It is so important to collect reviews. There are concrete benefits that customer reviews bring for a business, along with downsides of failing to collect them.
Your business is only as good as your reputation and your reputation (social capital) is most easily described through reviews. You know you check them before you buy something, eat somewhere, or hire someone. If a business doesn’t have any reviews, are you going to shop there and spend your hard-earned money on a gamble?
Make a website page where you can collect reviews
First of all, you’re going to need to make a website page where you can collect reviews. The reason you should have a dedicated page for this is that you want it to be as easy as possible for your customers to share their thoughts.
Make your page easy to share
This page should be easy for you to share with your customers after they’ve purchased. It’s important to make the URL easy to share, such as example.com/leave-a-review.
What goes on the page?
Plan what you’re going to feature on your page. You’ll want to keep it simple, as you only want the customer to do one thing: leave a review. You can feature a form that collects reviews directly or you can point people to websites where you collect reviews, such as Google, Trustpilot, Reviews etc. External review platforms are very important as these are indexed in Google. People who search for reviews of your business will find these external platforms.
Things to avoid
Do not use review gating. Review gating is where you only encourage happy customers to leave a review. So if they initially rate you highly, you filter those customers to leave a review. It might be tempting to try and push positive reviews only, but the practice of review gating is not allowed by many review platforms.
Tips
You could collect video testimonials that are proven to deliver more trust to potential customers. ZipMessage is an example of a tool that could be used for this. ZipMessage facilitates a link that allows somebody to leave a video.
Do you need help setting up a customer review webpage?
Contact us to schedule a 1 Hour Small Business Technology Strategy Session with Ashley, which includes a website and digital marketing audit ($350 value).
