“88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.”
If only it were so easy. Asking for reviews on a consistent basis is tough to do, but if you are serious about keeping your referrals it needs to happen. The best way to ensure you get the reviews you need regularly is to automate the process. In this post, I’m going to explain exactly how we do that.
Why should you care so much about online reviews? Well, they are the key to Word of Mouth marketing. As I explained in the last post, when your business generates a referral what they’re going to find first in Google isn’t your website. It’s your Google+ page. Which is why great reviews on Google have to be your top priority, but the problem is that consistently getting quality reviews is not always an easy task.
Luckily, there is a trick to getting great feedback for your business while simultaneously increasing your positive reviews! It’s all in the timing of when you ask.
The perfect time to ask a customer for a review is right after they’ve received a compelling offer from you. They are already in the right state of mind, they’ve just had a great experience with your business, and that sets the stage for the best reviews.
At boomtime, we ask your customer to rate you from one to five stars. For those that pick one to three stars, we ask them for more feedback and send that to you. But, for all of those customers that click on four or five stars, we then ask them to review you on Google. The customers reporting one to three stars present an opportunity for you to address the core issue underlying their mediocre review and give you a constant pulse on how your business is doing.
The end result? A steady stream of positive reviews. When you occasionally have something that goes wrong or a customer that simply isn’t possible to make happy, their negative or neutral review makes all of your great reviews appear more realistic! The assumption is that the reviews cannot possibly be coming from real customers. No one believes it when they see too many good reviews which is why, believe it or not, an occasional bad review can actually help your reputation.
That is the secret to great reviews, and great reviews are the cornerstone of Word of Mouth Marketing. Now that you know how to get referrals coming to your site, in the next post, I will explain how to turn your website into a 24/7 member of your sales team to convert more of your website visitors into paying customers.
