How to gather positive online reviews

Guest Post by Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude

The first thing you need to do is make yourself “review friendly”. What does that mean?

It means that you change your mindset about you reviews if you haven’t already. It might sound something like this.

“Hi Mr Potential Customer. I am looking forward to your positive review after you come on board with us!”

The challenge comes in making it very easy for Mr Customer to leave you the review. It is not a good strategy to just let them go to the internet all willy nilly and expect them to 1. Leave a review at all and 2. Leave it in a place that matters most.

This is why you need a review funnel. A review funnel is the place you send your customers to leave you a review.

The best setup is to create a link on your website such as www.MyWebsite.com/review. Then you can share that link in emails, on table tents, menus, business cards, etc., asking your customer to leave you a review and this is where you go to do that. (Hint: QR codes work well for this too)

This “funnel’ or landing page is also where you can collect and manage any negative reviews.

With Review Me Marketing we use a Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down on the landing page to help direct customers to the right place.

A Thumbs Up and we will show them the key sites that they can leave reviews for us on. A Thumbs Down and they will be sent to a form that goes directly to the business owner.

The next key piece of this is showing off all your great reviews on your website.

Again we recommend a link and a page setup just for this. Similar to the link above just add an “s” at the end. It would be www.MyWebsite.com/reviews.

For that we add a “widget” of code to your website that pulls in the reviews from key websites related to your particular niche. We call this the review stream.