Online reviews are increas­ing in impor­tance as con­sumer behav­ior and tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ue to evolve. Con­sumers are get­ting savvi­er about com­par­i­son shop­ping and con­duct­ing more online research before pur­chas­ing, cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment where com­pa­nies need to watch com­peti­tors more care­ful­ly and strength­en efforts to win con­ver­sions at the crit­i­cal moments when con­sumers are mak­ing pur­chase deci­sions.

Word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tions from friends and fam­i­ly are, by far, the best form of adver­tis­ing. But online reviews are extreme­ly valu­able – near­ly 80 per­cent of cus­tomers trust online reviews as much as per­son­al rec­om­men­da­tions, accord­ing to a Bright­Lo­cal report.

Online reviews help fos­ter trust and loy­al­ty. What will con­sumers find on oth­er sites about your brand or busi­ness when they search for reviews about your prod­uct or ser­vice?

While you can con­trol what peo­ple see on your site, you can’t con­trol what appears on review sites. This is why it’s essen­tial to opti­mize the entire search expe­ri­ence of con­sumers – includ­ing the feed­back cus­tomers are giv­ing about your brand or busi­ness.

Here are some ways to get cus­tomers to engage and leave cov­et­ed reviews of your brand or busi­ness.

1. Make It Easy

If a vis­i­tor to your web­site wants to make a review, make sure it’s a sim­ple process. Make it easy to find, either by pro­mot­ing your list­ing direct­ly on your web­site so cus­tomers know where to sub­mit their reviews, or mak­ing the but­ton to write a review high­ly vis­i­ble.

If your com­pa­ny relies on crowd­sourced reviews for con­tent, like Yelp or Angie’s List, the user expe­ri­ence of writ­ing a review should be excep­tion­al. Yelp does a great job of show­cas­ing their review form front and cen­ter, and mak­ing the min­i­mum of sub­mit­ting a review as sim­ple as a click on the star-rat­ing sys­tem, and click­ing “post review” after the review is writ­ten.

For ecom­merce com­pa­nies, a great way to request a review is with a polite email that fea­tures the prod­uct name and image, sent at a time short­ly after the prod­uct should’ve been received. Ama­zon is one exam­ple of a brand that does this well.

2. Present Reviews As An Unobtrusive Option

Many web­sites go about solic­it­ing reviews in a way that is annoy­ing and intru­sive. Dis­tract­ing pop-ups that appear unin­vit­ed usu­al­ly do noth­ing but aggra­vate your web­site vis­i­tors.

We’ve all been there. We’re read­ing an arti­cle or brows­ing a prod­uct page and sud­den­ly a pop-up obscures what we were look­ing at. Our knee-jerk reac­tion isn’t pos­i­tive, which means your web­site is pro­vid­ing a neg­a­tive user expe­ri­ence.

Bet­ter alter­na­tives for ask­ing for reviews is with a sub­tle, non intru­sive pop-up, a sim­ple appre­cia­tive email, or remar­ket­ing. You can use AdWords to tar­get your cus­tomers who have com­plet­ed a trans­ac­tion. Let them know you’d love to get their feed­back.

You can drop a remar­ket­ing cook­ie on a page that marks the end of your con­ver­sion fun­nel, like on your “Thank You” page after an online pur­chase, embed­ded in an online copy of their invoice, or on your online feed­back forms.

You can get cre­ative with your mes­sag­ing, exper­i­ment with options oth­er than “Please review us!” To avoid annoy­ing your cus­tomers, set your remar­ket­ing cam­paign so that it ter­mi­nates when they land on the desired page or after a rea­son­able time­frame.

3. Incentivize & Reward Reviewers

Want to incen­tivize users to review your brand?

• Cre­ate a splash page or spe­cial deal for cus­tomers. Share it in a fol­low-up email with a mes­sage encour­ag­ing them to review, or as a reward to review­ers, which can help encour­age addi­tion­al future reviews. This helps dri­ve reviews and helps increase brand loy­al­ty.
• Many com­pa­nies offer a chance to win a gift card or anoth­er prize in exchange for a review.
• Yelp offers perks for “elite review­ers” in the form of exclu­sive deals and events.

Get cre­ative with your incen­tives and offer brand-spe­cif­ic or even per­son­al­ized prizes. 

Are you mak­ing it easy for your cus­tomers to write reviews of your brand or busi­ness?