One of the best ways to grow your business and grow your online sales is with awesome, positive customer reviews. You know a lot of people, most people out there, before they’re about to make a purchase, they’re going to try to learn a bit about your company. One of the first things that they do is to look for reviews on a third party website like Google or Facebook, to kind of see what other customers or other people are saying about your business. There are so many businesses out there, so many organizations that really don’t have any type of strategy in place to get these reviews on a regular basis. It’s costing them money, right? If you’re a customer and you’ve got a choice of three to five different people to do business with and you’ve got one business that’s got you know, amazing reviews and you’ve got the other business that doesn’t have reviews and the product is very similar, you’re probably going to gravitate toward the product that has more reviews because you know, why take a chance at failure?
Why take a chance of losing some money? So I want to share a couple of ways or one way rather, you can really fast track that process, and it has all to do with automation. If you’re not using automation, this is a great way to get your feet wet and start with the automation. One thing you could do is you could integrate your sales process, which is, you know, whether it’s your invoicing, if you’re using QuickBooks for manual sales or if you’re using a website to do e-commerce, integrate it with your automation platform so it sends out an email a couple of days after the sale, maybe 15 days after a sale, thanking the customer for their business, mentioning the product that they bought or service that they bought and then politely asking for a review. And the way you really want to make sure you get those reviews is include links. That will take them directly to where the reviews are. So whether it’s Google By business or Facebook, Yelp, any property that you’re using where you want your reviews to be built up, you can figure out what that link is, that when people click on it, they go right to it and they have no excuse and no confusion on how to leave you that review.
Now the benefit of using automation is you can pretty much set it up and forget about it. But one thing you don’t want to forget once you get this automated process working is, make sure you got someone keeping an eye on those reviews because reviews can be both good and they can also be bad. Now, a bad review does isn’t the end of the world because you have an opportunity on Google or Facebook to respond to these reviews to tell your side of the story.
I’ve heard many times from our clients, we don’t want to collect reviews because you know there’s tire kickers out there or there’s people that are trying to game the system. They’re just trying to give us a hard time because we don’t want to refund them for a used product, for example. But if, if that person is leaving a negative review on Google or Facebook, you can, you know, tell your side of the story and say, you know what? “Sorry Mr. Customer, we spoke to you, and unfortunately we do not accept use merchandise for refunds”, right? So you’re able to turn that negative review around and tell your side. That’s one the benefits and the other benefit is people are going to see that you actually care, that you’re actually responding, that you’re actually present. You’re not one of those businesses–there’s so many of them out there, that are just ghosts online that don’t respond to comments, that don’t respond to reviews and don’t interact with people because all of that also plays a role when people are trying to figure if they want to work with you when they’re reading your reviews and learning about your business.
Sandeep Sambhi
