How To Ask For A Review (Customer Feedback) For Small Business

Learn­ing to request reviews from your cus­tomers or clients is a cru­cial skill that can help you ensure long-term suc­cess in your area. Busi­ness­es that want to ensure that they attract as many cus­tomers as pos­si­ble through Face­book, Google, and Yelp need to learn the sub­tle art of request­ing a review from customers.

In this arti­cle, we here at Rosy Strate­gies will help you learn the ins and outs of review requests. Apart from that, we will also help you by giv­ing you ideas on form­ing the prop­er cus­tomer feed­back tem­plates so you can get com­pelling tes­ti­mo­ni­als that will pro­vide you with the social proof you need to succeed.

How Client Reviews Help Businesses

You want to max­i­mize the buzz you can gen­er­ate about your ser­vices and prod­ucts. Request­ing reviews on online plat­forms can go a long way in improv­ing your over­all mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, no mat­ter the size of your busi­ness. As a mat­ter of fact, a stag­ger­ing 87% of cus­tomers have stat­ed that they read reviews before mak­ing pur­chase decisions.

Also, there are oth­er pos­i­tive aspects of cus­tomer feed­back that can poten­tial­ly help mar­keters and busi­ness­es when aim­ing to dri­ve growth: 

• Iden­ti­fy pro­mot­ers: these super fans con­duct out­reach on behalf of com­pa­nies help­ing them increase their NPS or Net Pro­mot­er Score. This score shows how like­ly a cus­tomer is to rec­om­mend your prod­ucts to oth­ers on a spe­cif­ic scale.
• Social proof: An excel­lent online rep­u­ta­tion with pos­i­tive rat­ings will build cred­i­bil­i­ty and trust in peo­ple who see your prod­ucts for the first time.
• Allure new busi­ness: Social proof and cred­i­bil­i­ty to client reviews will also help you attract cus­tomers who reg­u­lar­ly read reviews.

How To Generate A Request For A Review? 

It would be best if your cus­tomers would write reviews on their own, right? That would be more than ide­al, but unfor­tu­nate­ly, you need to be proac­tive regard­ing this, as with oth­er things as well.

Below are a few tricks and tips that will help you get the type of cus­tomer feed­back you’d like to see.

The Best Time for Requesting a Review? 

If you want to get pos­i­tive cus­tomer feed­back, then you should know that the best time to ask for a review would be soon after your cus­tomer has bought your prod­uct or used your ser­vices and had a pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence with it. 

For busi­ness­es that offer prod­ucts, the wait should be a bit longer (about two weeks) to make sure that the buy­er actu­al­ly has time to use the product.

Ser­vice busi­ness­es can ask right after they’ve fin­ished per­form­ing the said service.

Requesting Client Reviews 

Solic­it­ing a request for a review is an art form of its own, which takes a cer­tain amount of finesse to receive a pos­i­tive response. 

• Ask for cus­tomer feed­back first: Don’t jump right into reviews. If you ask for gen­er­al feed­back at first, you can give your­self some time to trou­bleshoot any issues they may have expe­ri­enced and you don’t come off as intim­i­dat­ing or igno­rant; this way, you lim­it the chances of get­ting a bad review.
• Explain why you are request­ing a review: Let them know that by post­ing their client reviews, your buy­ers can spread the word about the qual­i­ty of your ser­vices and prod­ucts, and they will help out oth­ers who are fac­ing the same issues they did.

Sending Requests for Reviews over Email

There will be cus­tomers who will write reviews about your ser­vices or prod­ucts on their own, but you can max­i­mize the num­ber of “writ­ers” if you encour­age them by send­ing review requests via email. 

While it’s a great idea to inspire more peo­ple to write, these review requests might also come off as intru­sive, so make sure to keep the fol­low­ing things in mind:

• Per­son­al­ize the mes­sage: Make sure to address the cus­tomer by their first name and also make sure to include the first name of the per­son who’s reach­ing out when sign­ing off (that can either be you or some­one else from the cus­tomer sup­port team).
• Make it easy: Make sure to link the page where you’re request­ing a review.
• Keep things short: Avoid writ­ing lengthy requests. Be straight­for­ward with your request.

Requesting Reviews for Yelp, Google, And Facebook

Review requests for these web­sites shouldn’t be that much dif­fer­ent, and you can always use a more or less gen­er­al­ized mes­sage when ask­ing for reviews. 

Your main con­cern should be avoid­ing neg­a­tive feed­back, and the best way to do that is by gen­er­at­ing pos­i­tive buzz about your busi­ness, ser­vices, and/or prod­ucts right off the bat.

Google Reviews

Accord­ing to sta­tis­tics, around 59% of buy­ers vis­it Google to look for product/service reviews and look at the search engine as one of the lead­ing author­i­ties when it comes to bet­ter prod­uct assessment. 

As such, you should encour­age your cus­tomers to leave pos­i­tive reviews on your Google My Busi­ness Page. This isn’t just an excel­lent way to build bet­ter trust and social proof, it’s a stel­lar method to improve your search engine opti­miza­tion efforts.

we all know good SEO is essen­tial to dri­ving more traf­fic, more cus­tomers, and ulti­mate­ly, more pos­i­tive reviews. 

Facebook Reviews

Request­ing a review on Face­book is also cru­cial for online suc­cess. Sta­tis­tics say that around 1.84 bil­lion users log in to the plat­form dai­ly, mak­ing it a robust dig­i­tal powerhouse. 

Most of your cus­tomers prob­a­bly have an account on the plat­form, and if they already fol­low your busi­ness there, writ­ing a review will be even eas­i­er for them. 

Yelp Reviews

Yelp is already an author­i­ta­tive plat­form for assess­ing product/service qual­i­ty and busi­ness trust­wor­thi­ness in gen­er­al. This means that you need to secure pos­i­tive client reviews on the plat­form to estab­lish your­self as a cred­i­ble and wor­thy busi­ness that cus­tomers can turn to. 

No mat­ter if you run an eCom­merce web­site, own a restau­rant, or work as an attor­ney, con­trac­tor, or con­sul­tant, every com­pa­ny can take advan­tage of the pow­er of pos­i­tive client reviews on Yelp.

The prob­lem is that the platform’s pri­va­cy pol­i­cy states that busi­ness­es shouldn’t ask cus­tomers (or any­body) to review their busi­ness­es on the platform.

Still, while you can’t ask direct­ly for a review, you can always include your pro­file page on the plat­form in your fol­low-up emails fol­low­ing a recent pur­chase. With this, you are sim­ply nudg­ing your buy­er in the pre­ferred direction. 

Make Your Customer Reviews Work For You

Pos­i­tive cus­tomer reviews and feed­back can only be attained if your prod­ucts and ser­vices are aligned with their expec­ta­tions to begin with.

On the oth­er hand, you also need the right online approach to make it eas­i­er and more straight­for­ward for your cus­tomers to get inspired to leave a review. This is where the help of a trust­ed dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing agency comes in handy. Experts such as our­selves will help you cre­ate a dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment where your buy­ers will feel enticed to write about what you have to offer. 

Feel free to reach out to us so we can help you dri­ve more growth with the help of cus­tomer reviews.