A 5 Minutes Per Month Online Reputation Management Tool.
After being asked numerous times “How do I encourage my customers to post reviews of my business online?”, I decided to put together an easy to follow email template you can flick through to happy customers, to encourage them to leave great reviews about your business on Google My Business.
A few of my clients have had some great success recently after taking the time (about 5 minutes per month) to send this email template to a few of their customers.
Why do I need reviews on Google My Business? (Formerly known as Google Places or Google+Local)
1. Google ranks businesses higher in their local organic search results when they have a healthy number of positive reviews from real users. When you rank higher, you get more exposure to new customers.
2. Local Google searchers will pay close attention to business listings that have reviews. When they’re making their decision about who to call first out of you and your competitors, you need to stand out from the crowd. Social proof is one of the best ways for you to stand out among competitors. Think about it – Would you be likely to just trust the words of a company telling you how good they are? Or would you be more likely to trust real people (potentially other local people you know) who have actively endorsed that company after using their products or services?
3. Positive reviews are an important part of protecting your brand’s reputation online. Remember, people are free to post negative reviews on your Google My Business listing. If somebody does happen to have a poor experience with your company and they post a negative review, what can you do about it? In most situations, you won’t be able to have it removed from the web. All you can do is make sure you have enough positive reviews published to dilute the impact of a negative review.
If we can encourage some of your happy clients to give testimonials on your Google My Business page, it will essentially help your business be found easier, improve your online reputation & drive more new customers to you from the internet. See below for a screenshot demonstrating what Google My Business reviews can look like in the local search results.
Real Life Example : A Google Review in Action
To give you an idea of how and why Google My Business reviews influence local search behaviour, I’ll refer to a real life experience I had recently.
I’d recently left a Google review for a client of ours – NewAge Air Conditioning & Heating. They did some air conditioner repair work at my unit so I thought I’d eat my own dog food and leave them a 5 star review. After all, they’d done a great job.
A few months later, I received a random phone call from a lady I knew who had been searching around for a local air conditioning company to take over the commercial contract work for her business. This lady had been searching around on Google, checking out websites & reading reviews, when she stumbled across my public 5 star review of NewAge Air Conditioning & Heating. She wanted to hire the most reliable company for the job, so she actually went to the extent of calling me to further confirm my great experience with NewAge Air. Of course, I told her that they did a great job, so she hired them for the commercial contract. This valuable transaction for my client probably never would have happened if it wasn’t for the social proof provided by the review I left on Google My Business. My endorsement was enough to influence her choice.
What’s the real lesson here? People pay attention to reviews and your online reputation can prove extremely important to your bottom line as a local business. Whether they’re Google My Business reviews, public endorsements on Facebook, or reviews left on your business’ Yelp listing – you need to be on top of your online reputation.
So without further ado, here’s the Google My Business email review template that you can customise and forward to your happy customers:
THE GOOGLE MY BUSINESS REVIEWS EMAIL TEMPLATE
IMPORTANT NOTE: I’d advise you not to send this email out to too many clients at once, because if Google sees an “unnatural” spike in positive reviews within a short time, it may be flagged as being a spammy. Go for a handful each month, say 2-4 max.
Hi [CUSTOMER NAME],
Thanks for choosing [Business Name]. Your feedback is important to us, so we’d like to ask a quick favour.
We would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to post a positive review on our Google business page to help us spread the good word about our services online.
If you’ve never posted a review on Google, we’ve included simple step-by-step instructions below for you to follow.
Thanks again for your business and we really appreciate you taking the time to help us grow our online reputation.
NOTE: This Google review process works best on a desktop computer at the moment
4 Quick steps to posting a review for us on Google:
Sign in to your Google / GMail account (if you’re not already signed in). If you do not have a Google / GMail account, you quickly sign up for a free one here.
Click on this link to visit our Google Maps listing:
[Insert a link to your Google Maps listing URL here. You can find this by visiting your listing on Google Maps and copy / pasting the web address from your browser bar]
Find the “Write a Review” icon and click on it.
Please rate us (Google’s current rating system is out of 5 stars) and write a brief description of your experience with us.
Thanks for your support!
