In order to grow, market and promote your business to potential customers in your local area, you need to ASK FOR REVIEWS!  After you’ve completed a job for a customer, ask them for a positive review.  Not only does this promote your business in local directories but it also helps new potential customers to more easily find you.  Based on positive reviews, a customer will be more likely to call your business rather than a competitor.  Asking for and getting a review from a customer is not as easy as it sounds, you require them to take action.  Here are some helpful ways you can get it into your customer’s head —

Send an Email:

When gathering your customer’s details before performing a service, make sure you ask for their email.  After the service is complete, follow up with an email asking them to leave you a review with a link to one of your business profiles like Google My Business.   You can use the template below

Dear Customer Name,

On behalf of (name of company), I would like to personally thank you for your business. We appreciate the trust you place in our company and strive to achieve excellence for you and all of our customers.

If like many of our loyal customers, you had a pleasant experience with us, please share it with others; leave us a review on Google My Business (https://plus.google.com/104496198506550641294).

If by unfortunate circumstances you had a bad experience with us, we would like you to reply to this email if you had a bad experience with us. We’re sorry and we would like the chance to repair our relationship with you.

Please let us know if we can enhance our service to you in any way.

Thank you,
(name of business owner)

https://plus.google.com/104496198506550641294

Send Out a Business Review Postcard

Create a business review postcard with separate business profiles for each one of the business review sites your company is listed on. Then print and shuffle the stack to get an even distribution of business reviews from a variety of popular business directories. Staple the postcard to every invoice or report you give out to encourage your customers to leave you a review.  You can also send the postcard using snail mail to the customer’s address after the inspection.  This can be very effective if you have a professionally created postcard and an easy way for the customer to find you online using the postcard.  Here are a few of tips on putting together an effective snail mail postcard:

1. Keep text brief and to the point.  Example: We appreciate your business.  Please review us at www.5starreview.com/businessname.
2. Include one or two eye-catching graphics, infrared images tend to work well as do arrows.
3. Include a QR code so that users with smartphones can directly access your online review profile by simply scanning the code.  Generate a QR code for free at http://www.qrstuff.com. Enter your business review profile URL and select “Download” as the output type.  Use this graphic on your business review postcard.
4. Make sure it looks professional.  You can create a simple business review postcard fairly inexpensively at: www.vistaprint.com/postcards.aspx

The goal is to get the customer to take action.  If you integrate the review process into your interaction with the customer following a service, you can begin to build positive reviews and prominence in local review outlets.  If you have any questions or need assistance with any of the steps noted above, feel free to shoot us an email on our contact us form. We’ll be happy to help you set it up.