How Can I Encourage Satisfied Customers to Leave Positive Reviews?

So you’ve decided to make gathering reviews a bigger part of your online marketing strategy – that’s great! Now, the big looming question: how? For many business owners, asking for reviews can be one of the most frustrating parts of the job. We get it – it can take a little bit of effort, and it doesn’t always seem like you’re making progress. But you are, and the good news is it gets easier, and it’s worth it. By building your online reputation now, you’ll be reaping the rewards for years.

Now, back to that question. How do you encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews?

Tell Your Customers to Expect It

Before you send your review requests, tell your customers you’re going to.. If you don’t tell them to expect it, they may assume it was sent by a robot, and nobody actually cares if do it or not, so why would they spend their precious time on it?

When you tell your customers to expect it, they’re more likely to notice it, and by saying you’d appreciate a response, you’re assigning it value, making it more worthy of their time.

When Is the Best Time to Send Review Requests? 

We recommend sending initial requests immediately after the service is completed. That’s when you’re most likely to be on top of their mind, making it more likely that they respond. But each business is different – and as you establish a baseline and test and tweak the process, you’ll begin to find the rhythm that works best. 

Here are some additional tips on the best times to send review requests:

• Immediately after: Tell your customer to expect the review request, and send it out right after that.
• A few days after service is completed: This is a good time to send a reminder. Keep things interesting and send a different type of message this time (more on that later). This is also still a good time to send a first request as you’re still relatively fresh in their mind. Don’t wait any longer, though.
• One week later: One week later is a great time to send a reminder. If you haven’t sent your first review request yet, we still recommend you do so, but keep in mind that the odds of getting a response diminish with every day you wait.
• When they’ll appreciate your service the most: Let’s say you’re an HVAC company doing air conditioner repairs. You see there’s a big heatwave spiking later this week. So why not plan to send an extra reminder then – “Hey, how’s that A/C holding up?”
• At a time your customer suggests: Talk to your customer, tell them to expect the request, and see if they have a preference for when you send it. Then send it out with a personalized message, “Thanks again for your business – here’s the link to the review page I mentioned.”

Find Different Ways to Ask

Reminders are a normal part of asking for reviews. People are busy. Even if they have every intention of responding, they might forget. But if you send the same email over and over as your reminder, that’s repetitious, spammy even. Customers may get annoyed. 

When you send a reminder, try sending a different type of message.

Instead of saying, “Thanks for your business. Will you take a few minutes to leave a review?” try saying, “Hi this is [your name], checking in to make sure that everything with [your service] is running smoothly, and by the way, if you have any positive or negative feedback, would you consider leaving a review?”

Or maybe you emailed the request the first time. This time, try a text message reminder. 

A Personal Touch Goes a Loooooooong Way

When you include a personal message, or reach out to the customer yourself, or include a personal touch in any other way, it shows that the review means something to you – and you’re more likely to get a response. The customer sees that you’re investing your time, so it makes it worthy of investing their time.

Here’s another point about adding a personal touch. It doesn’t have to be your touch. It just has to be a person. One easy way to do this is to have your employees download the Summit Reviews companion app. With the app, they can send review requests while they’re right there in the customer’s house after the service has been completed.

You can even come up with an easy script for them to remember. Something like: “Thanks for your business today. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to give us a call. I’m also going to send you an email with a link to our reviews page. If you think we did a great job today, it would mean a lot to me.”

Don’t Worry About Negative Reviews 

If you’re giving top-notch service and great customer experiences, you shouldn’t worry too much about negative reviews. Yes, they can sting, and they drag down your average, but you shouldn’t let them make you lose sight of the big picture.

The big picture: you need lots of reviews. And in the process of getting lots of reviews, some of them will be negative. That’s the reality.

When Google decides a local business to recommend, which do you think it has more confidence in? A) a business with 200+ reviews and an average star rating of 4.3 or B) a business with 25 reviews and an average star rating of 4.7?

It’s more confident in A – even though the average star rating is lower. The disparity in the number of reviews means there’s a lot more statistical significance in A’s rating than there is in B’s – and that counts for a lot. Not only that – people feel more confident, too. Studies show that people expect to see negative reviews. If they see a business without any, they think, what is this business hiding?

It’s a bit of a paradox, but for your positive reviews to seem credible, you need to balance them with some negative reviews.

Should You Incentivize Reviews?

Offer up a generous discount in exchange for a review? You’ve probably seen this before, but should you try it? No – we strongly recommend that you don’t try incentivizing reviews. In fact, it’s explicitly against many review platforms’ terms of service agreements. 

If you’ve incentivized reviews, they reserve the right to delete all of your reviews. Simply put, that’s not worth the risk.

Summit Reviews Makes It Easy to Collect Reviews

You can find all sorts of tips for encouraging customers to leave online reviews, and some of them may work while others don’t. In the end, it comes down to your business and your customers. As you do this more and more, you’ll learn what works best for you and them – and it will get easier.

Perhaps the most important part of being successful in online review marketing is making it easy for you – and that’s what Summit Reviews and the companion app do. Summit makes it so you can send requests quickly, effortlessly, and at the right time so you can get into a groove and start reaping the long-term rewards of excellent online reviews.

For more information about how Summit can help, reach out today!