Pay attention to your clients before asking for positive reviews
Some of your best clients won’t even think to write you a positive business review, but you can ask them. This is nerve-wracking for most people, but it doesn’t have to be.
Asking for Positive Business Reviews
After you provide a service or product for your client, follow up with a phone call or in-person visit to ask if the service you provided was beneficial for them.
Voice-to-voice or face-to-face communication is the best way we’ve found to get a good indication for a client’s satisfaction. Usually, there will be some follow up questions you can answer for them as well. Sometimes there’s something small you can add to their experience as well – think of it as the extra (free) cherry on the sundae.
A week or two after you’ve checked-in, you can send an email asking for a business review. For example:
Thanks for working with us on your project. We enjoyed working with you and really think the end result turned out well. We were hoping to showcase your project with some images on our Google Business page. Would that be okay with you? If so, would you also mind leaving a short review that we can reference? (Send link.)
Here’s another example:
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me last week about our X product. I am glad to hear it’s working well for you and thought others might benefit from hearing your experience. Would you leaving a short review on Yelp that we can share with others? (Send link.)
Don’t tell them what to say and don’t ask for them to leave a “positive” or “5 star” review. Those things aren’t genuine, put the client in an awkward spot, and will eventually come across in the tone of your business reviews.
Discouraging Negative Reviews
While this all promotes positive reviews, it also discourages negative reviews. How so?
Imagine you had a bad experience at a restaurant but you never had an opportunity from the manager or owner to mention it. So, you go on Yelp and post about your negative experience to try to warn others. Now, imagine if instead of just letting you leave the restaurant, the manager had stopped by your table and asked how your food and service was? What if he asked you what he could do to make it better?
Then you get a chance to provide your input, the manager has a chance to correct any mistakes, and try to provide something to end your experience with them in a positive light. If that happened, I bet you’d be much less likely to write a negative review or at least you’d end your review with an explanation that the matter was corrected.
Keep Your Business Reviews Genuine
Notice, we didn’t start this blog post off with, “Provide an awesome service, then immediately ask for a review.” Why?
Because that’s a very one-sided approach. The point would be only to benefit yourself. Make sure to put your clients first and the positive reviews will come more naturally.
