Just about anything related to digital marketing can be optimized, it’s a big part of why we love it. Over the decades of online interaction between businesses and consumers, marketers have looked high and low for every last element to optimize, from giant software implementations all the way down to changing one word or the color of a button.
Optimizing Your Review Requests
Within our offering, we often field questions and ideas on various elements in the process to optimize. Email subject lines, colors, personalization, deep linking, button sizes and more. We have tested many of these elements and will see some movement with these small adjustments, but often not larger impact businesses are looking for.
Why? Because the biggest optimizations to getting more customer feedback and online reviews sit outside of the emails and landing pages to gather the customer’s thoughts. So let’s look at the two biggest optimizations to get more online reviews.
1- The Human Ask
There is no other way to put it, the biggest lift you can give your review program is seeding a personal ask or mention in the real world. When you send a feedback request from our platform it shouldn’t be a surprise, it should be expected (even wanted).
Smart and successful businesses have this ask built into their customer interaction. It adds a needed human touch and creates responsibility for the consumer to respond to your request.
A few examples:
- In your sales process you could tell your customer “Your satisfaction is our top priority, we send every customer a short survey after you purchase to make sure you are happy.”
- At the end of your service or delivery of your product communicate “Now that everything is squared away, we’ll be sending you a quick request for your feedback and an online review. This feedback is super important to us, so please complete it.”
- When following up to make sure everything is finished you can ask “Our team and my performance is rated in part on your feedback and if you review us. When we send you a quick survey by email will you complete it for me?”
Just a few general examples, but hopefully you can see a way to work this into your customer experience. Happy customers, with a little heads up are much more willing to provide feedback and reviews for your business. Again, the fact you want feedback and reviews shouldn’t be a secret to them or a surprise.
2 – Timing
Simply put, to get the best results you want to send your feedback and review requests as close to the customer interaction as possible. If you have delivered a great experience, asking about it as close to the “moment of wow!” is super important.
Our platform has many options to get customers into the feedback and review process. Let’s outline the main ones and make sure you are using one or more of them to send timely requests to your customers.
- Manual entry – You can send a request instantly in seconds by adding their name, email and info on our platform one at a time
- List upload – You can upload a list of customers via a spreadsheet. If you serve a large customer base you may need to upload a list daily or weekly. While it’s good to get customers in no matter what, a once a month upload is losing valuable time.
- Zapier – We have made a lot of noise on how you can use Zapier to automate customers in our platform. Use a “zap” app to connect other platforms like MailChimp, QuickBooks Online, Gmail, or more without coding.
- API – Our API can be used to integrate your CRM, POS or other software to add customers to GetFiveStars. See our integrations page for more.
- Feedback link – Use our Testimonial Widget with a feedback button on your website, add your locations short URL to your header or footer to help customers looking to give feedback connect with you. It’s passive, but makes feedback easy for your customer and that’s what you want.
- Feedback locator – If you are a multiple location business, you will want to use our feedback locator. This allows you to place just one central “Give Feedback” link on your website and then our platform provides the tool and interface for the customer to select the location they want to leave feedback for.
These are the main ones and there are more to explore. The goal is to use one or more of these to make your request for feedback and reviews timely and as close to the transaction as possible.
Optimize The Little Things … After You Nail The Big Things
We absolutely support and champion the optimization of email subject lines, your content and other small elements to gain improvement. But if you really want to drive your performance as high as you can in asking for feedback and reviews, you’ll want to make sure you have the human ask and timing dialed in first.
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