Get More Customer Reviews with a Review Acquisition Strategy

Last updated on July 19th, 2021 at 12:17 pm

Today, we’re going to cover how to implement a Review Acquisition Strategy for your company. Simply put, a Review Acquisition Strategy is a system to help you maximize the number of reviews you can receive.

Let’s say, for example, you get 5 reviews a year right now. With a review acquisition strategy, the goal is to more double reviews a year. Know how to ask for reviews and when to ask for reviews without spending a lot more time.

Notice the two elements (“how” and “when” to ask for reviews) don’t need to cost you any money, and shouldn’t take that much time. It’s designed to change the DNA of your company. The way your team thinks and work so you’re constantly churning out reviews faster than your competitors.

Once you have a Review Acquisition Strategy in place, you now have a bigger collection of testimonials you can use to help you win more sales and be more discoverable on the Internet. 

Why it’s important for you to set up a Review Acquisition Strategy

As you probably know, reviews are great for selling online. Display your healthy selection of good reviews and you will be much more persuasive online. Good reviews provide validation and trust with your potential customers.

Don’t be a has-been—it’s very important to keep getting “fresh” reviews. Your reviews prove that you’re constantly doing good work, and they’re not just old and “stale” reviews.

Your customers will buy from the competitor with the most and best reviews. The more reviews you get, the better your chances are of garnering a sale from one of those reviews.

Having a Review Acquisition Strategy will also help you protect against bad reviews. In order to ensure that you have an active system for getting customer reviews. Having your Review Acquisition Strategy in place will also allow you to protect two things:

• “Drown out” bad reviews with good reviews
• Being quick and positive when your customers do post a negative review online

WHAT TO SAY to get more reviews

Ask your customers directly for reviews, as this will be the quickest and easiest way to ensure that you get reviews, and that they come from trusted customers. Being apprehensive and not wanting to “bother” your customers will not yield you as many reviews as simply being direct will.

Remind your customers that your business relies a lot on testimonials as part of your pitch to make them understand how important reviews are to you. Let them know that you’d love for them to write a review, how easy it is, and how meaningful their comments would be to other (potential) customers.

Phrase yourself in a way that makes people want to review you. These are three key things you need to have in your pitch to your customers to get reviews:

• We want your feedback
• It’s really easy for you to review us (here’s a link!)
• Your reviews are a big deal for our business

WHAT TO DO to get more reviews

In order to ensure that you get lots of reviews, the most important thing you need to do is to:

Remind the customers everywhere that you’re a review-based company and that their reviews mean the world to you. Plaster solicitations for reviews everywhere you possibly can in order to ensure that you have plenty of notices for people to review you.

The biggest problem you can have in a Review Acquisition Strategy is to have customers “not know that you wanted reviews” because you were too meek to ask them.

Here are some ideas where you can put your solicitations:

• Emails
• The footer of your email signature
• Facebook page
• Website
• Business cards
• On a sign in your front lobby
• Printed on your receipts
• Here’s a good one: put a computer in your office decorated with Yelp/Google+ positive reviews so that it’s very easy for customers to review you if they’re happy with your services

Be persistent and tactful with your solicitations; make the effort to remind your customers several times that you’d love for them to review your company online. Social media is a great tool to use to connect with people and remind people that you need reviews.

Follow up with customers and remind them that their reviews are important. Put your great customer service skills to the test and use postcards, emails, phone calls, etc. to. Doing so will help your customers recognize a) how important the reviews are to you, and b) that you care enough to take the time and provide great customer service.

It’s also important to train (and enforce) your sales and service teams to frequently ask happy customers to review you. As long as your teams understand the importance of customer reviews, the more people helping ask for reviews from your customers, the better. If you have a customer service team, they’re the ones who are on the front lines dealing with customers. If you don’t talk with every customer, make sure the people that do are clued into your strategy!

Take advantage of technology

Use technology to your advantage to make your task of collecting reviews easier and more accessible. You can do things like:

• Install a popup that asks your customers what they thought of the purchasing process at the time of checkout
• Use a review solicitation service like Feefo (email-based) or a website plugin like Reseller Rating that pops up once someone places an order with your business
• Provide a link that goes directly to where you can be reviewed somewhere in your correspondence with the customer. Don’t beat around the bush, state your request simply and directly
• Give customers one or two options online where they can review you so they can choose which one is best

Make sure your Review Acquisition System is set up and watch them pour in

Remember, some reviews are going to happen organically, whether you want them to or not.

Providing a Review Acquisition System for increasing the amount of customer reviews you receive is important because it’s going to convince more people that your customer experience is good enough so they want to buy from you and only you.

Customers are going to want to go with the company that has the most and best reviews. Having a strategy in place that ensures you can keep getting new reviews will go a long way towards ensuring you keep getting reviews.

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