Start Off By Simply Asking for Reviews
That’s as easy as it sounds! When you need to generate more online reviews for your business, all you have to do is ask for them!
You’d be surprised by looking at the number of customers who are willing to write positive reviews for your business but they just didn’t where or how to do it. And by simply asking them, you can generate a couple of reviews for your business without much effort!
But there are a couple of things you should keep an eye on and do before asking your customers for reviews.
Ask Reviews At the Right Time
Yes! The timing should be impeccable! Knowing when to ask for reviews is one of the important factors while trying to get more reviews for your business.
When you ask your customers for reviews at the right time, there’s a high chance you’ll get one. The right time could be when your customer has just completed a transaction – they could have purchased a product, renewed their subscription, or simply have their issue resolved.
The point is to ask for a review when a good incident is fresh in their minds. Not after a while or when the memory fades! This also means that you’re having a proper method in place for review generation.
Choose the Right Customers
Not every customer who has purchased from you is an ideal pick to ask for reviews. You should be selective in your approach. Ask reviews from customers who have just experienced or you think might have experienced a WOW customer service moment.
A review is a personal endorsement a customer gives to your brand. And they might think twice before doing it. But when you ask for reviews from customers who you think have a good connection with your brand, they won’t think much.
As for customers who you think are not the right fit to ask for reviews, consider asking them to rate your business or service privately. If you are satisfied with the ratings, go ahead and ask them for a review.
If not, ask for their feedback and try implementing them. Customers love when they are being heard! You never know, the same person could end up giving a good review for your business later!
Personalize the Request
How interested would you be in reading an email that addresses you only with a “Hi”? Yes, we know that face! It’s pretty much the same here.
When you want your customers to write reviews for your business, you should personalize the ask. If you’re sending out an email campaign, make sure you personalize it as much as possible.
Add the first name, if possible bring up a few specifics on when they first signed up as your customer, a couple of interactions that happened with them and finally, explain how important their review is for your business to grow.
Coming up with such personalized emails can definitely help you generate more reviews online.
Here’s a review generation email template that caught our eye,
The email copy has the first name and mentions how long the individual has been their customer. They’ve taken a different route here, asking the customer to help others find the best dentist – witty, but would work!
That’s the kind of email we are talking about!
P.S. We’ve come up with a couple of review generation templates for you below!
So, those are the couple of things you should be doing when you set out to ask for reviews from your customers.
2. Make the Process Easy for Your Customers
To get more reviews, you should make the process as easy as possible for your customers.
Remember that your customers are taking additional effort to write reviews for your business. And if they find the process to be hard and time-consuming, you’re not going to get the review.
If you’re sending out an email, make sure to include the review link by mentioning and highlighting the same (the email template we saw above has nailed this). If you are talking to your customer in a call, clearly give them instructions on how to proceed with the review writing process.
Making the review generation process easy will get more reviews for your business. Your customers are doing a favor for your business and you should ensure that the process they go through is a smooth one!
3. Automate the Review Asking Process
It’s impossible to ask for customer reviews manually every single time. And that’s when automation comes in!
As your business grows, it becomes hard for your team to reach out individually and collect reviews.
Say you’re running an eCommerce store and you have around 2000 customers. You cannot reach out to every one of them asking for reviews. Instead, a better way would be to automate your review generation emails based on certain criteria.
For example, you can set criteria where your customer receives a review request email 10 days after he or she completes the checkout process.
The timeline usually differs – if your customer is buying a product from you, you should give them some time to use it. If it’s a service they’re availing from you, then consider sending out the email within a week or so.
Automating the review generation process will not only save time for you but also keep the reviews flowing in constantly.
Pro Tip: It’s always a good idea to make your customers fill out an NPS survey first. Based on the results, you can then send automated review generation emails. No one wants a bad review showing up!
4. Follow Up on Your Review Requests
Like we already said, your customers are busy and writing a review for your business isn’t going to be the top priority on their to-do list. They sometimes even forget that you asked them for a review in the first place.
This is exactly why you should be following up on your review requests. All those customers who forgot to leave a review, feel a sense of responsibility and they eventually write a review for your business (second time’s the charm).
If you think following up on your review requests might make you look bad and desperate, you’re totally wrong. Following up on your request the first time is not harmful. But when you go beyond that, it might make you look desperate. And that’s something you’d want to avoid!
If you’ve sent an email the first time, send a follow-up email stating it as a gentle reminder. If a specific agent is in touch with your customer via call, well, they know how to follow up!
5. Help Customers With The Reviews
Remember where we told you about making the overall process easy for your customers? This is about that!
If you get half the work done for your customers, they’ll find it easy to do the remaining half. Try giving your customers a review template that they could use as a reference. You can include a couple of pointers, explaining how you would want them to write a review and what to include in it.
This allows you to have some control while generating reviews from your customers.
However, not every customer would appreciate this. They’d want to write their own reviews. It’s best when you state it clearly that the template is something they can use if they’d like to (be subtle)! And their personal views are always welcome!
6. Offer Incentives for Reviews
What’s better than offering your customers an incentive?
An incentive could be anything – could be a gift card coupon, subscription extension, or a huge discount on products.
Incentives motivate your customers to write reviews. You would have already picked the best customers to generate reviews. And if you offer them an incentive, there’s nothing stopping them from writing a review for your business.
Here’s a clean review generation email template that offers an incentive,
Another great incentive would be free shoutouts! When a customer writes a review, you can showcase it on your social media platforms and mention a little about them or their business. Everyone loves free publicity!
7. Ask for Reviews Via Multiple Channels
Don’t just rely only on emails to get more reviews for your business. Emails are great! But why do you want to miss out on other equally promising ways?
Here are some of them for you!
- Use website popups to collect reviews from your customer
- Ask for reviews during live chat support
- Collect reviews during special events
- Ask for reviews during a support call
- Ask for reviews via SMS
- Show in-app messages
These are some ways you can use to get your customers to review your business apart from emails. A couple of them might be suitable for your business. However, it’s best when you sit down, identify the suitable ways and implement them!
8. Don’t Forget to Manage Your Existing Reviews
Trying to get more reviews for your business is great! But only when you manage your existing reviews, you’ll see more reviews flowing in.
When you don’t respond to online reviews (both good and bad), a sense of distrust is created among the community. No one wants to get in touch with a business that doesn’t respond or heed to customer feedback & reviews.
When you respond to your customer reviews, it is a clear sign you’re sending to the world that you care about your customers’ feedback and their satisfaction.
So, make sure you respond to your customer reviews irrespective of the platform the review comes from.
Since you’re here, we thought you should hear this out!
As and when your business grows, review management is going to be hard. You’ll be getting a number of reviews every day from different platforms and you’re going to find it difficult to reply to every single one of them. And that’s why you should probably invest in a review management platform, to streamline your review management process.
With a review management platform like SimplyReviews in place, you can seamlessly,
- Monitor, manage and automate responses to online reviews across all platforms – Facebook, Google My Business, TripAdvisor, App Reviews, eCommerce platforms & more.
- Identify and segregate reviews into different queues based on review sentiment, nature of the issue and location.
- Find and respond to high-priority reviews by setting auto-escalations based on review ratings, issues and sentiment analysis.
- Trigger and send automatic customer surveys across all communication channels or specific channels – find what customers think about your business.
You can know more about SimplyReviews here.
Having a review management platform in place will help you to manage your online reviews with ease and establish the trust factor amidst your audience.
The better you manage your reviews, the greater your chances of recommendation and increasing sales figures is going to be!
So, those are the 8 proven tips you can use to generate reviews online for your business!
Before we wind up with this read, here are a couple of review generation templates you can use!
Review Generation Templates
We’ve come up with a couple of generic Google Review Email Review Generation Templates here. We’re also creating 100+ review generation templates for businesses based on industries! We’ll let you know when that goes live!
You might want to subscribe to our newsletter, we will deliver it right to your inbox.
Okay, here’s the first template for you!
#Template 1
[Customer Name], we couldn’t thank you enough for sticking with us for over [number of years]!
It’s been great having you as a customer! And we really hope you have been enjoying our products & services.
We’re reaching out to you because we need you at this moment!
We were hoping you could take a couple of minutes and put in a good word for us! We’d really appreciate the effort! It would help us grow and become better at what we do!
You can leave your review here! (add review link here)
Thanks so much in advance!
xxx
#Template 2
[Customer Name], we know you’re busy! We’ll wrap this up quickly!
We are super happy that we could be of help to you today! We hope our team helped resolve your issue!
Speaking of which, could you take a few minutes to share with us your experience here? It would help us serve you and others better!
You can use this link to drop your review. (add review link here) Much appreciated!
Have a great day!
xxx
#Template 3
[Customer Name], we care about your opinion!
It’s been [number of days] since you availed our house renovation service. While we believe our team did the best it could, we’d like to hear it from you!
It’d be great if you could take a few minutes to drop in your review about our services and what you liked in us the best!
You can drop your review here. (add review link here)
Reviews like yours will help others make the best decisions. Looking forward to your review!
Thanks,
xxx
When it comes to review generation email templates, there’s no fixed way! The end goal is to get more reviews for your business and you should send an email that’ll make your customer do so!
But make sure your email is personalized, polite and not desperate!
Final Few Words
Online reviews are a double-edged sword. They could do you both good and bad. Learning how to get more positive reviews for your business and managing the negative reviews is more like a skill you should be mastering today!
Remember, good reviews mean good visibility, increased sales, better trust and free word-of-mouth marketing. For benefits like this, you should go above and beyond!
If you’re reading this, here are a couple of other blogs you’ll find useful!
👉 How to Create an Online Review Management Strategy for Your Business
👉 5 Reasons Why You Need A Review Management Platform
Now that you know how to get your customers to write reviews and generate reviews online for your business (and a review management platform to manage acquired reviews), it’s time you start implementing them for your business!
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section!