A Sneaky (Yet Ethical) Trick To Get More Customers To Review Your Business Online
People are lazy.
Online they’re even lazier.
Any extra effort you put between someone online and the action you want them to take (like leaving a review for your business) greatly decreases the chances they’re going to do it.
Here’s a sneaky little trick you can use to make things as easy as pie for people to leave reviews for your business at local review sites.
First, you have to understand something important about these review sites. Most of them, and all of the important ones, require a login in order to leave a review.
This can be tricky for a local business owner. If you send someone to a review site and they don’t have a username and password for that site already, chances are between slim and none they’re going to take the time to set up a new account just to write a review for you.
But you can stack the deck in your favor. Here’s how…
If you’re asking for reviews by email, use your customers’ email address to send them to the appropriate review site.
Sending an email to someone with a Gmail account (ie. [email protected])?
Send them a link to your Google+ Local page to leave a review there. If they’re checking Gmail, then they have to be logged into Google. Once they go to your Places Page, all they need to do is give you your 5 star rating, leave a review and they’re done.
Sending an email to someone with a Yahoo! account? These can end in @yahoo.com, @ymail.com, @rocketmail.com or, because of Yahoo!’s partnership with AT&T any of the following:
- @Att.net
- @Ameritech.net
- @Bellsouth.net
- @Pacbell.net
- @Prodigy.net
- @Nvbell.net
- @Sbcglobal.net
- @Snet.net
- @Swbell.net
See any of those extensions in an email and send them to your Yahoo! Local page to leave a review.
Now, here’s the extra credit. If you have a Facebook Fan Page, you can link from that page to your review sites. The thing to know here is that many of the local review sites like CitySearch, YellowPages.com, SuperPages and others allow users to sign in through Facebook. Once they see your review request on Facebook, they’re just a click away from leaving a review for you on any of those sites.
Hey, you’re not going to know the best place to send everyone to make leaving reviews as easy as possible for them, but using the strategy above, you can stack the odds in your favor more often than not!