How to Ask Customers for Online Reviews

There’s no question that customer feedback is powerful. While all comments about your local business can be insightful, high-quality online reviews with good recommendations from community members can be one of the best things for your business. Many satisfied customers never think to share their experiences, so learning how to ask for reviews is crucial to cultivating and maintaining a good online presence.

Positive reviews can be the thing that helps differentiate your services from the next local business. Positive reviews also help build a positive reputation because they are endorsements from your customers, and can help you attract new customers who are in need of your product or services. According to Nielsen, 83% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. For your business, this means that online reviews have the potential to influence your community’s perceptions of your business more than any advertising.

So, how can businesses like yours ask your most loyal clients to leave positive reviews or recommendations? Whether you’re looking for a review on popular websites your customers frequent, there are polite, courteous, and effective ways to solicit glowing reviews.

Customer review basics: A checklist for getting started

First, it’s time to do some exploring. Where are customers leaving online reviews for your business (or for your competitors)?

Step 1: Check out popular sites your customers visit to find reviews for your business.

For starters, search for your Business Page on Nextdoor, as well as other review sites like Google or Yelp, that your customers frequent to discover your business.

Is your business listed? If not, it’s time to start advertising your local business in places like these—as having no online presence may prevent you from attracting potential customers.

Does your business listing have reviews? If not, that can raise questions for people comparing your business to one that has tons of in-depth reviews and photos. To start generating recommendations for your company, skip ahead to the next section of this article: Strategies for asking for recommendations.

If your business has listings and some reviews. Before asking other customers for additional reviews:

• Read what people are saying. This may uncover areas for improvement – changes you can implement before asking anyone else to rate or review your company online.
• Respond by thanking people for sharing their experiences and addressing any negative reviews. Customers will appreciate that your company is listening and adding this personal touch.

Strategies to ask for recommendations

Angry or upset customers are more likely to write negative reviews than happy customers. About 45 percent of those with bad customer experiences are likely to share on social media compared with 38 percent who had positive experiences, reports Adweek.

Step 2: To tip the scales in your favor, encourage customers with positive experiences to leave reviews.

Here are some tips:

• Encourage positive reviews, but don’t be pushy or awkward. No customer wants to feel forced to endorse your brand (in fact, being overly pushy can lead to bad reviews). Instead, you should ask kindly and naturally, without making the customer feel that leaving a review is expected of them. Lastly, be sure to show appreciation to all customers, whether they leave a review or not.
• Feel free to provide incentives. But it doesn’t have to be monetary. Research published in Harvard Business Review indicates that people are motivated to share reviews when they know their feedback will help others. Something along the lines of “Help us offer the best service for each and every guest by leaving us a review online!” can convey this message.
• Ask at the right time. Clients may rave about you in person, providing a natural moment for you or your employees to ask, “Do you mind sharing your feedback online on ‘x’ site?”

Passively ask for reviews all the time. The ask doesn’t have to be said out loud. Placing signage in your brick-and-mortar location asking for reviews (or for customers to follow you on social media). Or, offer a simple incentive, like “Follow us on Instagram” or “Recommend us on Nextdoor” in exchange for 10-15 percent off their first purchase, or for a small freebie, like branded swag. Remember, customers are more inclined to be descriptive and thorough in their reviews if they leave them within a day or so of their experience, so look at review incentives as a way of eliciting useful and complete feedback.

Ways to ask for positive reviews

Step 3: Make the ask

Here are some great ways:

• In person: As mentioned above, staff and owners can ask satisfied customers to do the favor when the moment is right, ideally after completing a successful (and happy) transaction.
• On your website: Nearly half of all small businesses don’t have a website. About one third say they use a company website to communicate with existing and future customers, according to a CNBC/Survey Monkey Small Business Survey. If your business doesn’t have a website, this is a missed opportunity to create your own online presence.
• Review sites: Highlight client testimonials and popular reviews, and ask customers to share their experiences on sites like Facebook and Google. Responding to your Google reviews improves your local SEO.
• Via Nextdoor Recommendation: Ask your customers to recommend your business on Nextdoor to make you more discoverable in your local neighborhood. Businesses with at least one recommendation will show up in the “Businesses” section, where Nextdoor members search for local products and services.
• Via social media: Once you start getting positive customer feedback, you can showcase your favorite review on social media. This demonstrates the social proof of your company. Ask other followers to do the same. Consider turning it into a contest, such as offering a free product sample to one lucky customer who leaves a review in the next week.
• Via email marketing/text message marketing: If you as an individual are regularly emailing or texting potential and current clients, you can leave links to your company’s online reviews in your email signature or ask for a review via text.

Consider adding a post-purchase/post-transaction follow-up email as part of your automated email nurture efforts with a review request. Send a quick thank you message and ask customers to share their positive experience online. The best marketing strategy is when you can get customers to organically spread the word and recommend your business.

Review generation is no easy feat-- without your prompting, a happy customer has no incentive to leave a positive review for prospective customers to see. Meanwhile, an unhappy customer might leave a bad review, scaring off a potential customer.

Strong customer service and attention to detail can ensure success in all parts of the review process, and it's essential that as a business owner you know how to ask customers for reviews. So, follow the tips we just laid out in our guide and you'll be sure to have a better grasp of how to manage negative and positive feedback on online review sites!

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91% of buyers click on a listing from the first page of the search results.  

Only 4.8% even make it to the second page.

Staying on top of search engine page rankings is critical for success in today’s intensely competitive virtual marketplace. Search engine visibility is a top priority for every business model. Improved search engine rankings directly translate into better customer acquisitions and with DomainsBuyDesign.com’s search engine visibility package in your corner you have the perfect tool to maximize your market reach.

Domains Buy Design search engine visibility tool is a simple and easy to use tool that does not require any technical expertise to implement. This tool is a comprehensive one that analyzes your website and also tells you exactly what you should do to enhance your page rank. This search engine visibility tool is compatible with Safari too which means that Mac users can sign up for it too. Detailed tutorials on search engine rankings and optimization complete the package that come with this tool. Even if you have no prior knowledge of search engine optimization and SEO techniques, this tool will let you ensure that your website gains maximum visibility in the virtual market place.

Domains Buy Design search engine visibility tools offer a comprehensive reporting feature that allows you to measure your website’s search engine ranking performance with ease. These reports include Link Popularity, List Checking, Alexa/ Google Ranking, Competitor Ranking and Keyword Ranking. You can also gauge keyword usage, Robots Meta tags and Robot.txt files and spiderability of your pages with this tool which allows you to tweak your pages to make them most search engine friendly. All of these tell you exactly how your website is faring when compared to your peers and how you can enhance your visibility further.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the strategy we use to rank your page on the search engines.  Google is the largest search engine out there and getting in good with them is huge. This is why we specifically cater our services to revolve around what Google is looking for.

Do you ever wonder why your web page is sitting on the 2nd or 3rd page?  It's because your competition is favored by the search engines due to keywords, content, backlinks, and other critical information.

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We offer continued support and analysis of your website to ensure you stay ranked among the giants in your niche on Google. Because there will be competition, you may see your website move up or down in rankings.  We will pay attention to that and continue to update your page as necessary.

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Domain Name Basics

DOMAIN NAME BASICS

A domain name is a company's virtual real estate on the internet and it's best if it's memorable. This is one of the biggest decisions a small company or startup will face, particularly in regard to marketing and search engine optimization.  But your creativity may go unrewarded as finding a great or iconic name that's still available is getting impossibly hard.

It's so hard nowadays to find something viable, you just have to be willing to try for a while and also be willing to take a longer name if you want a .com.  By now, most .com names have been grabbed by businesses who came up with the idea earlier. The scarcity also stems from the presence of speculators, who register for domains hoping for a payday when an interested buyer comes along.

The most common top-level domains (TLDs) are .com, .net and .org. but plenty of companies still find other endings that suit their businesses. For instance, the recently shuttered Sidecar, a competitor to Lyft and Uber, had a perfectly fine domain in Side.cr. Unfortunately for the company, it failed for reasons other than its domain name.

Starting out

You can do a quick search using a Whois-like search engine such as DomainTools.  Also, you may want to check the Trademark Database Search System (TESS) before purchasing a domain name. It's a free and easy website operated by the US Patent and Trademark Office and it can save a lot of headaches to make sure no one else is already using the name.

After finding an available name, there's no shortage of potential registrars to choose. Does it matter which domain registrar you select? That depends. Sometimes there is a difference when it comes to service levels. Also, some providers have gone out of business, so it's worth examining their track record and their user ratings. Above all, you need to make sure that your domain will get renewed. As you can imagine, that's a very important consideration. So, yes, it does matter who you use, depending on your needs.

The cost of registering domains is inexpensive -- you can land a one-year registration with DomainsBuyDesign.com for $16.95 -- 

Each and every domain name comes with all you need to get online.

Domain Forwarding and Masking: Direct any domain name you own to your website. Anyone who types that domain name into their browser is taken directly to your website.

Domain Locking: Domain locking prevents accidental or intentional transfers of domain ownership and stops anyone from redirecting your nameservers.

Total DNS Control: Manage your domain nameserver (DNS) records and set your email, FTP, sub-domains and website location all from one control panel.

Change of Registration: Assign your domain name to someone else or change the contacts for your domain online anytime.

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Auto Renew Protection: No need to watch expiration dates to make sure you renew on time! Auto renew keeps your domains, hosting, website builders, and other products in your name and under your control.

The registration process isn't complicated. Applicants provide the domain name, an address to use for the domain registration and the name they want the domain to be registered under. They also need to supply an accompanying email address that will get added to the public Whois record.

Venturing beyond .com

Startups frequently select oddball names to avoid paying big fees to domain holders of .com names. That's why Digg chose an extra "g" and Flickr is missing an "e".

There are plenty of extensions now that can fit a business -- or a location, such as in all the .nyc names.  If you're considering any of the other new domain breeds -- such as .us, .biz or .info for example -- research whether there's a potential business penalty in not choosing a .com. If a business's web presence is really important and it matters how high you rank in Google, then make sure all those extensions are treated the same by the SEO gods.

Make sure to register similar names to your main one -- even including typos. Facebook fought hard against all the domain weisenheimers who registered names like Facebook and made a fortune monetizing the typo traffic that came their way. So if you're CoopRocks, Inc., you might want CoopRks.com or some other likely typo that's most important if web traffic is your goal. It's worth thinking about and not that expensive anymore.

There's no one best approach but as you get ready to select a domain name for your company, keep the following in mind:

Think hard about the name and how it might figure as a search term or key words someone might type in to find your site.

Find a way to connect your brand to the domain name. The more closely you can link the two, the better.

Short and simple sticks in people's minds. You want to make your online presence stand out and it'd be great to find a domain that readers can easily remember.

If you need any assistance selecting or setting up a domain name for your business or for you personally, We can help, Contact Us!  Just give us a call at (480) 624-2500 or toll-free 1-866-888-6305.