How to Get Online Reviews for Your Small Business

So, how to get online reviews for your business?

This is one of the simplest and most commonly used options. You can email your customers asking to share their level of satisfaction with products or service quality. There are two ways you can use this tool:

Personalise your email by including addressee's name and describe what you're asking for and why. If you receive no answer, it's appropriate to send one followup. More emails will most likely end up in spam, and you'll lose an effective channel for receiving feedback.

It's important to give your customers ample time to test the purchased product and form an opinion about it. On the other hand, you shouldn't let them forget about their experience. With products, the optimal timing for an email is one week from the purchase, while with services it should be sent the next day.

If you already have an extensive mailing list, you can collect information on what customers think about your company, product quality, customer service, pricing, or relevance of your content.

Consider segmentation by date and activity. For example, you might have groups of users who subscribed to the newsletter over 3 months ago, opened 5 emails over a certain period of time and clicked on 3 or more links.

If customers are following your news the chances are high they will be willing to write a couple of lines about you when asked properly.

Presence on social media not only helps attract target audience and advertise your products—it's also instrumental in getting feedback. This is the most popular way for people to share their opinions and recommendations.

Give your customers a chance to leave feedback on your business page. Welcome and respond to both positive and negative reviews. Here's how you can reinforce the positives with responding to positive reviews and how to handle the negative ones to your benefit.

This format is very convenient for the clients: all that's required of them is to check a couple of boxes and write a couple of lines in answer to a specific question. There's no need to register or enter your personal data.

There are multiple services that help automate creation of forms, from Google Forms to websites like Typeform.com

As a rule, people react positively to various contests, especially when the terms are simple. The mechanics are only limited by your imagination. For example, you can organize a photo contest where customers take a picture with the purchased products. Typically, customers would supplement their photos with texts, which serve as a great source of reviews and brand mentions. The successful campaigns are creative and offer a satisfactory reward for participation.

Providing bonuses and incentives involves additional costs but they are justified by the amount of reviews that you can get. Consider the following options for incentivising your customers:

The most popular ones are discounts, gift cards or free shipping. Determine the most suitable option for your company, which does not hit hard on the budget.

This option works best with the most loyal customers. An example from one of our reputation marketing campaigns: giving out certificates for purchasing baby food from a brand resulted in positive reviews and coverage.

Paying for reviews might seem more cost-effective and less time-consuming. But, apart from the obvious ethical issues, businesses face reputational risks when doing so.

Online reviews and brand mentions will help attract more customers and encourage them to make purchases. Make sure you ask your audience to leave feedback on the quality of your services and products. We recommend using all of the above methods for obtaining reviews in order to achieve good results.