How to Get More Online Reviews

Everywhere you go, you see reviews. Whether it’s a physical product, food, or some type of service, if it’s worth talking about (in good or bad ways), it has reviews.

Some of this feedback is simply comments on blogs and forums. But mostly, reviews exist on large e-commerce sites where companies sell their products.

The most important thing about reviews is that people are passionate about them.

According to Venturebeat.com, 30% of Internet users check out reviews on Amazon before buying a product. And that’s just Amazon.

This digital bathroom scale on Amazon has nearly 12,000 reviews and 143 questions and answers about the product. The fact that it’s nearly half-off will help drive sales, but the reviews and customer interaction have a huge impact. Before, people would ask their friends about products. But now, they increasingly rely on online reviews.

People trust reviews to inform them about their decisions, and reviews play a huge role in final purchasing decisions – whether it’s to buy a particular product or choose a specific doctor. 

Although there’s no way to definitively say that reviews are good for business, just about every study or anecdotal case suggests that they are. You don’t have to be a big e-commerce site to add reviews to your personal website store.

Potential customers trust reviews for a few reasons:

  • They represent a real use situation
  • They are less likely to be biased (than a sales page)
  • They give visitors confidence to buy, proving there won’t be any issues with the purchase

Getting reviews is hard: If you’ve been selling online, you’ve probably noticed that it is difficult to get customers to leave reviews. People want to buy things, but they don’t really want to do any extra work. Writing a good review can take 5 to 15 minutes without providing much of a benefit to the reviewer.

That’s why people typically leave a review for one of three reasons:

  • They hate the product
  • They love the product
  • They’re somewhere in-between but would like to clear up any confusion around the product for other potential buyers (essentially just doing something nice)

The first two reasons are pretty self-explanatory.

Obviously, you don’t want people leaving reviews if they hate the product. That’s how you get negative reviews and one-star reviews that actually decrease your conversion rates.

So, how do you prevent it? Simple: have a great product along with great customer service.

If you create a product that everyone loves, you’ll get tons of reviews. In reality, most products have customers that fall into all three camps. What you need to do is focus on the people who already love your product and the ones that like it. A solid three- or four-star review can still help your conversion rate.

The Best Ways to Get the Most Reviews from Your Happy Customers

Most business owners love to create products. But not all business owners love to sell their products or services. Selling often feels like you’re doing something wrong and imposing on the people you genuinely care about. It’s hard to ask for anything but it needs to be done.

You need to start by realizing that selling doesn’t have to be underhanded. If you create a truly valuable product, sales is simply letting people know about it. If your product is great, people will buy your product and thank you for the opportunity.

After you make the sale, however, you need to ask customers to review it.

If you don’t ask, most will never even think of doing it, even if they don’t mind. Although it might seem like you’re imposing on them—asking for something without giving something in return—you aren’t. Most happy customers are glad to help you spread the word of your product so that other people will also give it a shot.

So, stop thinking that you’re taking advantage of your customers and realize that you’re helping each other. Ideally, you want to ask for reviews as soon as you can after the purchase is made and your buyer had the time to receive and test the product. If you ask too early, customers can’t review the product because they haven’t had the chance to use it. If you ask too late, they’ll have forgotten about it and are less likely to review it (although late is better than early). You could do what Amazon does. Amazon typically sends an email reminder asking you to review a recent purchase a few days after you’ve received it.

What’s the right approach? How to ask for a review

It’s important to carefully approach the subject of reviews with your customers.

First, you want them to receive the product and be happy with it. The more satisfied they are, the more likely they are to not only leave a review but leave a positive one. Before asking for a review, I recommend contacting customers and asking them if they had any problems with their order. If they have had problems, they’ll let you know, and you’ll have the chance to fix them. If they haven’t had any problems, some will let you know, but the others just won’t reply. It’s safe to ask any of these customers for reviews.

Finally, the way in which you ask for reviews is important. Being persuasive with your request can double or triple the number of reviews you end up getting.

Tip #1 – Be appreciative:

Reviewers don’t get much out of the process. It’s just a nice thing they can do for other people reading reviews in the future. That said, many reviewers will give you reviews if they know that the reviews are important to you.

The online doctor review site – Real Self – does a good job of this. There are two parts of the email in particular that make it work so well:

  1. “…would love for you to share your experience…” – They don’t just ask you to leave a review for the fun of it. They’re making it clear that they appreciate it and value it.
  2. “…will also help others make informed decisions” – Since the customer was just in the tough situation of trying to make a good decision, they are likely to be empathetic to other people in the same situation. Some customers will leave a review just to help others.

image16

Tip #2 – Make it simple:

Most reviewers leave reviews because it’s a nice thing to do. There is, of course, a limit to how much most people are willing to give just by being nice. Make leaving a review as easy as possible.

First, if you’re asking for a review on any third-party sites, always link directly to the review forms on the specific sites:

Alternatively, if you’re asking customers to leave a review on your site, let them start the process by clicking on a star rating within an email. All the biggest sites do this for a reason. It works.

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The other benefit is that it makes it really clear that you’re looking for the customer to leave a review (they know what stars represent).

Tip #3 – Do NOT offer an incentive:

I think this is unethical and there are obvious moral issues because you’re essentially bribing your customer for a good review.

Even if you don’t intend your incentive to be a bribe, most people feel compelled to provide good reviews if they’re being compensated for it (without any other potential buyers being aware of it).

If you are going to offer an incentive, you should ask your reviewers to disclose that fact in their reviews. If the review discloses the incentive, not only is there no moral argument, but it’s also not violating any laws.

Tip #4 – Be clear about what you’re looking for:

If you just have one textbox that says “your review,” customers could write about anything, even irrelevant things.

However, if you break down the review into descriptive fields, your reviewers will have a much better idea of what to include:

You can prompt the customer to talk about certain aspects of the product that you believe influence buying decisions (shipping, packaging quality, durability, etc.).

Speaking of great reviews…here’s what’s in them

You can dictate the contents of a review by prompting your customers to think about certain topics.

This is important because most people don’t know what a good review consists of. They’ll often leave reviews like “great product” even though that’s not really very useful.

Instead, you want to prompt them with any (or all) of the following:

  • including their background situation
  • any special features of the product or buying process
  • their overall impression
  • would they buy again?

When you send your review request, just tell your customers that they can include any information they’d like. However, they should consider things like…(pick from the above list).

Part #1 – A quick background:

Not everyone buys a product for the same reason or knows as much about a specific type of product as others.

The best reviews include a quick statement about why a customer bought a product. If another potential buyer is in a similar situation, they will automatically become more interested (it resonates with them).

Additionally, any mention of expertise also makes the review more credible (e.g., “I have purchased x types of product”).

 

Part #2 (optional) – A brief description of product and buying process:

Unless you’re selling your products through a well-known fulfillment service like Amazon, shipping speed and safety are still big concerns for online shoppers.You should obviously make your shipping information very clear on your sales pages.

But people also want to know how fast and secure your shipping is in real life, not just in theory.

If a potential buyer sees multiple reviews praising your shipping process, they’ll feel assured.

Part #3 – The overall result:

The most important part of any purchase is how good the product is. That’s going to be the focal point of any review.

Part #4 – Would you buy again? 

Customers can often find at least a few good things to say about a product. Nice people leave nice reviews—it’s that simple.

However, the ultimate test of a great product is if it earns the loyalty of a customer. When customers say that they will definitely buy from you again in the future, anyone reading the review will know that the reviewer is serious when they praise the product:

Conclusion

If you sell anything online, remember that reviews are one of the biggest factors that affect your sales, so don’t ignore them.

First, come up with a plan of attack to determine what type of reviews you need.

Next, optimize your sales funnel to maximize the number of customers who leave you reviews—and not just any reviews, great ones.

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The Twitter Hashtag: What is it and How do you use it?

Hashtags are unavoidable. Everyone is using them – on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, even TV.

A hashtag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you type #NationalCoffeeDay (or #nationalCoffeeDay or #nationalcoffeeday, because it’s not case-sensitive) into the Search Twitter box at the top of any Twitter page and hit Enter, you’ll get a list of tweets related to National Coffee Day (September 30th, by the way). What you won’t get are tweets that talk about “coffee” because “coffee” isn’t preceded by the hashtag.

 

Hashtags allow you to create communities of people interested in the same topic by making it easier for them to find and share info related to it.

Where Do Hashtags Come From?

Any user can create one simply by adding it to their own tweet. For example, when a plane went down in the Hudson River a few years ago ago, some Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549 to it. I have no idea who this person was, but somebody else would have read it and when he posted something about the incident, added #flight1549 to HIS tweet. For something like this, where tweets would have been flying fast and furiously, it wouldn’t have taken long for this hashtag to go viral and suddenly thousands of people posting about it would have added it to their tweets as well. Then, if you wanted info on the situation, you could do a search on #flight1549 and see everything that people had written about it.

When hashtags first started being used, it was a very organic process that worked simply because of a group mindset that people like to categorize topics and this was one way to make it easier to do so.

Now that they are so common, they really only show up spontaneously if there’s a breaking news item. Otherwise, they’re used to promote, praise, or pan people (#TrumpSucks), brands (#VolkswagenScandal), events (#MNF), and anything else people want to discuss en masse (#Joaquin).

How Do I Create My Own Hashtag?

The first thing you would do is a basic Twitter search to see if a related term already exists. These days, odds are it does. In fact, I’ve been trying to think of something so obscure that one doesn’t exist (#underwaterbasketweaving, anyone?) and haven’t had success yet!

Probably the only reason you would need to create a new one nowadays would be for the group activities category I mentioned above. In that case, since the tag will use up some of your 140-character limit, you want to keep it fairly short, while still making it precise so other people aren’t likely to use it for another purpose. For example, let’s say I wanted to create a virtual book club with my friends scattered around the country. I might create the #gsbookclub hashtag that we would all add to the tweets we’re posting about the books we’re reading.

If you want more than just your friends to use the hashtag, you might want to “announce” it to your followers.

There are two possible issues here. One has to do with whether there’s an issue with the hashtag itself. Twitter’s Help page explains some of the problems you can run into—for example if a hashtag is made up entirely of numbers, Twitter doesn’t make it searchable. However, in most cases, this is NOT the problem.

Instead, the problem is actually with Twitter’s own search feature. This Help article explains some of the factors that may be affecting you as well. For example, maybe you’ve got your page set to Top Results instead of All or maybe your tweets are protected.

How to Promote Your Content in Less Than an Hour a Day

Why Promoting Content is Important

In his post “The 80/20 Rule for Building a Blog Audience” marketer and entrepreneur Derek Halpern notes:

If you spend time writing a piece of content, and that content only gets 1,000 readers, chances are there are one million other people in the world who can benefit from what you wrote.

Why then, would you spend more time creating content when you already have something that your ideal customers can benefit from?

Halpern has an 80/20 content strategy, that is, he spends 20 percent of his time creating it and 80 percent of his time marketing it.

While this is a fantastic strategy if you’re new and need to grow your audience quickly, content marketing experts warn that sticking to this strategy can mean that you’re under-serving your existing audience.

So how can you grow your audience while still focusing on creating massive value for your existing readers and followers?

Here’s a plan: Give yourself quick wins with an automated strategy and a checklist.

Promoting Your Content: 5 Quick Tips

1. Send it to Your Email List (Time taken: 3-5 minutes)

One of the best ways to get immediate traction with your content is to send it to your email list. Your email subscription list is typically comprised of people who have signed up to receive updates from you because they like and trust you or your brand and want to hear from you.

These are the people who are most likely to add high numbers to your social shares, to read your content the moment it’s published, or to forward it to others who may benefit from it.

Your email subscribers are most likely the most engaged of your audience, so it’s always a fantastic idea to share content with them on a regular basis.

2. Schedule it on Social Media over a Period of Weeks (Time taken: 5-10 minutes)

A social media editorial calendar can be a fantastic thing and one most business owners swear by, especially if they run small operations with little help.

When you publish a post or a piece of content, one of the best things that you can do is to spread out the promotion over a period of time using tools like Buffer or Hootsuite.

3. Email Everyone who is mentioned in your post or article (Time taken: 5-10 minutes)

A fantastic way to not only connect with your audience, but to connect with other people in the industry and their audience, is to mention them in your articles and blog posts and then let them know when you’ve done so, in order that they can share with their readers if they so choose.

To find someone’s email address quickly:

  1. Look through their website for a “Contact Me” or “About” page to see if you can find it there.
  2. Try LinkedIn. Often, people who want to be contacted will put their email address up in order to be found.
  3. Google combinations of their name with “@websitedomain.com” (in quotes) to see what comes up. For instance, if you were looking for my email address, you’d be able to find it very quickly by using the search term [Gabe “@connect4consulting.com”]

4. Syndicate Your Content (Time taken: 10-15 minutes)

Building partnerships with larger media organizations is the ideal way to syndicate and share your content. This however, will take lots of time and effort.

While you’re working on building those, don’t forget to utilize the free networks like Medium and LinkedIn that offer you similar syndication opportunities to reach new audiences.

Medium has a great guide to publishing on its platform and the things to keep in mind. Read it here.

And in this fantastic post about publishing to LinkedIn, Noah Kagan lays out the following tips:

  1. Make your titles between 40 and 49 characters long
  2. Make your posts on LinkedIn visual! Add 8 images
  3. Don’t add video or other multimedia assets to your posts
  4. Use “how-to” and list-style headlines
  5. Divide your post into 5 headings in order to attract the greatest number of post views
  6. People like to read long-form content on LinkedIn – 1,900 to 2,000 words long
  7. Don’t get your audience all fired up
  8. Make your content readable for an 11-year-old
  9. Promote your LinkedIn publisher post on other social networks!
  10. LinkedIn likes get you views, shares, and comments
  11. Publish your LinkedIn posts on Thursday

You shouldn’t syndicate every single post. Choose posts that may resonate with unique audiences. It’s a great way to bring interested readers over to your website. I also don’t recommend syndicating new content immediately.

5. Create Quick and Easy Graphics to Share on Social Media (Time taken: 10-15 minutes)

If you’re using images in your posts anyway, a quick and easy win is to share the headline or quote from your post along with an image. If not, you can quickly and easily do so in Canva or many of the other image-creating resources mentioned in this post. We’ve found that it’s incredibly helpful to share images in your social media posts, since according to a 2013 Pew Research Study, nearly half of all Internet users have reposted a photo or video they found online.

This can help you gain traction on image-oriented social sharing networks even if you don’t have much of a presence on them.

Social Media Guru’s Weekly Checklist

Checklists can help you make sure that everything that needs to be accomplished within a given period gets done. As you’ll see below, a social media guru has a lot to do each week to maintain guru status.

Social Media Guru’s Weekly Checklist

Weekly

  • Check your stats
  • Engage with influencers
  • Engage with partners
  • Weekly goals check-in
  • Hold a strategy session
  • Attend events – chats, hangouts, etc.
  • Update your social media ads

Check Your Stats

In terms of what to check when it comes to stats, there are many, many options.

The Buffer blog has a great introduction to social media stats, as well as a weekly social media report you can create for sharing with your boss, client, or team.

This tip from Finola Howard is also really great:

Measure what’s worked. Note your best-performing posts in a spreadsheet or other file so you can reference later as you hone your content.

What makes for a best-performing post? That can be totally up to you, depending on the stats that matter to you.

Engage with Influencers

Influencers are people with either a large following or a verified status or an important role at a significant company. Reach out to those outside your circle, particularly any influencers in your industry or niche.

In the past, I’ve identified a few people who I was wanted to connect with, added them to a Twitter list, then went about the weekly task of checking out their updates and engaging when appropriate. The goal, ultimately, is to build a relationship and connection—and in a lot of cases it works, if given time.

Engage with Partners

Engaging with partners involves staying in frequent connection with your competitors, colleagues, and friends.

Weekly Goals Check-in

Often times, along with checking your stats on a weekly basis, you can quickly peek at how your stats fit with the goals you’ve set for social media. Here’re a couple of ways we do this at Connect4 Consulting:

1. Per-post basis

I know that we’ve got a certain benchmark in mind for a successful post, so I’m able to quickly see if we’ve reached that goal by peeking at the per-post stats (for instance, one benchmark is 200 clicks per tweet).

2. Longer-term goals

At other times, we’ll set a bigger goal to aim for over time, and we’ll use what’s called a waterfall graph to chart our progress.

Credit goes to the team at HubSpot for giving me this cool idea. Here’s how to make a waterfall graph for yourself:

If you’re using Excel, create a table with the following columns:

  • Date: Dedicate a cell to each day in the month.
  • Weekday/Weekend: Label each day as a weekday or weekend day.
  • Daily Actual Visits: Plug in the number of visits you actually get each day.
  • Cumulative Actual Visits: Add that day’s actual visit number to the number of visits you’ve gotten so far that month.
  • Daily Goal Visits: At the beginning of the month, plug in your daily visits goal, depending on whether it’s a weekday or weekend.
  • Cumulative Goal Visits: At the beginning of the month, sum your daily visits goal day over day.

Here’s what it might look like:

daily-traffic-waterfall.png

Each morning, plot your progress by plugging in the actual visit number from the previous day and adding it to the traffic you’ve earned over the month in the “Cumulative Actual Visits” column.

Next, create a graph from this spreadsheet to create your daily leads waterfall graph. First, hide the “Weekday/Weekend” column by right clicking on the column and choosing “Hide.” Then, highlight the rest of your data, including the titles of your rows and columns but excluding the “Total” row that’s at the bottom. Click the “Charts” tab at the top and choose “Line” and then “Marked Line.”

You should see a graph that roughly resembles this one:

daily-traffic-waterfall-excel.png

From there, you can add a title, label the lines, and change other visual elements.

Hold a Strategy Session

It always helps to step back and reflect.

Some cool strategy exercises could be reviewing what went into your social media marketing plan in the first place, i.e. your goals and purpose behind social media. Or answering some of these questions:

  1. What do we hope to achieve with social media?
  2. Are we on the right networks to connect with our audience?
  3. How does our voice/tone convey our brand?
  4. In what ways can we be most helpful to those we serve?

Attend Events

Here’s a huge list of possible chats to participate in:

list of possible places to look:

Update Your Social Media Ads

Depending on the depth of your commitment and involvement in social media ads, this one could easily be a daily to-do item. If you’re running just a few ads, then weekly could be a good frequency to start with. Check and refresh your ads. Keep the ones that are working. Iterate on the ones that aren’t.