How to Get Your Clients to Leave You a Review

Many of our blog posts mention the importance of customer reviews and displaying those reviews on your website.  Reviews can have a profound effect on your business, from your search engine ranking to your company's overall reputation. 

But it's difficult figuring out how to get clients to leave reviews in the first place. Where do you start? How do you get people to only leave positive reviews? The process may seem complicated or difficult, but getting clients to write reviews isn’t as hard as you might think.

Here are five easy steps you can follow to motivate your clients to leave a review of your business.

Step 1 - Create a client email list

The first step is to gather all your resources into one place. In many service-based businesses, clients provide their contact information at some point during the process, including their email address. If you don’t already keep all your clients’ info in one place, start compiling email addresses. When you craft an email to send to your customers asking for a review, it will be easier to keep track of who you’ve emailed and who has responded. You might also consider identifying the clients you feel have had a positive experience and only email them, leaving out those few you know wouldn’t have anything nice to say about your business.

Step 2 - Provide options for where they can leave a review

When drafting your message, give people as many outlets as possible to leave a review. Sure, they can write a review that just goes back to you, but give them the option to leave one on popular sites like Facebook, Google, Yelp and Houzz by providing links to your pages within the email. They probably already have an account on at least one of these websites, making it even easier for them to log on and rate your business. Plus, it’s good to have reviews on all sites like these, so giving your customers an option will allow a wider variety of places people can read reliable reviews of your business.

Step 3 - Redirect people who have had a negative experience

In addition to giving customers multiple outlets to rate your business, you should also provide a separate outlet for those who want to leave a negative review. This means you’ll want to be strategic about how you ask for reviews. Leading customers to an outlet that allows them to directly post a review on a website is great if they have good things to say about their experience with you, but if they’ve had a bad experience, you’ll want to intercept those reviews before they get publicly posted.

Step 4 - Monitor and respond to reviews

Once you’ve politely asked your customers to leave you a review, monitor all your public reviews. Make time every week to check all places people are leaving reviews so you can respond to each one as quickly as possible. Publicly responding to reviews is an easy (and free) marketing tactic that is essential to making your business stand out. Whether it’s a positive or negative review , there are ways to respond to each that show that you are committed to excellent customer service, even after a transaction is complete.

Step 5 - Display 4 and 5 star reviews on your site

Now that you’ve gotten your clients to leave you a review, you might as well utilize them, right? The best time for potential customers to read the best reviews of your business is when they’re on your website considering your services. Incorporating an online review builder like Locallogy’s will automatically gather 4- and 5-star reviews of your business from various places on the Internet and display them on your website. This shows visitors what people like them are saying about your business, while allowing you to control what reviews they are seeing.

The Reviews are In

This five-step process is pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. It might require you to send a few messages gently reminding customers to rate your business, but it’s worth it. People are much more likely to leave a review if you just ask, so don’t be shy. Once you’ve created and sent your email, all you have to do is sit back and watch the reviews roll in.

If these five steps seem overwhelming or you would rather focus your attention on running your business, Locallogy can handle the work as part of our review builder service . From crafting a series of emails asking for reviews to displaying positive ratings on your site, we take care of getting you reviews and making sure they’re utilized.