How to get customer reviews

5 April 2023

Customer reviews are a real selling point for a business. If a customer is searching online for a product, place to visit, or service, they are much more likely to choose the business with lots of positive reviews over the one with very limited online presences. But how can you get customers to leave positive reviews online?

Ask for email address with payment

If a customer is satisfied enough to share their contact information with you at the end of a transaction, chances are they’re happy with their interaction with your business. You can then use that email address to ask for a review a few days after the contact. A friendly, non-pressurised email can encourage them to share their positive experience online for others to see.

Add review request on a receipt

Putting a request for review on a receipt can increase the number of people leaving online reviews, especially if they’ve placed a large order with you. When they’re going over their expenses, the receipt will remind them to share their experience with you.

Let people know how long it’ll take

Life online moves fast. If a customer isn’t sure how long leaving a review will take, they’ll likely just not bother. When you’re reaching out for some feedback, make it clear that it’ll just take 2 minutes, for example. Users will be much more willing to review when they know it won’t take long.

Simply ask them

Train your team to ask for honest reviews when they’re interacting with customers. If they’ve been chatting and it seems appropriate for the conversation, a genuine ask for a review won’t seem pushy. Let the customers know how much the business appreciates its customers and wants to learn from feedback.

You can also ask vendors and partners to leave you reviews to help get the ball rolling. Your trusted contacts will leave you great reviews and help fill in that empty space until more of your customers have had time to feedback.

Choose your communication cleverly

If you’re after Facebook review, use messenger to ask for feedback. Cross platform communications are trickier, and you don’t want to divert a user off your site after working so hard to get them there.

Offer incentives

We all love a money off incentive. If you can offer a discount or coupon for money off a future purchase as a thank you for a review, customers are much more likely to leave one. It’s a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours situation where everyone wins.

Make it easy

A lot of customers don’t leave reviews because it’s too difficult to find out how and where to do it. Make sure your website has a clear reviews link for a user to find. If you’re printing reminder cards or receipts, include a URL or QR code to the review page. You can also include the link in your email footer, so every time you send a message, the request is there.

Respond to the reviews you have

If you take the time to answer the reviews that you get, it shows how much you care about customer opinions. Your customers will appreciate that you’ve taken the time to thank them for their feedback and feel special that you’ve reached out to them. It’ll help boost your long-term relationship with them and hopefully keep them coming back.

Share other reviews

Reviews are brilliant content for your social media. Regularly post recent feedback from your customers with a big thank you, it really will inspire others to review your business. Plus,  customers will be much more likely to review if they know it’s actually being seen and used.

We hope these tips help you increase your online reviews. You can take a look at ours here.