This review campaign helped my business reach almost 5 stars on Google – here’s how you can recreate it.

Like many industries, our customers rely on testimonials and social proof to recommend products and services. In the competitive PropTech environment, every mention of your brand is helpful, no matter whether it is in a review, article, comparison site or forum.

High on the Google search results list for our industry are PPL (pay per lead) review sites, which, while collecting honest reviews from users, display results that the site selects based on bidding strategies and people who want to look on top of the list no matter rating and variety of reviews. These sites may display results for “most recommended”, which essentially implies that if you pay a higher amount, the site will list your product first and “most recommend” it as a result.

I have had profiles on these PPL sites for over 10 years and have turn out to be increasingly frustrated with the cost/value ratio. I’d bid to get to the top of the advisable list, but the next day I can be outbid and dropped to the bottom, regardless that our product’s customer review rating was still one of the highest on the platform. Rather than proceed to compete with our competitors’ promoting budgets, I’m selecting to shift our marketing budget in a different direction.

I made a decision to reinvest the money I spent on promoting to my employees in the type of review bonuses. Results? In lower than a month, our Google rating increased to 4.9 out of 5 stars, which is higher than the rating of any of our top competitors. Here’s the exact approach I used to reward my employees for reviews, which yielded tangible results in just a few weeks.

1. Start with a feature value showing off

I at all times knew my company had great customer support; this is one of the key features that distinguishes our product from the industry. Our customer support team goes beyond being friendly and helpful; provide added value because everyone has training and experience in our industry, so they can build a personal connection with our customers.

I know our customers have loved working with our customer support team. I often receive personal emails from customers who tell me about their positive experiences. I have also seen emails between customers and our support team that say something like, “It was a pleasure working with you. I will be happy to recommend you.”

2. Give your employees a reason to ask

It was clear that we had a feature value showing off and that our customers would share their experiences if the opportunity arose. I asked our team to ask their customers to depart reviews after positive interactions.

However, the suggestion to ask wasn’t a motivating enough reason for my team to take motion. Perhaps it was the fear of rejection or the so-called afraid to ask for help which prevented them from asking for reviews.

Review incentive campaigns are quite common and traditionally involve a company paying someone to depart a review. I wasn’t against offering our customers incentives to depart reviews. I just desired to see what would occur if we asked first.

I still needed to determine how to motivate my team to beat fear, so I developed a easy “Review Rewards” campaign for our customer support team.

Rewards for reviews (this is a copy of the exact project proposal I shared with my team)

We need to reward excellent customer support and user experience! If a customer has a good experience with you or your software, we would like to listen to about it.

According to SureLocal85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Great reviews increase awareness of our brand and drive more customers to make use of our services.

How it’s working:

1. Provide great service
2. Ask for a review
3. Earn $20 for every review you collect

Details

1. After a positive customer interaction, ask for a review. An ideal time to do this is when you send a follow-up email to your service request. (see example below)
2. If a customer leaves a review on Google and you’re the last person to discuss with them, we’ll pay you $20.
3. When we receive a recent review, it’ll be shared on the #reviews Slack channel and Nathan will contact the SSO team to seek out out who requested the review

Email example (we can add this as a saved answer):

It was a pleasure working with you today. If you have time, could you write (*5*)review on Google for us? This allows others to learn about the value of the software to their rental business and helps us a lot!

3. Work as a team

While a program like the one suggested above rewards a single person, you can encourage your entire team to work together towards success. If a person receives a positive review, share it and praise it with everyone. This validates the work everyone is doing to attain the common goal of a good product or service. You may additionally consider offering an additional bonus if the entire team collectively achieves a certain variety of reviews.

4. Continue to redeem rewards

Within a few weeks, I had already paid our customer support team over $500 in bonuses for reviews. That $500 could have been put toward a PPL bidding strategy that would have moved the needle on the software rating site for a day or two. Instead, this investment will go back to my employees and positively impact our Google rating. Every fraction of a point on Google matters. As an added bonus, we can see real customer reviews about their experience with our company.

You can look into strategies like these to reward your employees, gain insight into customer experiences with your product, and hopefully gain recent business from your organization’s online popularity.

The most significant thing

Managing your social popularity, collecting reviews, delivering the highest quality product or service, and rewarding your employees should all be a high priority in your skilled success strategy. If you need to increase your reviews, you can follow the steps above and see the additional return of rewarding your employees and working together towards a common goal.