Did you know that online reviews influence the purchase decisions of 80% of consumers*? Pretty impressive, right? When customers research your business, they read what previous customers have said online, and decide whether they’ll engage with your business, treating the reviews like personal recommendations from friends or family members. As mentioned in this handbook already, social proof and word of mouth are super powerful, so how do you get more of your customers sharing their thoughts publicly?
The best way to get more online reviews for your business is to ask your customers to leave them. If you don’t ask, likely, you’ll only get around 1-2% of customers leaving reviews, which will be a mix of glowing reviews (yay!) or negative reviews from disgruntled customers (eek!). Not all customers will leave reviews (even if you ask them) because they don’t want to share their thoughts publicly, however, you’re guaranteed to get a lot more of your customers leaving reviews if you ask than you would if you didn’t ask at all.
When asking your customers to leave an online review, it’s also important to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Often a business will include a link in a post-visit email, but the uptake of this method is generally pretty low because the link gets lost amongst the rest of the message, and it’s too much effort for the customer to leave a review.
Yonder helped Easyhike increase their Google reviews by 500% in one month by using our survey tool to identify their most enthusiastic promoters and making it frictionless for them to leave an online review. For comparison, Easyhike was receiving 2 to 3 Google reviews per month (average figure based on Summer 2019-20 results) and since using Yonder, they received 15 Google reviews in February ‘21 alone.
How? Yonder sends a beautiful survey directly to the customer, with rating buttons embedded directly in the email - making it super quick and easy for customers to share feedback. We then ask customers who rate you 5-stars to post on their preferred online review site and make it easier still by giving them a copy button to share their comments from the survey.
