This online reviews guide was written to compliment our reputation management services page and give clients, both current and future, an understanding of how online reviews can help give your business an advantage, improving both its results and search engine presence. Understanding and achieving good online reviews should be an important element of any businesses digital marketing efforts. In fact as soon as you have an online presence your business will always be under review by someone ... so you may as well learn to exploit the concept. By embracing online reviews effectively you will importantly learn about your customers perceptions and how you compare to your competitors.
From new tech to consumer services, it’s rare to blindly make a purchase decision without reading through several online reviews – so whatever your industry, having a positive online presence gives you several key advantages, which is why it should be considered a key part of your branding.
Understanding why you need online reviews will help you optimize your customer experience to help create a positive online footprint. Let’s review these seven reasons why your consumers’ published experiences with your brand are vital.
You’re Under Review ...,
The way you market your brand is important, but having people talk about you is the best way to enhance your message. By encouraging positive conversations about your brand, you can quickly and clearly improve your marketing efforts.
How to Get Customers to Write Online Reviews:
Sometimes the challenge isn’t getting people to buy from you, it’s getting their opinion. Here are seven ways to help you get more online reviews.
1. Post on Social Media
A great option if you are active on social media and have a healthy following. Simply create a post asking your loyal customers or readers to leave a review. Chances are, if they have the free time to scroll through social media, they can likely spare a couple of minutes to tell you what they think about your business products or services. Plus, a customer that is loyal enough to follow you probably has some good things to say.
2. Offer Incentives for Leaving a Review
Incentives can be an effective strategy, particulalrly for certain promotions, but be careful not to overuse the strategy. Something simple, such as an Amazon gift card to the first five people who leave a review, or a 10% off coupon or voucher for their next purchase from your business, is a reasonable reward to offer.
3. Run an Email Campaign
When customers make a purchase, they often leave their email information with you. This gives you a list of contacts who have already purchased from you and likely have something to say. You can automate emails to go out as part of a campaign to gather customer opinions or after a customer’s product has been delivered.
4. Find Happy Customers Using a Survey
Surveys can tell you how satisfying a customer’s experience with your brand was. The data collected from these surveys can inform you about how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to a friend. From there, it’s easy to find out who the highly satisfied customers are, and you can send those specific individuals a request to leave a review. There’s a much better chance they’ll say something positive.
5. Send SMS/Text Messages
SMS/Text messages give you immediate access to customers. Plus, it might be a better way to get your request actually seen. Studies show that consumers read 82% of text messages within 5 minutes but only open 1 in 4 emails. Just make sure to keep your message short—and don’t forget a review link.
6. Ask In-Person
Asking for a review in person can feel awkward to some businesses, but it’s likely the most effective method. A great time to solicit a review is when a customer compliments or praises something about your business, then ask them if they’d be willing to share their opinion on a Google Review. (Read more below: when to ask for a review). You can also make it as non-threatening as having a tablet set up near the cash register with a sign asking for feedback. These are known as tablet reviews or Kiosk reviews
7. Always Make the Review Process Simple
Keep it simple. Make it as easy as possible for the customer to leave a review. Some ways you can do that include:
Timing is just as important in getting more Google reviews from your customers. It’s in your best interest to pick the moments when your customers are satisfied enough that they would leave a positive review, like:
Get More Reviews with web-aviso
If you have any kind of presence online, you need to incorporate online reviews into your marketing strategy. It’s one of the many things you should be doing to increase your visibility. web-aviso knows how to make the most of your reviews.
For those who have read this far we are rewarding you with some of our 'secret sauce' ... various responses to your online reviews, as t’s not just the reviews that matter, but how you respond to your reviews plays an even more significant role in influencing customer decisions.
Evidently the success of your online reputation heavily relies on how you manage your reviews. Granted, many review platforms don’t offer brands the option to respond to reviews, but popular platforms like Google, Facebook, and Yelp do. If a potential customer comes across unanswered reviews, especially negative reviews, it will dampen their perception of your brand. Potential clients have no way of knowing whether any action was taken to rectify the issue or if the customer who left the review received any acknowledgment. The cost of not responding to reviews is that you might lose the customers that you work to gain as well as newer ones. Nurturing your existing customers to establish a relationship is more profitable as attracting a new customer can cost five times more than retaining existing customers.
Before we reveal some of our different online review responses here are four key points :
1. Develop a plan that includes multiple scenarios
Create a list of brand-approved responses for various scenarios so your marketing staff can be prepared and respond to customers’ reviews efficiently.
PRO TIP : Check what reviews your competitors are getting, create a list of FAQs and keep the answers ready.
2. Always acknowledge customer reviews
Regardless of the sentiment, always thank customers for putting in the effort to share their experience. It’s always important to reference details about their experience mentioned in the customer’s review. For example, if they have specifically mentioned an employee they appreciated, include that person’s name in your response.
3. Offer an invitation to discuss their review further
If you receive a poor review, ask the customer to contact you through a customer service channel. This is especially helpful for negative reviews that are a little hazy. It shows the customer that you are interested in learning about their experience and working to improve it.
4. Look into adopting a platform to manage reviews
Online review and reputation management can become a complex process, especially if you have multiple locations or your business is growing rapidly. A review management platform or mechanism will relieve the stress of operational processes and help you focus on what’s important. Reducing the workload is just one of many benefits of adopting a review management service - which is where web -aviso can help with their reputation mangement solutions. With that, we’ve covered the basics! Let’s look at the review response templates now.
5-Star Review
1. The Glowing Review
5-Star Review
2. The Superfan Review
5-Star Review
3. The Review That Puts a Smile On Your Face
5-Star Review
4. The Objective Review
Positive Review
5. The Polite But Honest Review
Positive Review
6. The Sweet and Short Review
Positive Review
7. The Vague Review
Negative Review
8. The ‘Professional’ Review
Negative Review
9. The Brutal Review
Negative Review
10. The Harsh 1 Star Review
Negative Review
11. The One With No Review just A Rating
Negative Review
12. The Ones Where You Need More Information
Negative Review
13. The Red Flag Review
Negative Review
14. The Painful Review
Negative Review
15. The Slightly Unfair Review
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Web-aviso: Website Privacy Notice 1. INTRODUCTION This privacy notice provides you with details of how we collect and process your personal data through your use of our site https://www.web-aviso.com, including any information you may provide through our site when you purchase a product or service, sign up to our newsletter or take part in a prize draw or competition. By providing us with your data, you warrant to us that you are over 13 years of age. Steve Drury is the data controller and responsible for your personal data collected via this website (referred to as “we”, “us” or “our” in this privacy notice). Contact Details Our full details are: Legal entity: Steve Drury [Sole Trader] Trading as S.J.Drury/web-aviso Email address: steve.drury@web-aviso.com Postal address: 4 Andrews Close. Formby, Merseyside L37 2YH If you are not happy with any aspect of how we collect and use your data, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We should be grateful if you would contact us first if you do have a complaint so that we can try to resolve it for you. It is very important that the information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. Please let us know if at any time your personal information changes by emailing us at info@web-aviso.com 2. WHAT DATA DO WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU Personal data means any information capable of identifying an individual. It does not include anonymised data. We may process certain types of personal data about you – although very little is directly via the website: • Identity Data may include your first name, last name, and title • Contact Data may include your billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers. • Technical Data may include your login data, internet protocol addresses, browser type and version, browser plug-in types and versions, time zone setting and location, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this site. • Profile Data may include your preferences, feedback and survey responses. • Usage Data may include information about how you use our website, products and services. • Marketing and Communications Data may include your preferences in receiving marketing communications from us and our third parties and your communication preferences. • Financial Data may include your bank account and payment card details. • Transaction Data may include details about payments between us and other details of purchases made by you. We may also process Aggregated Data from your personal data but this data does not reveal your identity and as such in itself is not personal data. An example of this is where we review your Usage Data to work out the percentage of website users using a specific feature of our site. If we link the Aggregated Data with your personal data so that you can be identified from it, then it is treated as personal data. Sensitive Data We do not collect any Sensitive Data about you. We do not collect any information about criminal convictions and offences. Where we are required to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of the contract between us and you do not provide us with that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract (for example, to deliver goods or services to you). If you don’t provide us with the requested data, we may have to cancel a product or service you have ordered but if we do, we will notify you at the time. 3. HOW WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL DATA We collect data about you through a variety of different methods including: • Direct interactions: You may provide data by filling in forms on our site (or otherwise) or by communicating with us by post, phone, email, social media or otherwise, including when you: order our products or services; subscribe to our service or publications; request resources or marketing be sent to you; enter a competition, prize draw, promotion or survey; or give us feedback. • Automated technologies or interactions: As you use our site, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and usage patterns. We collect this data by using cookies, server logs and similar technologies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites that use our cookies. Please see our cookie section at the end section of this Privacy Note. • Third parties or publicly available sources: We may receive personal data about you from various third parties and public sources inside OR outside the EU as set out below: Hosting and analytics providers such as Google, Axandra Gmbh Strikingly and Mixpanel (via Strikingly) Search information providers such Google and Microsoft. Contact, financial, transaction data from providers of technical, payment, delivery services such as Paypal Identity and contact data from data brokers / aggregators such as Moz, Factual, Facebook, LinkedIn Identity and contact data from public sources such as Companies House and the Electoral Register 4. HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL DATA We will only use your personal data when legally permitted. The most common uses of your personal data are: • Where we need to perform the contract between us. • Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. • Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation. Generally, we do not rely on consent as a legal ground for processing your personal data, other than in relation to sending marketing communications to you via email or text message. You have the right to withdraw consent to marketing at any time by emailing us at info@web-aviso.com Purposes for processing your personal data Set out below is a description of the ways we intend to use your personal data and the legal grounds on which we will process such data. We have also explained what our legitimate interests are where relevant. We may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground, depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data. Please email us at info@web-aviso.com if you need details about the specific legal ground we are relying on to process your personal data where more than one ground has been set out in the table below. Purpose/Activity Type of data Lawful basis for processing To register you as a new customer (a) Identity (b) Contact Performance of a contract with you To process and deliver your order including: (a) Manage payments, fees and charges (b) Collect and recover money owed to us (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Financial (d) Transaction (e) Marketing and Communications (a) Performance of a contract with you (b) Necessary for our legitimate interests to recover debts owed to us To manage our relationship with you which will include: (a) Notifying you about changes to our terms or privacy policy (b) Asking you to leave a review or take a survey (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Profile (d) Marketing and Communications (a) Performance of a contract with you (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation (c) Necessary for our legitimate interests to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products/services To enable you to partake in a prize draw, competition or complete a survey (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Profile (d) Usage (e) Marketing and Communications (a) Performance of a contract with you (b) Necessary for our legitimate interests to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business To administer and protect our business and our site (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data) (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Technical (a) Necessary for our legitimate interests for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation To deliver relevant content and advertisements to you and measure and understand the effectiveness of our advertising (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Profile (d) Usage (e) Marketing and Communications (f) Technical Necessary for our legitimate interests to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences (a) Technical (b) Usage Necessary for our legitimate interests to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our site updated and relevant, to develop our business and to inform our marketing strategy To make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods or services that may be of interest to you (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Technical (d) Usage (e) Profile Necessary for our legitimate interests to develop our products/services and grow our business Marketing communications You will receive marketing communications from us if you have: (i) requested information from us or purchased goods or services from us; or (ii) if you provided us with your details and ticked the box at the point of entry of your details for us to send you marketing communications; and (iii) in each case, you have not opted out of receiving that marketing. We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any third party for marketing purposes. You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by emailing us at info@web-aviso.com - or following any opt-out/in guidance on any correspondence at any time Where you opt-out of receiving our marketing communications, this will not apply to personal data provided to us as a result of a product/service purchase, warranty registration, product/service experience or other transactions. Change of purpose We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to find out more about how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please email us at info@web-aviso.com. If we need to use your personal data for a purpose unrelated to the purpose for which we collected the data, we will notify you and we will explain the legal ground of processing. We may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent where this is required or permitted by law. 5. DISCLOSURES OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the table in paragraph 4 above: Service providers who provide IT and system administration services such as Claranet. Professional advisers including lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services. HM Revenue & Customs, regulators and other authorities based in the United Kingdom and other relevant jurisdictions who require reporting of processing activities in certain circumstances. Third parties to whom we sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets. We require all third parties to whom we transfer your data to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We only allow such third parties to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions. 6. INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS International transfer of data outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) is currently restricted to two international clients in the ASPAC region, with whom separate processes are in place. Otherwise we do not transfer your personal data outside the EEA. It is acknowledged that countries outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) do not always offer the same levels of protection to personal data and European law has prohibited transfers of personal data outside of the EEA unless the transfer meets certain criteria. Our sole third-party service provider is Strikingly LLC whom host all Steve Drury [Sole Trader] business websites alongside web-aviso web services (excluding independent marketing clients) websites. Strikingly also provide secure form data hosting and backup as part of this contracted service. Their processes can be made available by emailing info@web-aviso.com. As such their processing of your personal data will technically involve ‘a transfer of data outside the EEA’, however being US based they are expected to meet US Privacy Shield compliance too. (The Privacy Shield allows US companies, or EU companies working with US companies, to meet this requirement of the GDPR) For earlier mentioned international clients ... Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we do our best to ensure a similar degree of security of data by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented: • We will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission; or • Where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts or codes of conduct or certification mechanisms approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe; or • Where we use providers based in the United States, we may transfer data to them if they are part of the EU-US Privacy Shield which requires them to provide similar protection to personal data shared between the Europe and the US. If none of the above safeguards is available, we may request your explicit consent to the specific transfer. You will have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. Please email us at info@web-aviso.com if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA. 7. DATA SECURITY We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know such data. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so. 8. DATA RETENTION We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements. By law we have to keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for six years after they cease being customers for tax purposes. In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see below for further information. In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you. 9. YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. These include the right to: • Request access to your personal data. • Request correction of your personal data. • Request erasure of your personal data. • Object to processing of your personal data. • Request restriction of processing your personal data. • Request transfer of your personal data. • Right to withdraw consent. You can see more about these rights at: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/ If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please email us at info@web-aviso.com You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances. We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response. We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated. 10. THIRD-PARTY LINKS This website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit. 11. COOKIES You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly. What is a cookie? • A "cookie" is a piece of information that is stored on your computer's hard drive and which records how you move your way around a website so that, when you revisit that website, it can present tailored options based on the information stored about your last visit. Cookies can also be used to analyse traffic and for advertising and marketing purposes. • Cookies are used by nearly all websites and do not harm your system. If you want to check or change what types of cookies you accept, this can usually be altered within your browser settings. You can block cookies at any time by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site. How do we use cookies? • We use cookies to track your use of our website. This enables us to understand how you use the site and track any patterns with regards how you are using our website. This helps us to develop and improve our website as well as products and / or services in response to what you might need or want. • Cookies are either: - Session cookies: these are only stored on your computer during your web session and are automatically deleted when you close your browser – they usually store an anonymous session ID allowing you to browse a website without having to log in to each page but they do not collect any personal data from your computer; or - Persistent cookies: a persistent cookie is stored as a file on your computer and it remains there when you close your web browser. The cookie can be read by the website that created it when you visit that website again. We use persistent cookies for Google Analytics. • Cookies can also be categorised as follows: - Strictly necessary cookies: These cookies are essential to enable you to use the website effectively, such as when buying a product and / or service, and therefore cannot be turned off. Without these cookies, the services available to you on our website cannot be provided. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you have been on the internet. - Performance cookies: These cookies enable us to monitor and improve the performance of our website. For example, they allow us to count visits, identify traffic sources and see which parts of the site are most popular. - Functionality cookies: These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make and provide enhanced features. For instance, we may be able to provide you with news or updates relevant to the services you use. They may also be used to provide services you have requested such as viewing a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect is usually anonymised. See our Cookie Policy here: https://www.web-aviso.com/pages/cookie-policy/