Customer Reviews – How to get & use them effectively

I call today’s idea the Tell Me How Much You Love Me hack.

We all like to be told we’re doing a good job, right? Well, why not seek out a bit of customer love, and help future prospects make a more informed purchase decision!?

Like testimonials, reviews are great tools to use when you need to tackle any fears or objections your prospects may have when deciding whether or not to do business with you. One mistake a lot of business owners make is they don’t ever think to actually ask people to write reviews; instead they just assume it will happen naturally. Sometimes it does.

But smart business owners don’t wait for people to leave reviews. They ask them. And guess what? They get them!

So, here’s my 3-steps to getting a little love from your precious customers …

1. Make a list of happy campers you can reach out to. You could also create a list of influential bloggers and podcasters willing to review your product or service.
2. Set up profiles on sites that people can go to when they’re ready to leave you a review. For any type of business this could be Google Reviews, LinkedIN or Facebook, if you’re a cafe owner then Zomato is good, or you could even create a form on your own website.
3. Reach out to people on your lists and see who is willing to leave a review. You can decide whether or not to create an incentive as a way to encourage participation.

Pro-Tip: As you start to get a nice little stockpile of reviews, be sure to actively use them. Add them to your website, include them on proposals, email them to individual prospects who may have raised a particular concern.

That’s my 3-steps to getting and using customer reviews.

To help bring this low-cost marketing idea to life, here’s some additional resources:

Everything you need to know about Google Reviews

7 more creative ways to get customers to leave reviews

Online review request page from a carpet cleaning business

As always, you’ll find more marketing inspiration in my popular marketing text The Boomerang Effect.

So, what have you got to lose?

WHYGTL