Complementing our blog on cart abandonment prevention, being highly rated by past and present customers will help you increase your new customer base. When a new customer visits your website it’s likely that they have never heard of your business before. Therefore, they need reassuring that you offer high quality products/services and customer service. One way to do this is to gain customer reviews – and there’s plenty of ways to go about it!
How to collect customer reviews
You can collect customer reviews using services such as Trustpilot, Google Reviews (via Google Business Profile), Feefo, Reviews.io and even your own website. We advise using a customer review website as they verify genuine reviews from customers. Customers generally don’t trust reviews that are on your own website.
Many of the solutions listed above allow you to integrate with them so that you can send your customers to review your business. But there are many other ways in which you can gain reviews outside of these integrations.
You can email your customers with a link to your review site once they have had their products delivered and have had a sufficient amount of time to use them. But can you just email your customers without their permission? According to the ICO, emails requesting reviews from your customers are classed as service messages and not marketing emails. Therefore, you are allowed to email your customers asking for a review.
The most effective way of gaining reviews via email is to implement an automated system, especially if you have a large enough store where it would be impossible to email each of your customers. That being said, if your store is relatively small then you may opt to capture reviews manually.
Automated systems take away the laborious task of emailing your customers. Most large businesses ask for reviews this way. If you are thinking about sending emails to gain reviews, you must remember to thank your customer for their purchase – you cannot include links to other products as this would then be a marketing email and you need permission. If you need help implementing an automated system, get in touch.
Another option to collect reviews is to include a link on the invoice you send to your customers (hard copy or via email). Although, it’s better to give your customer a bit of time to experience your product/service first.
Text/Phone Call
If you have your customers contact number, you can send them a SMS (Text Message) requesting them to review your business. Did you know that Text Messages have a 99% open rate, with 97% of those being opened in 15 minutes? Similar to email, you could do this manually or implement an automated system to do this. If you need help implementing an automated SMS system, get in touch.
Alternatively, depending on your business you could go old school and start picking up the phone to contact your customers. Most customers appreciate being contacted by phone as part of your customer service as they know you really care about the products/services you provide. Because of this, customers are more likely to give you a great review.
How do reviews help gain customer trust?
When you start collecting reviews, they will automatically start appearing on whichever platform you have chosen. Once you have a substantial number of reviews you can then start promoting the fact your customers love your business. There are numerous ways you can do this, such as an email campaign, social media campaign or a section on your website.
How to avoid fake/bad reviews
Inevitably, you will come across fake reviewers leaving reviews about your business. It’s heart-breaking for business owners to get a bad review – never mind it being fake! Most platforms allow you to report fake reviews and if you are successful, they will be removed.
If you get a fake review, report it immediately to help prevent any misinformation about your business. Secondly, if the platform has the option to – reply to the review. It’s best to ask the reviewer to get in touch with your customer services to resolve the issue that’s led them to leave the bad review in the first place. If you don’t recognise the customer leaving the review, tell them you don’t recognise them. Afterall, it could be a mistake on behalf of the reviewer.
If you get a bad review, it can be tempting to report it as fake. But deep down you know the customer and that something has gone wrong with your product or service. The best option is to get in touch with the customer and ask them what the issue is and how you can resolve it. Once resolved, you can ask them to update their review. This is beneficial to your business as it shows that if anything does go wrong, you’re there to resolve it, and fast.
Conclusion
Gaining reviews is a great way to gain customers’ trust. Businesses that have been recommended are likely to have increased conversion rates because others trust you. There are many platforms/methods you can use to gather and show your reviews and therefore a strategy to collect reviews is dependent on your business. If you want to start collecting reviews to help increase your websites conversion rate, get in touch for an informal chat.
