Online reviews are a trusted source of information for many of your potential customers so it's important you cultivate your online presence. We recently came across a great article on the Hubspot marketing blog about encouraging your customers to leave positive reviews and we've come up with a few ideas on how you can apply these to your glazing business.
Read the original article at Hubspot here.
You want to make it easy to leave reviews and easy for prospective customers to find them so give your customers options — your website, Facebook page, Yelp (or something similar) and your company's Google page. Your goal is not for one customer to leave the same review on all of those platforms, just give them options so they can pick the one that is most convenient for them.
Check out our article for setting up your Google My Business page here and find out more about using Facebook Pages for your glazing business here.
People love perks and incentives are a great way to encourage your customers to leave reviews. Hubspot suggests gift cards for coffee, cash or entries into a competition to win a larger prize.
You could implement this by including a small flyer with your final invoice or receipt with information about where to leave a review and what the customer will get in return.
You don't want to specify that you want a 'good' review, it's an incentive not a bribe! Needless to say, don't include your review flyer unless you're confident the customer had a good experience. You don't want to be forking out for a bad review after all.
If your customer takes the time to write a review, make sure you respond and thank them. If they make a suggestion for improvement then acknowledge it, even if you disagree. Don't respond defensively — remember this is public and you don't want to come across as angry — just keep it light with a statement like "thank you for your feedback, we've taken this on board and we're looking into it."
Leave your suppliers a review and hopefully they'll do the same in return! Things like customer service, promptness and availability are all features worth commenting on. There's a good chance that a residential customer won't be familiar with a glass fabricator but having an endorsement from a business is a good look for you.
Too often customers leave reviews out of frustration and you end up with more bad than good. You can counter this by encouraging your customers to leave reviews after having a positive experience with your business.