Online Essentials
When you first take your business online, you worry about essentials. You get a domain name and snag web hosting. Then, you build or have someone build the website for you.
If you’re wise, you make sure that you get a mobile-friendly website that works well on phones and tablets.
Once the core website is up and running, you turn your eye at least partially away from technical concerns and begin to worry about the content on your site. This is when you begin your marketing strategy and, not so coincidentally, begin worrying about search engine optimization.
Few marketing strategies survive long online if those strategies don’t improve your search engine performance in some way. So, you must play ball by employing SEO best practices. If you use those best practices well, you enjoy better search engine page ranks.
Of course, businesses and their websites differ from other kinds of websites in one key way. People will leave reviews about your business on your website, on review websites, and on social media. These reviews can help or hurt your online brand reputation.
Given how these reviews can affect brand trust, you need some kind of online review management system in place.
Online Review Management Overview
Online review management isn’t a one-stage process. Rather, you can break it down into these four areas of concern:
- Securing reviews
- Review monitoring
- Review responses
- Reviews as marketing
You can think of it as a bit like a review life cycle from the business’s side of things. Beyond the obvious concern over brand reputation, though, why should you care about reviews or managing them?
Customers will often check out reviews before they even visit your website, buy a product, or get a service from you. If you don’t take an active hand in managing your online reviews, the first thing a potential customer reads about your business may well be negative. That can cost you a sale before you ever had a chance to put in your two cents.
We’ll look at each area of online review management, in turn, to help keep things organized.
Securing Reviews
For new businesses, reviews often seem a bit like the weather. It’s hard to accurately predict when you’ll get them. It’s also hard to know what they’ll bring until they arrive.
With a bit of thought and careful planning, though, you can do a lot to manage when and what kind of reviews you get. Ultimately, you want reviews from happy customers. Yet, happy customers typically leave fewer reviews.
They get the product or service. Things go as expected. They move on.
Unhappy customers, on the other hand, get the product or service. It doesn’t go as expected. They’ll routinely leave a bad review and, on top of that, they’ll talk to lots of people about it.
That divergence in behavior makes it crucial that you secure reviews from the silent majority of happy customers.
Getting Reviews from Happy Customers
There are a few strategies for getting those reviews from happy customers. Almost all of them boil down to variations on one strategy: ask for reviews.
In-Person
If you do a lot of your business in person, you can encourage reviews when people leave your business. You can say something like:
“If you were happy with our service, please leave us a review online.”
If you favor a particular online outlet, you can ask them to leave a review on your Facebook page, Yelp, Foursquare, or a similar site.
At Checkout
If you primarily sell products online, though, it’s often a little trickier. You can offer the customer an option to leave a review as part of the checkout process.
Automated Follow Up
Of course, it’s often more effective to ask for reviews after the customer has a chance to use your product or service. That’s where an automated follow-up system works best.
These systems will generate an email asking for a review and send them out. In most cases, the system will generate the email after a fixed period of time, such as three days or one week.
The idea is that the customer has enough to use the product or service and come to a conclusion about it. Since most customers are satisfied, a little nudge is often sufficient to get them to leave a review.
The key takeaway here is that you must make the ask at some point. No, not every customer will leave a review. If you can get even a percentage of your customers to leave a review, though, the number of positive reviews will help to drown out the occasional negative review.