8 Ways You Can Generate Customer Reviews For Your Brand

1. Delight Your Customers With A Great Experience

This is the most important and number 1 for a reason. Your customers’ in-store experience is pivotal to the amount and quality of reviews you’ll receive. If a customer is awestruck with your product, service, or the experience they had, they’ll feel obliged to leave a review.

Delighting customers and exceeding their expectations is key to generating more, and better, reviews. So, if you strive to deliver the best possible customer experience, rest assured it will pay off.

2. Collect Email Addresses During Billing

Asking for the customer’s email address and phone number at the time of purchase is a big step toward landing a review from them.

Usually, if someone is willing to share these contact details with a business, they have likely had a satisfactory experience and, thereby, are quite likely to share their experience with others. Once you have their email address, send a friendly follow-up and ask them to write an honest review about their experience with your business.

3. Use In-Store Signage To Encourage Feedback.

Being a local business with a brick-and-mortar store, you can use in-store signage to spur reviews. This can be in the form of countertop signs, window clings, stickers and review cards.

You can also include a review request at the bottom of the bill receipts. Or, you can even have a NFC or QR code that, when scanned, points to a list of review profile links that enable them to choose the platform of their choice to write a review.

These are clear cues to customers about your desire and appreciation for online feedback, proving you care about their opinions and the continuous improvement of your services.

4. Verbally Mention How Much You’d Appreciate Honest Feedback

Train your employees to mention how much an honest review would be appreciated, especially if a customer seems satisfied. This tactic won’t be effective if there’s a line of customers and the person at the counter keeps repeating the same “Please review us” message to everyone.

When the time (and rapport) is right, a friendly staff member should be authorized to use their judgment to say, “It’d be great if you’d consider dropping a review about <business name>.”  In this case, a request for a review will sound heartfelt instead of pushy.

Keep in mind that this applies to both in-store staff and online/phone support.

5. Offer Incentives On Future Purchases

While your most loyal customers are hopefully already evangelizing about your brand to their friends and family, some others may need a friendly nudge to get them to leave reviews. One of the best ways to do this is by offering them discounts, coupons, or other incentives in return for a review.

Just be aware that Google looks down on fake reviews and other types of engagement it views as insincere. That’s not to say you can’t offer incentives – you just can’t offer incentives for positive reviews. So long as you’re giving the two-star reviewer the same coupon as the five-star writer, you stay within the guidelines.

6. Include Review Reminders & Widgets On Your Website

The easier you make it for your customers to leave a review, the better the odds you have of landing more reviews. It sounds obvious, yet so many businesses aren’t making any effort to simplify the review writing process for their customers.

You see, most people don’t leave a review because they don’t want to spend time “learning” how to do so. Even if they know how to, it’s just viewed as an unnecessary tedious process that they can’t be bothered with. So, make it as straightforward as you can for your customers to leave their valuable feedback.

Use call-to-action buttons and pop-ups (not in an annoying way) on your website to lead them to your Google Business Profile, Yelp or Facebook review page.

Don’t expect your customers to follow an elaborate path for writing reviews, as it’s highly unlikely they’d do that.

7. Leverage Social Media

You can use social media platforms like Facebook, X or Instagram to post specific questions regarding your business’s performance.

Interested followers can be directed to leave a review on their choice of review platform.

For instance, if you have a restaurant business, you might informally ask if there was an older menu item that was discontinued that your followers really miss. Then, you could encourage customers to mention that in their review as a “vote” for bringing it back.

This technique empowers customers to share fun stories in the form of reviews while boosting the social media engagement of your brand.

8. Thoughtfully Respond To All Reviews

No matter how busy you are, it’s your duty to respond if someone takes the time to review your business.

While it’s always advisable to avoid sounding robotic as a brand, even a simple, timely “thank you” can encourage customers to stick around with your business. In other words, your response should ideally be personalized and uniquely worded.

When people see that you respond to every review – good or bad – it gives the impression that the business truly cares about consumer sentiment, thus providing an incentive for new customers to take a moment to share their own experiences.

Also, don’t feel dejected by negative reviews – they help make your brand more authentic. If all the reviews are sunshine and rainbows, there’s almost always something fishy. People would start doubting the authenticity of those reviews.

Here are some guidelines to follow when responding to negative reviews:

• Respond as quickly as you can.

• Acknowledge your mistake.

• Explain your point of view courteously.

• Write a meaningful and personal apology (even if you think it’s not your fault).

• Provide an immediate resolution or compensation (such as a refund, voucher, etc.).

• Request to take the matter offline if things seem to be getting out of hand.

• Use bad reviews as an opportunity to improve your business and show that you care about your customers’ satisfaction.

• Go back to the drawing board and fix the root cause of the problem.

Long story short, follow the golden rule of responding to reviews: always respond and never respond harshly.

Key Takeaways
Ultimately, consistently providing top-notch service to your customers is what naturally leads to positive reviews. Excellence in what you do tends to shine on its own. Yet, by adopting the strategies mentioned above, you can expedite the process of receiving favorable feedback.