Podium states that a staggering 93% of consumers say online reviews have an impact on their purchase decision. It is no wonder then that companies are desperate to increase their business reviews.
This might seem like a difficult task. However, don’t fret. There are multiple ways you can build up review database.
Here are a few key ways to increase business reviews:
1. Just ask
Businesses shouldn’t be afraid to ask their customers for reviews. It definetly won’t hurt.
In their local consumer review survey, Brightlocal found that 76% of customers who are asked to leave a review, do so.
Customers understand that review helps your business grow and are usually happy to leave short business reviews.
2. Use your CRM to your advantage
Reach out to existing customers, especially those who have recently made a purchase and ask them to leave a review. You can make this process easier for yourself and your customers with an automatic send out.
For example, Vicinus, our hyperlocal marketing platform, can help you send out an automatic SMS to your entire customer contact database with a link to the relevant Google My Business listing.
By sending out a text asking for a review with a ready to click link, customers are far more likely to go straight through and leave feedback.
This avoids them having to navigate the internet to find the location-specific listing for the store or branch they visited.
3. Publish all of your reviews on your business listings
To increase your business reviews, collect together all the listings across all your listings and on your website. Publish them all on your Google My Business listings.
This is one of the most common ways customers find your business – by performing a Google search. Therefore, your customers will be able to easily find and view all your customer reviews.
4. List your business where your customers already are
If you know that a lot of your customers, or customers of businesses in your industry, use a certain review platform, list your business there. For instance, your customers might be more present on social media than they are on Yelp.
So, to get more business reviews, you should list your business on Facebook and encourage customers to leave reviews there. Nevertheless, the more places your business is listed the better because it will lead to more reviews.
Vicinus can help you publish your business listings across multiple major platforms including Facebook, Instagram. Yelp, Google My Business & Bing.
Get in touch to learn more.
5. Respond to all of your reviews
If you are not responding to your currenty business reviews, you have little chance of achieving more. When customers see you are unlikely to reply, they will be discouraged from providing feedback.
Businesses need to be monitoring all their reviews and responding to them all – both positive and negative. This can be a tedious and never-ending task, especially for those larger multi-location businesses.
That’s where Vicinus can help.
Vicinus has in-built Machine Learning-powered Sentiment Analysis which gathers insights from your customer reviews. Powered by Amazon Comprehend, this technology identifies emotions in reviews to help you understand your customers’ percpetions on your business.
For example, where they happy, sad, angry, shocked or satisfied with your service? Vicinus even has an auto-responder tool which allows you to create automatic responses tailored to the sentiment and given star ratings of reviews.
This means that if you receieve a negative review, Vicinus can automatically send out an apologetic response and an offer of help. Similarly, if you recieve a positive business review, Vicinus can send out a grateful reply.
Now, here are a few quick-fire ideas on how to get more reviews:
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Host a competition
Do not offer incentives like discounts or vouchers for every review as this can be seen as buying reviews which builds a bad business reputation. Instead, occasionally host competitions where you ask for customers to leave reviews. Then reward one to three people who do so.
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Share positive reviews on social media
This will encourage others to come and leave business reviews also.
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Include links to your review platforms in email receipts
Having review stations used to be very popular but now it can come across a bit too desperate. Also, customers are unlikely to spend time standing in your store typing up a review. Having links on email receipts is a far better way of scoring reviews from customers who have made purchases.
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Be reviewable
Provide the best service you can and you will likely recieve more business reviews. When people are truly thrilled with the service you provide, they are far more likely to give feedback.
Those are our suggestions. We hope you gained some insight on how to increase your business reviews.
Visit
Vicinus.ai to learn more about our review management features and how Vicinus can help your increase customer reviews for your business.
