Whether they like it or not, businesses everywhere are coming to terms with the fact that their prospective clients are consuming customer reviews as part of the purchasing decision. Thus, it is crucial that business owners invest in the management of their online reviews as a way to differentiate their business from top competitors.

So, how can this be done? First, integrate a process for capturing customer reviews into your everyday business functions, and keep at it. A page with reviews posted on a consistent basis will be more trusted by your prospects as well as the major search engines. Your prospects want to see a solid track record.

Compiling a large number of reviews will give your potential clients more confidence in your average star rating, so focus on getting more reviews. Your large compilation of reviews will give the reader more assurance in the handful of reviews they choose to read.

Make sure to always request reviews from your recent customers, as they are more likely to leave a thorough report of their experience. The more detailed your reviews are, the more believable they will be when read.

Negative reviews add validity to your reviews page. Always post a comment on negative reviews to show that you are engaged and willing to make the extra effort to resolve any client’s issue. Have negative reviews? We can help you formulate an impactful comment.

Lastly, reviews are more impactful when they are on multiple 3rd party sites (Google, Customer Lobby, Bing Local, Citysearch, Mapquest….). To learn more about how we help businesses generate reviews and syndicate them around the web check out our new website……

A Google Example

Local business often want to build their review count on Google Plus.  Some local businesses ask many of their customers to write a review for them on Google.  But the experience for the vast majority of  those customers is terrible.

The vast majority of the internet-using population does not have a Google Plus account.  So if they get all the way to the point of being willing to write you a review and actually go to your Google Plus page and click here:

This is what they get:

Would you complete the form?  Very few customers are willing to go through the hassle of creating a new Google/Yelp/etc. account simply to write a review of your business.

Create a 100% Solution

Inviting all of your customers to write a review on Google is like saying you want to direct the majority of your customers to have a failed experience.  Create a solution to enable 100% of your customers to write a review for you.

Customer Lobby also makes it easy to enable 100% of a business’ customers to leave a review.  When you use our review invitation tool, we already know who your customer is and they do not need to create an account.

The result: more reviews in more places more often.

It bears repeating that Internet marketing, at its most basic, consists of generating web traffic and converting that web traffic into leads or, better yet, customers. This process is probably best exemplified by online ads and their corresponding landing pages.

Landing pages are basically single pages dedicated to converting web traffic delivered from pay-per-click ads or search engine results. The content is incredibly focused on getting visitors to take one particular action, which is typically embodied by a button with a clear call-to-action (CTA).

If you are a local business owner, one way to think of your website is as a landing page, and search engine results, including Google+ Local listings, are the ads. With that in mind, your homepage should be designed to convert leads similarly to landing pages.

As always, the Internet marketing experts at HubSpot have provided an excellent resource on landing page design tips: 7 Design Best Practices for High-Converting Landing Pages

2 of the takeaways I found especially compelling for local business homepages are as follows:

1. Use a button with contrasting colors on the CTA button.
If the primary goal is to get prospective customers to click a button to fill out an appointment request, that button must standout from other content on the site.

2. Add Social Proof
This can mean anything from featuring social media plugins to snippets of recent blog posts, but for local businesses especially, it is important to have third-party verified customer reviews featured prominently. After all, prospective customers need a reason to follow through with that CTA.

Here is a link to the video directly: http://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m7kuh7itbe

• The maximum you can profitably spend on all of your sales, marketing and advertising efforts.
• How important customer retention is, particularly for the first few visits.

Simple Calculation – Wrong Answer?

A simple way to calculate this is:

(Average Value of a Sale) X (Number of Repeat Transactions per Year) X (Average Retention Time in Years for a Typical Customer)

However, this formula can lead to dramatic over-/under-estimates for many local service businesses.  Why?  The average value of a sale and average retention time is often skewed for local businesses.  More specifically, customers who come back for a 2nd, 3rd, 4th visit often spend more than on their first visit.  In addition, many businesses see a significant drop off in retention between the first and second visits and subsequent visits.  The results skew the averages resulting in wrong answers that could lead to very expensive mistakes for your company.

Detailed Calculation

Lets assume a business identifies a group of 1,000 customers who first used their company many years ago.   They then determined how many of these customers came back a 2nd, 3rd, … time.  Using the chart below, 350 came back a 2nd time and 175 came back a 3rd time.  They tracked the total sales from these visits and generated the following chart:

Using the simple formula above, the average customer visits the business 2 times and spends $215 each time resulting in a LVC of $421.  However, the weighted average sale is actually $140 per visit ($243,798/1,745) resulting in a true LVC of $273.

Why does this difference matter?  This business needs to spend less than $273 to acquire and service a customer (this example assumes a $0 cost of good sold) rather than $421.  Sales and marketing expenses based on the $421 LVC are expensive mistakes.

Key Take Aways

Most businesses do not know the LVC for their business. These are 2 very common mistakes:

• Over-spending to acquire new customers.
• Under-spending to generate and keep repeat customers.

Using the math above, a modest improvement in the customer repeat rates from the 1st visit to 2nd visit from 35% to 45% increases LVC to over $300 and total value by over $40,000.

For small business owners, there is nothing like getting a new five-star review. Long, detailed reviews are especially gratifying because they’re packed full of details attesting to those extra efforts that too often go unrecognized.

That kind of public recognition obviously helps small businesses to differentiate themselves from competitors, but at a more basic level, the reviews just feel good. For that reason, many business owners I speak with read each new review they get. Positive reviews fuel their motivation.

However, I have come across many business owners who are dismayed by typos, spelling, and grammar errors in their reviews. I have even seen reviewers asked to take down or edit their reviews for containing innocuous grammar mistakes, even though the reviews were readily understandable.

My advice is don’t sweat the typos. In fact, learn to love them.

Reviews are not supposed to read like polished marketing copy because they are not. Reviews are the natural sentiments of everyday people, not writers and marketers. That’s the difference between a review and a testimonial — testimonials are ads and reviews are a valued resource for consumers.

Consumers seek out reviews, not ads. So when savvy review readers encounter a reviews page filled with perfectly-written testimonials, they may second-guess the validity of the content. Surprisingly, those typos actually add value because the more apparent it is that your reviews were written by real customers, the more likely it is that your prospective customers will continue reading.

So while it is natural to want your best marketing asset to be perfect, it’s important to remember that reviews are only an asset because they are not perfect.

Most review sites that host published reviews offer some recourse for business owners and other concerned review readers to flag reviews that violate content guidelines or terms of service, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

Whether you are dealing with a review published on Yelp! or Google+ Local, you should be able to find published guidelines for the reviews content. This is your guide for flagging inappropriate content. In Google’s case, the guidelines are made available only after you flag the review, but most other sites have their policies readily available.

When flagging a review, the key is to reference the reviews site’s own guidelines.

Your best hope is to follow these steps:

1. Find the particular violation listed on the site’s own published content guidelines or terms of service.

2. Identify the part of the review that is in violation of one or more of the guidelines.

3. Flag the review. (Most sites give you the option to flag the review)

4. When possible, write a comment that identifies the infraction by citing the passage in the review and the particular guideline being violated.

Google now only offers a radio button, which makes it doubtful anyone actually investigates the flags, so just try to select the option that best describes the particular infraction. Hopefully someone else will submit a flag, making it more likely the inappropriate review will be stricken.

It is important to note that in most cases it is impossible to distinguish whose version of events are correct, so don’t expect to successfully challenge a review for being either “untrue” or “unfair.”  The most common violations are obscenities, spam, or someone writing a review about something other than a customer experience.

Yelp’s Content Posting Policy:

(click to enlarge)

Google’s Content Publishing Guidelines:

(click to enlarge)

We have written quite a bit about email marketing for 2 main reasons: First, as demonstrated in this survey, email remains the channel through which most customers prefer to communicate with the businesses they patronize. That fact alone means email deserves at least as much consideration as social media. Second point ends the discussion: Email is among the most cost-effective marketing endeavors, and confers a greater ROI than Social Media Marketing.

In light of these two points, small business owners stand to gain from best practice tips related to email marketing. We have written about building a customer email list, executing subtle drip marketing campaigns, and the kind of copy to write in the emails.

As I have grown intimately familiar with the pitfalls that often beset email marketing, I feel it is worth contributing a list of tips to avoid common problems.

1. Subject Line

The subject line of an email is where most of the battle is won or lost. This one line has more to do with whether or not anyone opens your email and ultimately the success of your campaign than any other single element, so it’s worth spending some time to make sure it makes sense and compels people to open the email.

To avoid annoying prospects and customers, make sure that the subject line message matches your content. If the subject line begs a question, answer it immediately in the copy of your email. Don’t make people search for the purpose of your email and don’t let them feel like they are being in anyway misled. The Subject line should create an expectation that the copy delivers.

2. SPAM Triggers

Spam filters are incredibly unfriendly to deals and offers being sent via email. In fact, the words “deal” and “offer” are both red flags. The way to think about SPAM filters is that they start with a perfect score and then begin deducting from that perfect score as they encounter triggers. If you get too many red flags, the email will not make it to your recipients inbox. Your efforts will be for naught.

There are many kinds of triggers, but by far the trickiest to overcome are words. Why is this hard to overcome? Take a look at some of the words and phrases that have been found to trigger SPAM filters:

• Dear
• Free
• Click
• Here
• Stop
• Member
• Cost
• Deal
• No Obligation

3. Conversion

Conversion can be defined any number of ways — a click, a phone call, a lead captured from a form. The best emails have a singularity of purpose and compel the reader to one action. This is usually embodied in the call-to-action or CTA. If the purpose of your email is to drive the readers to a landing page, it makes sense to have only one link, posted several places in the email, that serves a sole objective.

But, it’s not quite that simple. While it is desirable to have a clear call-to-action and the links and buttons driving readers to that action, Social Media plugins and reviews have been found to increase conversion when placed near a Call-to-action. Both Social Media channels as well as links to third party reviews encourage the reader to follow through with the Call-to-action.

Mike Blumenthal recently conducted a survey (the results are available here) looking at how a consumer might choose a specialty lawyer.  Although the results are specific to that industry, the data is useful for many local service businesses.

It turns out your potential customers take multiple paths to reach your door.  Some ask their friends for a suggestion; some ask a professional in a related field; some search online.  Asking for referrals/suggestions is as old as recorded history.  In a recent survey, Customer Lobby members estimated that 40-50% of new customers came from referrals.

But what about the other half?  What do they do first when they need a [insert your industry here]?  Not surprisingly, they search online.  But what do they look for?

#1 – They read your reviews

46% look for and read reviews about your business as a first step.  Even if they started with a Google search, 40% of them will first seek reviews from around the web and 60% will seek Google reviews first.  Reviews are now “table stakes” for a local business.

Your prospects are often finding your reviews through a branded search (i.e. typing you your company name and “reviews” into a search bar).  We track the keywords that searchers use to find Customer Lobby reviews pages and, by far, the most common search terms are “[insert company name] reviews” and “[insert industry name] reviews”.

#2 – They go to your website

30% of prospects first go to your website.  If your website is their first stop, its a good bet that your reviews will be their second stop.  This is a great opportunity to provide them a link to your best review content.  Check out the reviews widget in the column on the right side of this page as an example.

Regardless of how they get there, building your review asset is now as (more?) important than any other digital asset you have.

Need help?  Get started with a free reviews account!