Drive more Online Reviews with Marketing Automation
Online reviews are a crucial part of customer research. Everyone these days is trained to do it: you Google the company or product + “reviews” and see if there’s anything that looks great, or if anything stinks. The problem for most companies is there are too many extreme reviews: either customers who are over the moon in love with the company or customers who hate your company and want to spread that hate on every review website they can find. Increasing the number of legitimate customer reviews for your business helps protect against the crazies, it helps with local SEO, and it helps paint a more detailed picture of how your customers use your product and the varied needs they have. Building an automated review process like this is something we recommend for most customers. Getting valid customer reviews is difficult for most companies and this process adds rigor and consistency to the process.
Components:
- A way to add customers to the drip campaign, which is easy if you’ve integrated your CRM.
- Drip campaign workflow
- This is where you define how many emails will go to the customer to thank them and urge them to review you.
- The initial email to customers thanks them for purchasing/signing on.
- “Review Request” landing page or form: this is your customer satisfaction survey on your website.
- Auto Responder on the Review Request form.
- This is where you add logic to separate customers based on how they rated your company
How a Basic Automated Review Generation System Works
- A customer purchases Widgets from our company. The salesperson sets the user to “Closed – Won” in Pipedrive CRM.
- That field synchronizes with ActiveDEMAND. The user contact change puts them into the “Get more reviews” workflow.
- The workflow waits 2 days for the customer to fall in love with our bespoke widgets.
- The workflow sends an email to the customer thanking them for buying our widget and asking for feedback.
- The customer opens the email and clicks on the review page.
- On the review page, the customer rates our widget ⅘ stars.
- We email the customer asking them to share their review on our Google My Business listing, we even include their notes so they can copy and paste the review they gave us on the form onto other review sites.
Best Practices from the Pros
We’ve described a simple version above. Johnny Wenzel, Manager of Marketing Science at POD Marketing, has these best practices to share:
- We send up to 3 emails or texts for the initial review. They only get the second and third if they didn’t click a link in the previous email.
- We only ask for a star rating plus comments, unless the client has a very specific thing they want feedback on. Users are more likely to fill in a form when there are fewer fields.
- We wait 0 seconds after 5-star review feedback. Using dynamic blocks, we take them to a landing page. There, we have links to review sites right there, we ask the client to review us on one of the sites, and we have their comments handy for them to copy and paste to make it easy for them.
- We like to reach the customer when the experience is most fresh for them. If it’s eCommerce, we reach out the day after delivery. For lead gen, we try and send it immediately after their service with our client. The ideal scenario would be to send a text message that pops up on the client’s phone right after using the service.
Johnny’s other tips:
- SMS works better than email
- Don’t use the slider but use the star rating field
- Send negative online reviews to the client so they can nip an issue in the bud
- Only choose 3 review platforms for the customer to choose from with Google being the most prominent (unless you’re trying to fix a bad Yelp listing or something like that)
Johnny’s last parting thought was:
Reputation management is going to continue to grow in importance so make your clients adopt a system for it. By being proactive in generating online reviews, you’re setting up a system for building great reputation for your clients.
Getting more online reviews is critical to growth because it helps clients trust in your company. Don’t delay, drive more reviews for your company using ActiveDEMAND.