Howdy, so I work closely with a car dealership in California and they are killing it with online reviews. Even if you don’t sell cars, any business could follow these tips.
1. Use Yelp & Google
Most of their customers are leaving reviews on Yelp and Google. They are absolutely dominating it there! If you don’t already, create a Yelp business page and a Google My Business page. Make sure it’s up to date and accurate. I also recommend sending customers to your Facebook page because that’s another platform where they get lots of reviews.
2. Be Consistent
You need to reach out to customers each week to get online reviews. It really is just a numbers game. The more customers you ask, the more reviews you’ll get. I recommend setting a day of the week to contact customers. Maybe every Tuesday at 9am you email customers for reviews. Do it consistently each week and you’ll see awesome progress.
3. Timing Is Everything
You need to ask customers for reviews shortly after they use your business. We see the best response rate being up to 2 weeks. After that time it seems their experience with your business starts to fizzle. Ideally you should reach out to them around 1 week after they visit your business.
4. One More Timing Tip!
Not only the time they finish using your business is important but the time of day you email them is also important. I recommend you contact them early, between 6-9am is good. That way you’re the first thing on their mind in the morning. We see higher open rates from our emails early in the am.
5. Reply To Negative Reviews But Do This…
The business we work with very rarely if ever gets bad reviews because they use our customer feedback software. But it if does happen, you need to chill out. First reactions tend to be angry. I recommend writing out your response, then waiting a day to read it over again before you hit reply. You’ll most likely be a little calmer that next day and tone down your response. Be courteous and kind to the bad reviewer. Potential customers reading your responses to past customers will respect your polite tone.
Getting more reviews doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Check out our software if you want to help generate more reviews and prevent the nasty ones!
If you have any questions, comment below!
