How To Get Your Clients To Write Online Reviews

Update to this post (2÷6÷2012) Rate­point is no longer in busi­ness. Feel free to read over the arti­cle any­ways, but no need to hunt for Rate­point. They got bought out by a com­peti­tor and total­ly changed their services.  In recent years, anoth­er ben­e­fit of the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion has been online cus­tomer reviews. Whether they are buy­ing a trac­tor, a trun­dle bed, or a tooth­brush, peo­ple will check out cus­tomer reviews on any num­ber of web­sites. Today, the major­i­ty of home­own­ers will research your com­pa­ny by search­ing for reviews by your pre­vi­ous cus­tomers before call­ing to set up an appoint­ment. This trend was start­ed sev­er­al years ago by Ama​zon​.com, as well as local restau­rants in var­i­ous loca­tions. Soon, it spread to sites like Yelp, Google, Angie´s list, Wal​-Mart​.com, and the BBB online reports. When a cus­tomer has an expe­ri­ence, good or bad, they can go to any num­ber of sites to describe their sat­is­fac­tion or anger about a prod­uct or ser­vice. Now some of the major search engines are begin­ning to give first place rank­ings to the com­pa­nies with the most reviews. Obvi­ous­ly, this means you want reviews — good ones, and lots of them! The prob­lem is that your sat­is­fied cus­tomers are con­tent­ed­ly qui­et, and the ones that make online noise are usu­al­ly those who are dis­sat­is­fied or have a chip on their shoul­der. Also, many of the clients of the com­pa­nies I work with are busy, wealthy home­own­ers who have nev­er heard of Google Reviews or Yelp. They might read some reviews on these sites before hir­ing a con­trac­tor, but after­wards they don´t remem­ber the sites they used. So what can we do to get our sat­is­fied cus­tomers to leave excel­lent reports about us? Gener­ic emails ask­ing them to write a review won´t work. A ser­vice com­pa­ny has to get a lit­tle more cre­ative and per­son­al. As you con­clude a job, talk to the cus­tomer by phone or in per­son and ask them to write a review for you: ​“Can you do me a favor…” or ​“Can you help me out with some­thing?” Briefly explain how it helps you to keep down adver­tis­ing costs and assists oth­er home­own­ers in find­ing you online. Give them a quick overview of how long it takes and what they need to do. If they seem will­ing, then send them an email with detailed instruc­tions, prefer­ably with screen­shots. Besides mak­ing it per­son­al, you need to make it easy. Many cus­tomers won’t write a review because they have to reg­is­ter for an account or fol­low com­pli­cat­ed instruc­tions. To make it easy, I´ve start­ed using a pro­gram called Rate­point. This is an inde­pen­dent online review pro­gram that makes every­thing a piece of cake, and doesn´t require cus­tomers to cre­ate an account. A com­pa­ny can install cer­tain wid­gets or graph­ics on their site that will encour­age vis­i­tors to read recent rat­ings and tes­ti­mo­ni­als. It´s like hav­ing your own Ama​zon​.com review sys­tem right on your site. Because it is 3^rd par­ty, it also has many Search Engine ben­e­fits. For exam­ple, Google can dis­cov­er the reviews and post them on Google Places. Rate­point has also made it even eas­i­er for cus­tomers to share their thoughts on oth­er major review sites: after writ­ing a review (again, with­out need­ing an account), cus­tomers are invit­ed to share their thoughts fur­ther on oth­er major web­sites. Anoth­er key ben­e­fit to Rate­point is that it can han­dle your email mar­ket­ing and any sur­veys you want to con­duct. It can replace your cur­rent email sys­tem com­plete­ly. I’ve used it for a few clients and I do like it. How­ev­er, my favorite email pro­gram con­tin­ues to be MailChimp. It is just real­ly slick and easy to use. So remem­ber, per­son­al­ly invite your sat­is­fied clients to write reviews, and tell them how. Make it easy for them. Give Rate­point a try: Here is a sam­ple of how it looks on a web­site: Bren­nan’s Cus­tom Painting