If you have more customer reviews and endorsements than your competitors, people are inclined to choose your product or service over theirs. It seems logical, right? But the case is most people won’t give you a review if you don’t ask them for it. They’re busy, emerged in their daily to-dos, and overwhelmed by information. Simply, they don’t have time for it and won't think about it on their own. This is why you should send review requests.
When you ask, you get more
As Robert Cialdini pointed out, you hugely increase the odds of getting people to help you when you ask them for a favor. In the study, compliance was boosted by 77.3 percent when the researchers asked random people to complete a survey vs not asking the helpful question first.
Of course, there are certain business areas where it’s easy to get reviews, such as food and hospitality industries, but it can be a real struggle for a gym, car rental agency or landscaper. Most people don’t leave feedback until something goes wrong. This is how it can happen that a business has only negative reviews. Some businesses have a great reputation in real life but can’t show the same online.
So, you can put the question to yourself: What can a business owner or general manager do when they find themselves in this situation? Ask happy customers for reviews. Wiremo’s new tool, named Wiremo Campaigns, helps you with it. You can easily send out emails as a follow-up after your customers’ purchases, to make things simple for them.
Best practices when asking for a review
The best way is to personally ask for a review via email. The person-to-person request is incredibly effective, particularly if the requester has spent much time with the customer.
However, you don’t have to send out emails, one by one, to each single address. You can use software to automate the whole process. Therefore, if you have certain details of your customers, the program can substitute the appropriate data in the correct place.
If you’re thinking about asking customers for reviews, first try to figure out the customers' touch points and who within the company builds the deepest relationship with the customer. Another option for small businesses is to sign the email as the CEO of the company, giving it more authority and importance to the recipient.
Best practices shortlist:
- Have a very clear call-to-action link/button. Remove random social media or website footer links — just as with good conversion rate optimization, have a singular goal of users clicking the review button.
- Be polite and friendly while asking for a review.
- Test different subject lines.
- We’ve found that using the person’s name in the email works well in many instances.
- Test different email copies to see what performs best.
As a general rule, you should test everything until you’re getting the best response results. Email is the best online method to ask for reviews. You can also give a discount to the reviewees. Sometimes, it can increase the number of good reviews.
At Wiremo, everything is about your customers' reviews, their management, and how they can help your business achieve more success in the future. Try our new tool, Wiremo Campaigns, to drastically increase the number of your online reviews.
