Joy Gendusa

Joy is the Founder and CEO of PostcardMania. After more than seventeen years of leading one of the most innovative and successful postcard marketing companies in the industry, Joy has obtained a level of marketing expertise that is sought after for counsel and speaking engagements all over the country. But here at the Maniac Marketing Blog, you get her knowledge at absolutely no cost to you. She will be dropping by often to share wisdom and experience on a wide range of topics, from direct mail to business management, and even email marketing and website development. Read More

Go Ahead… Ask for Business Reviews!

Updated on July 15, 2021 by Joy Gendusa

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You get feedback all the time: on the phone, in person, with feedback cards, etc. In the pre-Internet days, this was more of an internal process. But thanks to customer review websites on the Internet, it’s easy for people to share their reviews with other consumers and at the click of a button.

This may make some business owners uneasy, but it shouldn’t! You can use these customer review websites to your advantage and leverage them to get more customers. I’ll show you how. Let’s start at the beginning…

What IS a customer review website?
Some of the most popular sites for customer reviews are Yelp and YellowPages.com. There are also specific business-centric pages on social media sites like Google+ Local and Facebook.

First things first: you need to create review profiles on these sites so people can find you and write reviews! This doesn’t take long and the payoff can be huge.

Is it proper etiquette to ask my customers to visit these sites?
Yes, it’s 100% OK to ask. In fact, you SHOULD be asking! Your profiles on these sites will be a lot more useful as promotional tools if you proactively seek out reviews from your best clients.

Here at PostcardMania, we send an e-mail asking our happy customers to review us on our various customer review profiles. If they decide to write a review, awesome! If not, that’s fine too. The worst that can happen is they don’t respond and our email gets deleted. At least we asked!

The thing is: it is much more difficult to get a happy customer to review than an unhappy one. They do it all on their own, unfortunately! Some people feel funny asking, but it’s really a common practice in today’s business world. And people who have had a good experience with you are usually more than happy to share it with others; they just don’t think of it on their own. People love giving their opinions.

How do I ask for online reviews?
There are simple email marketing programs that can schedule follow-up emails to be sent out at certain times, or you can do it “old-school” style and contact each customer individually. You don’t want to wait too long after your customer’s experience with you to ask for reviews, though. They’re experience with you should be fresh and top of mind. Waiting too long to ask will result in fewer reviews because people then have to take the time to remember their experience.

What about negative reviews?
Reviews are based on your service and product. If you are confident in these things, you shouldn’t worry about negative reviews. We all make mistakes and have really cranky customers sometimes, but review sites are based on average ratings so one bad review and 40 good reviews are still going to have a very positive effect on your company. Plus having a few bad reviews makes your business more “real”. Most people will inherently understand that the person who wrote the bad review is probably pretty hard to please.

Most businesses actually find that getting more reviews is a big confidence booster. Of course, if you’re getting more bad reviews than good – it’s probably a good idea to figure out where your business needs improvement!

Was this information helpful? Let me know in the comments!