To gather reviews from your existing customers can sometimes be a difficult task. Most of the times, the scope of getting “a couple” of reviews to add on a specific comparison website, can become a bigger project. For this, to also be successfull you have to involve different stakeholders and the Customer Success/Account Manager to get everyone to understand what you are trying to do. From one marketing person’s idea to be reality, it usually ends up with nothing, or you are just recieving a couple of reviews from those who are your most loyal customers without any further plan in how to get more reviews.
What is review marketing?
Review marketing is focusing on getting customers that have bought your product or service to rate you on different comparison websites. At the same time you need to build a strategy and process in how to collect reviews and in what channel you want to reach out to your customers (Social media, newsletter, in-app etc).
For review marketing to be successfull you need to look at your data to see when it’s the best time to reach out to my customers asking for a review.
Why are reviews important for my business?
This is important for many reason. For you to build trust and a strong brand, you will have to compare yourself to others. Comparison websites such as G2 and Capterra are growing fast and consumers (B2C & B2B) are today relying in a wider spread to these companies when they choose their product or service. If you are not on these sites, but your competitors are – then you have a hugh problem.
For people to understand and feel for your business and service you need to build brand awareness and show these leads that your customers recommends your product. This is perfectly normal and happens every day in you personal life: you get insights from your friends and family in what product or brand to buy. Same goes for businesses.
And it’s not necassary the amount of reviews that are depending on if a consumer chooses you or not, it’s the rating in combination of what the review says about you. But its also important for consumers to look at bad rated reviews to see if there is any less value to your company or service.
Today it’s really hard to compete and one step to ease your pains is to invest some time in getting reviews on different review website but also promoting on your own website.
Collect the easy wins
As mention earlier, the ambition to start collecting reviews can sometimes be overwhelming and you want to do everything at the same time. That is why you should start focusing of collecting reviews from your most loyal customers – your top performers! Usually they are happy to help out since they love your product or service, and sometimes the only thing that’s needed is to give them a free gift card. Start with these and it’s good enough for starters!
Get a review strategy in place
Since it’s really helpful asking customers one-off for a review, it’s also necassary for you to think of a process who this is being handle with other customers in the future. This can be done by e.g sending automated e-mails to your customers after a purchase or x days after they bought from you. With having a process and a strategy for your review it will be a lot easier for you to collecting reviews over time.
Another idea you also want to look into is to split these different comparison softwares up. It’s not a good idea asking your customers to leave a review on both G2, Capterra and Google Reviews at the same time. Plan out the different target customer groups and which segment you want to review you on Capterra etc.
One example can be to let your colleagues review your company on Google Review to cover recruitment branding and when you hire new people, and the customers scoring NPS 10 to review you on G2. By doing this you are aiming with a strategy for collecting reviews for different purposes and covering the different markets.
Good luck and happy review hunting!