How to Get More Customer Reviews Just by Asking for Them

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Your business can’t have an effective online presence if it doesn’t have any customer reviews.
Why? Because when people are hiring a new business, they want to be sure they’re making the right choice. Reading about other people’s experiences helps them decide which business will best align with their needs. They’ll be able to see which companies are pleasant to work with, which ones are punctual, which ones deliver good results, and so on.
In fact, a 2016 Local Consumer Review Survey by BrightLocal reports 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends! And 74% say positive reviews make them trust a business more.
It’s one thing for your business to appear prominently all over Google Maps and local search results. It’s another thing for your business to actually grab customers’ attention and get them to hire you. Customer reviews help close this gap.
In short, if you want your business to stand out and appeal to local consumers—essentially making all of your online marketing efforts worthwhile—then you need to get more customer reviews for them to read.
The best way to get more customer reviews? Just ask for them! Keep reading to discover how.

How to Get More Customer Reviews Just by Asking for Them

 

Ask and You Shall Receive

Did you know? According to BrightLocal’s 2016 survey, 7 out of 10 people will leave a review for a business if they’re asked to. This is a super promising sign that you’ll be able to get the customer reviews you need, as long as you’re proactive.
When trying to get more customer reviews, keep these three tips in mind:

  • Ask customers directly.
  • Make leaving a review foolproof.
  • Act quickly before customers forget.

There are a lot of specific tactics you can use to ensure better responses from your past customers. Read “Make Your Presence Known: Get More Customer Reviews Online” for further suggestions!

How to Get More Customer Reviews in Five Easy Steps

  1. First, identify your best customers—the ones who loyally come back to you, and the ones who you’re confident will give you a good review. These people are more likely to help you out.
  2. Next, contact these select customers by phone or e-mail and ask them directly if they would please take a few minutes to leave you a review online. Tell them your preferred platforms. Google Maps, Facebook, and Yelp are best. This should give you an initial boost in your number of customer reviews.
  3. Then, develop a plan for future customers so you can start getting a continuous flow of reviews. Add an on-page feedback tool to your website (available through Prospect Genius). This way, customers can write a review in one place and the tool can disseminate the review to other platforms.
  4. In the future, ask customers at the very beginning of your service, before you’ve even started the job. Say, “If you’re happy with our work once we’re finished, please consider leaving us a review on Google.” This will plant the seed in their minds early on.
  5. Finally, remind customers again as soon as the job is complete. Attach links to follow-up e-mails, mention it in follow-up phone calls, and even add it to the bottom of your invoices. Customers are more likely to leave you a review while the experience is still fresh in their minds.

If this sounds like too much work on your end, you may want to look into a service like Customer Lobby. An automated service that follows up with previous customers on your behalf, Customer Lobby can do all the legwork for you. Prospect Genius refrains from officially endorsing specific products and services; however, we can say we’ve had good experiences using Customer Lobby ourselves.

Get More Customer Reviews Now!

As we’ve explained previously, having a large number of customer reviews can potentially save your business. Not only is it good for your online reputation, but it’s also helpful for improving your local search performance.
So if you’ve already invested in any type of online advertising, it only makes sense to strengthen it and give it the best chance possible to succeed. By following our advice, you’ll be able to get more customer reviews online and increase your business’s appeal.
If you have any questions or need a little guidance, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

How Having a Large Number of Customer Reviews Can Save Your Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we’re pushing to improve our own web presence through increased customer reviews and social media activity. As we embark on this long-term project, we thought it would be helpful to illustrate why it’s so important for your company to have a large pool of customer reviews online.
In fact, customer reviews might be what save your business one day. Here’s how.

A Lot of Good Outweighs the Bad

Negative reviews are like vinegar. If a salad dressing or cleaning solution had too much vinegar, what would you do? You would dilute it. Diluting the solution doesn’t change the amount of vinegar, but it does change the solution’s overall composition so that the bite isn’t as strong. The same logic applies to your company’s reviews: While you can’t extract a negative review from your listing, you can flood your listing with so many other customer reviews that a negative one has very little effect.
If you can acquire a large volume of customer reviews before a negative one hits, that’s even better.
Take Conner & Sons Repair, one of our esteemed clients, for example. Serving the Detroit area, Conner & Sons has an impressive Google+ Local listing with a rating of 4.8/5.0 stars from 29 reviews. Given that the overwhelming majority of its reviews are 5 stars, one or two negative reviews read like the flukes that they are. Without 27 or 28 other positive reviews surrounding them, those negative reviews would carry more weight in the eyes of prospective customers.
Note: The owner of Conner & Sons Repair actually responds to one of the negative reviews directly, which highlights the company’s attentiveness and commitment to customer service. Responding to negative reviews is actually a very smart strategy. Read more about it in our previous post, “Keep Calm and Carry On: How to Respond to a Negative Review.”

Boost Search Engine Rankings

Reviews are important as more than just a reputation defense strategy, however. They also pack a super SEO punch.
According to Jayson DeMers, a contributing writer at Forbes, “Regular reviews are important both in terms of your organic search rankings and new customer acquisition. Businesses who have frequent reviews are seen positively by Google and by potential customers. Thus, a herd of raving customers is good for both sales and SEO.”
In the same article, “Your Guide To Customer Reviews For Organic Search Rankings In 2014,” DeMers also adds that Google’s algorithms weigh recent reviews more heavily than older ones. He even suggests that the nature of customer reviews may soon matter, as well: “Google can measure whether a review is positive or negative. While they’re not currently penalizing businesses for poor reviews, they may in future algorithm changes.”
In fact, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, recently hinted at a future algorithm update that might reward merchants with positive reviews and penalize those with negative ones. In Danny Sullivan’s coverage of Cutts’s SXSW conference panel, Sullivan quotes Cutts: “We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.”

Increase Your Reviews

We’ve written extensively on this topic before, but here are the basic ideas you’ll want to keep in mind:

  • Make it as easy as possible for customers to leave reviews.
  • Ask for reviews directly (particularly from loyal, repeat customers).
  • Act quickly, preferably as soon as your service is completed.

For more in-depth instructions, read our full post, “Make Your Presence Known: Get More Customer Reviews Online.”

The Takeaway

Having a solid reputation with your customers is great, but it isn’t going to help bring in new business unless prospects can also find you online. Collecting more customer reviews will make your listings more visible to those who are searching for your services. And for your future prosperity, you’ll want to make sure those reviews are as positive as possible. With an update to Google’s algorithms looming in the near future, you’ll want to take action sooner than later.