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Key Takeaways
- Ask for reviews directly. When you do this, the customer’s experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind and leaving a review feels like the natural way for them to close the loop.
- It’s not always necessary to encourage customers to review your business. If you time your requests well, they will feel like they are simply fulfilling the final step in the sales process.
- Don’t rely on other platforms to display your reviews for you. Highlight your reviews on your website and social media — this will give you more visibility and quality control.
Word of mouth is still the best marketing channel there is. In the United States it is even the largest source of brand discovery on the internet. That means reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold. But many companies aren’t using social proof effectively enough to reap the full benefits it can provide.
Reviews don’t come out of the blue, and simply having them isn’t enough. You should do your best to obtain them, filter them and display them in the right places so that they have maximum impact on your business.
Below I’m going to share some of the strategies I used to get almost 19,000 rave reviews for my home service business, Roof Maxx – and how you can do the same.
Related: 4 Things You Need to Know About Online Reviews (And Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Them)
The best way to overcome your fear of asking for reviews is to do it faster
Many business owners aren’t proactive when it comes to asking customers for reviews, and here’s why. They worry that making the request will be annoying and that irritated customers won’t leave positive reviews. It’s a completely understandable concern. It turns out that it simply isn’t true.
Yes, calling or emailing out of the blue to ask for a review can be awkward, especially if you’re contacting a customer after a sale that happened weeks or months ago. But that’s no argument not to ask. If you don’t ask for reviews, you usually get more negative ones than positive ones, no matter how good your products or services are – a phenomenon known as negativity bias.
What you should actually do is ask for a review immediately, the moment you finish each job.
At Roof Maxx, we’ve made this process simple by automating it for every dealer in our network. Every time a guarantee is issued, a request for assessment is made. This way, the customer’s experience is still fresh in their minds and leaving a review feels like the natural way for them to close the circle.
Bottom line: Requesting a review should never feel like you’re asking a brand new question. It should feel like the final step in the process that your customer has already agreed to as part of the original sale you made.
Related: This Review Campaign Raised My Business to Nearly Five Stars on Google – Here’s How to Replicate It.
How to get positive reviews that your potential customers actually trust
You may be toying with the idea of offering incentives to customers to review your business. But I’m here to tell you that’s not always necessary. In fact, it can even be counterproductive.
First, if you time your request correctly, as I advised in the previous section, most of your customers won’t need an incentive. Remember: they don’t give you something for nothing. They fulfill the final step in the sales process. It’s only when you wait until they’ve moved on before asking that they feel like you owe them something in return.
Roof Maxx is a perfect example: to date we have 18,917 customer reviews on Google, Hubspot and Facebook, with an average of 4.9 stars – and they cost us nothing. We didn’t have to offer any incentives to any of them.
That’s also important for another reason: a freely given review is always more honest and reliable than a review that you had to coax out of someone with a reward or discount. We can point to those thousands of reviews as a true signal of the trust people place in our brand, rather than it being a vanity metric.
When we call ourselves America’s number one roofer, we come up with compelling evidence to back up that claim. No other roofing company in the US has as many slam-dunk reviews offered for free by their customers.
Related: 4 Ways to Leverage Social Proof to Grow Your Business Online
The way you display your reviews directly impacts customer perception
Whatever you do, don’t rely on other platforms to display your reviews for you. Waiting for customers to come across them on Google or Facebook is passive. It offers only a fraction of the visibility you could achieve with a little more legwork, and it doesn’t give you any quality control.
Every channel you use to reach your audience is a potential place to display a good review or testimonial. At Roof Maxx we post our best reviews in images on social media. We invite homeowners with positive feedback to send us video testimonials and then upload them to YouTube. We also contact these customers for referrals so we can activate their brand interests and use them to generate new customers immediately.
You also want to pay close attention to how you display reviews on your website. Learning how to present the feedback that is most relevant to your audience is far more valuable than pulling it all in without any sort of filter. You want people to find information that answers their questions and helps them decide if you are a good fit for their needs.
We solved that by adding a badge to our website that dynamically links to a review aggregator app we built in-house. These reviews are then prominently and beautifully displayed on our site, where new potential customers can find them.
I’ve written extensively about how important it is for growing companies to embrace new technology and how it should complement your team rather than threaten them.