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When it comes to asking for reviews, timing is extremely important. When a customer doesn’t leave a review, it doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t love your product or service. They may be absolutely thrilled. It may be the best purchase they’ve made in months. But you just contacted them at the wrong time. Maybe they were busy, or just don’t feel like typing a review at that moment. Happily, timing is a battle we can win, here’s how.
When should you ask your customer for a business review
Ask at the moment of peak excitement
If your customer loves your product or service, they’re most likely excited about it right after receiving it. Presenting a request for a review as soon as possible after the transaction is completed increases your response rates significantly.
So what do you need to do?
A) Develop a good habit of sending after each purchase
B) Or even better, get a system that sends review invites automatically after each purchase
That’s right, the answer is send reminders!
Even in peak excitement, our customers have lives. They’re doing things, and just may not be able to write a review right when we’d like them to. Instead of just being disappointed that our customers didn’t respond to our review invite, we can do something about it. We can send review reminders over the following weeks and try to reach them when they are ready to leave a review. It’s important to use software like NiceJob to automate this process, otherwise, we all know it just won’t happen.
The perfect time to send the review request
Sending review reminders at the right time can mean the difference between a new 5-star review and no review. Let’s use what we know to help us discern how to effectively send review reminders.
Our customers are busy and have lives so we want to send the first reminder soon, but not so soon that it irritates the customer. Sending the first review reminder after 2-4 days is a good starting range. Sending just one reminder may not be enough. It’s important to keep nurturing your customers to leave the review, often it takes 2 or 3 reminders before you get them at the right time and they leave a review. One caveat on this, there’s a fine line though between making sure the reminders are helpful and starting to irritate your customer…send too many reminders too close together and you can lose a fan.
Make sure you’re sending these reminders via email, and the initial invite via SMS text message. SMS is much more personal than email making it great for your initial invitation to leave you a review, but a bit overbearing for follow-ups. It’s also important that once someone has left you a review you’re no longer sending them follow-ups. This will at best annoy your customer, and at worse, cause them to change their positive review into a negative one.
So how do you send effective review reminders?
- Send the first friendly reminders soon, but not too soon
- Send 2 or 3 more reminders over a period of a few weeks after the job finishes
- Make sure your review invite system detects if the customer has left a review and if so stops sending reminders; otherwise you could irritate your customers.
Managing contact lists and sending review requests
Remembering and managing everyone’s contact information, sending out invites to those contacts after you’ve done business with them, and knowing whom of those you invited to leave you a review actually did so you can stop following up with them is not only a mouthful, it’s an arduous and lengthy process if done manually.
Software like Housecall Pro can manage your contacts for you, and when integrated into a review marketing platform like NiceJob, you can have your customers be automatically enrolled in review campaigns where they are unsubscribed automatically from receiving follow-ups after they’ve left you a review. You can set up this system to literally run on its own so all you ever have to do is finish a job in Housecall Pro, and respond to customers who leave you reviews, either to thank them or resolve any issues they may have.
Using software system setups like the NiceJob integration with Housecall Pro saves you thousands of hours of managing reviews that you can instead be spending managing all the new customers these reviews will help you acquire.
Should you incentivize reviews?
In a word, no. It’s the great product or service you provide that should be the incentive. If you delivered, it isn’t a big deal to ask for a review. Most customers are happy to do it. The trouble is, many businesses don’t ask. For those that do, most only ask once. It often takes more than one request. Incentivizing customers to leave you reviews can also actually hurt the trust people place in your existing ones because it can look like people were bribed into giving them. This is essentially the same thing as fake reviews, and having a reputation for being fake, is less trustworthy than having no reputation at all.
Instead of incentivizing reviews, simply make it as easy as possible for people to actually leave you reviews. Once again, software can help you do this.
The takeaway
Timing is really important if we want to get as many reviews as possible from our customers.
- Send review invites as close to peak excitement as possible
- Send regular reminders to make sure you contact the customer at the right time.
- Don’t incentivize reviews
- To send review invites at the right time, and frequency you either need to organize a really good in-house plan or skip all that work and use a system like NiceJob to automate the process.
