Online reviews play an important role when it comes to improving and maintaining your online business. Considering the ever-increasing competition, it is important that you keep up with the preferences of your customers and devise strategies accordingly to cover the gaps. Therefore, let’s discuss some tips that will help you collect online reviews from your website. This is an easy way to generate reviews and increase the trust of customers.
Place A “Leave A Review” Section On Your Website
The first thing you can do to collect online reviews from your website is to create a “Leave a Review” section, which will direct the customers to a section where they can pen down their reviews. Plus, you should also have the option of selecting the number of stars.
This is perhaps the easiest way for you to know what your customers think about your business as well as the products. However, make sure the review form is neither too long to fill out nor complicated. If the review form takes several minutes for the customers to fill out, they will simply lose interest.
Place A Floating Popover
Another great way of collecting online reviews is by placing a floating popover that will float at the bottom of your screen. This popover is the latest reviews of your customers and will direct your customers to the review section upon clicking it.
Then again, make sure the popover is not too big that it covers the entire screen as you would not want it to ruin the customer’s shopping experience. Some websites have a huge popover covering the entire main screen upon visiting the site. Even though it is a practice followed by many but not ideal. Instead of guiding your customers to leave a review, you will simply make them go away.
Request Via Email Or SMS
Even though there are several advanced methods to provoke customers to leave a review, some old-school techniques can do wonders as well. For instance, if you have a collection of email addresses of your loyal customers, you can send them a link to your review page via an email or SMS. This will also serve as a reminder.
At the same time, do not fill their inbox with multiple reminders. You should send not more than three and then wait for the response. If there is no response, it means the customer is not interested in leaving a review and you should forget about them and move on.
Offer Incentives
Sometimes, you might want to offer your customers some incentives for leaving reviews. These incentives could be a discount in return for their feedback. Plus, you can also put them in a draw upon leaving a review.
Things To Avoid When Collecting Customer Reviews
While collecting online reviews from your website is important, you have to keep certain things in mind that might ruin your strategy. To begin with, review gating is a technique used by many businesses out there to filter out high-quality reviews from those that are either negative or won’t provide any review at all.
This is because business owners are terrified of negative reviews and will do everything, they can to hide them. Unfortunately, if a business has hundreds of five-star reviews, the customers are going to sense fishy activity anyways. It is not possible for a business to have high-quality reviews each time.
Secondly, you need to show some respect and courtesy to your customer for taking out the time and leaving a review. Since customers do not have anything to gain from reviews, it is only you who need them. Therefore, some customers might even feel burdened to leave a review while they are busy with their schedules. Therefore, you should make sure that you show respect and thank them for their valuable time and effort.
The aim here is to prove to your customers that you appreciate their time and effort so that they realize your business is also putting an effort in return to show them appreciation. Hence, a win-win situation.
Final Word
Collecting online reviews from your website can be pretty nerve-wracking. You cannot spend time chasing every customer out there. Therefore, simply follow the tips mentioned above and let the reviews flow automatically or use white label review management software to make the process easier.
