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3 Biggest Mistakes Business Owners Make When It Comes to Reviews

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3 Biggest Mistakes Business Owners Make When It Comes to Reviews

Reviews are the #1 way to convert potential clients into customers and most business owners have no clue how to get a powerful review and actually market it in a way that will generate revenue. Today you are going to learn what the 3 biggest mistakes business owners make when it comes to reviews. I promise by the end of this blog you will have a strategy how to correct them so that you can double or even triple your revenues.

Mistake #1 Waiting to ask for a review

The biggest mistake business owners make when it comes to reviews is waiting too long to ask for a review. How many times have you been asked by a company to review them a day, three days or even a week later? Now think about how many times you have actually completed the review. Odds are you did not take the time to give the review. Now why is that? Is it because they didn’t do a good job? Probably not. the main reason people don’t leave reviews is because that excitement over your service has wore off and they are focused on the next thing. That is why it is so important to ask your customers to give you a review right after you finish the job. That is when they are the most excited about your services and will give you the best review. By asking for the review immediately you increase your odds of getting a great review astronomically.

Mistake #2 Asking for a review with a postcard or email

How often do you check your mailbox or email? How quickly do you throw mail away or delete emails? If you are like most people the mail goes in the trash right away and email is deleted without even reading past the subject line. Using these methods to ask for reviews is so ineffective that even if you have the best clients in the world you are only going to get a single digit response. Even worse than the response rate, the reviews you do get are going to be brief and most will lack any emotion, which is the key to a great review that sells people on your services. The best way to make sure that 99% of your clients read your invitation to give you a review is through text messaging. 99% of text messages are read which means they will see it. Not only will they see it but it will conveniently be on their phone at all times until they give you that review. By just using text messaging to invite your customers to give you a review, you can double or triple your reviews.

Mistake #3 Not marketing your reviews

The third and most damaging mistake business owners make when it comes to reviews is not using them in their marketing. Your reviews are the best marketing weapon you have because it is someone else talking about you, not you talking about you. Why is this so effective? Because 88% of consumers will believe an online review as if a friend personally recommended the business. Think about that for a second, that means that a review is as good as a referral from a client and we all know how well word of mouth referrals convert.

I was talking to a business owner the other day about reviews and I asked him how he markets his reviews. He told me that he gets reviews on one of the major review sites that is his strategy. I said, ”So, your marketing strategy for reviews is to hope that a potential clients does a search for your service in Google, picks the review site out of 9 other options, picks your company out of the 50 other competitors on the page and then happens to pick your best review to read? That sounds like Vegas odds to me!”

You cannot hope and pray that your reviews will be seen on a review site, you have to market your reviews to world if you want to double or triple your business.  First, your reviews should be on the homepage of your website for every visitor to see. Why? Because people will believe your reviews faster than any sales copy you can put on that page. Most business owners focus on so much on the sales copy on their website that they completely ignore the one thing that has been proven to increase website conversions by up to 84%….reviews!

Second, you should be sharing all of your reviews on your social media sites. All of your clients and potential clients are hanging out on the social media sites so you should be sharing your success stories where they are spending the majority of their time online. Additionally, sharing them on the social media sites will help your reviews get indexed in the search engines as well.

Third, no communication should go to a customer or potential customer without a review included in it. Every email, flyer, or proposal you send out should have a link to your reviews. That is your social proof that will close the sale faster than anything you can say…let other people share their experiences with your company and sell for you!

I promise if you implement these strategies in your business you will get more reviews, get more powerful reviews and close more sales using reviews as a key part of your marketing. If you would like to learn how to collect reviews automatically and automate the marketing of your reviews, you can check out this great system we use and get a started today with a free trial: www.sotellusnow.com

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