This episode Jason and Bridget are joined by Tevya Washburn from Starfish Reviews. We discuss everything you always wanted to know about review marketing but were afraid to ask.
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How Are People Approaching Reviews Online?
Reviews supply social proof as we discussed with Chris Badgett. Reviews help facilitate the purchase process. Starfish Reviews helps with the ask for the review.
Reviews help your search ranking and can be part of your content marketing. You can reuse them as Instagram posts, testimonials on product pages, etc. That completes the social proof circle.
“Reviews are more potential for people to find you.” Tevya Washburn
Bridget suggests copy/pasting the reviews you do receive and put them on your website also, even if they are on Google, Yelp, or Trust Pilot, etc.
How Do You Ask For Reviews?
If you make it easy, people are more likely to give you a review. Wait at least three to four days before asking for the review or after the product is installed. If you wait too long, that could be bad. It really depends upon the complexity of the product.
How Do You Integrate Reviews in Your Workflow?
Starfish Reviews focuses on getting the reviews. It creates a funnel landing page. Based upon the reactions (thumbs up, thumbs down), the logic asks for a review on whichever link you set up. If it is a thumbs down, it takes the reviewer to a form so they can email the business owner.
Responding to reviews is a really important part of any business. Once the issue is corrected, you can ask the customer for a review again.
Depending on your product and service, the timing of when you ask for the review can depend. Try to have as few options as possible, however.
“I always encourage people to leave them in a public place.” Tevya Washburn
How Do You Handle Bad Reviews?
Tevya belives in extreme ownership. If you take responsibility, you have the power. Take some responsibility even if it stays out there. You can win people over really fast.
“If you choose to find some way to take responsibility in that situation, then suddenly you have some control and some ability to influence the outcome.” Tevya Washburn
Don’t be too worried about negative reviews, Tevya says, because we have the culture of fake news. People will wonder knowing that no business is that good. It’s all about how you respond to any review — good or bad.
How Do Reviews Affect Company Culture?
One of the internal guiding principles of Starfish Reviews is responsibility with empathy. Knowing the team has a feedback loop, affects the team in an encouraging way — sometimes even more than a cash bonus.
In fact, he encourages his team mates to hand off the conversation if they can’t respond well. This factors in the notion that everyone can be frustrated or have a bad day.
“If you can’t find that empathy or responsibility, then give it to somebody else.” Tevya Washburn
Tool or Tip of the Week
This Tool or Tip of the week is brought to you by VendorFuel. VendorFuel is a next-generation shopping cart plugin that will ignite your eCommerce. Built using AngularJS VendorFuel lets you keep your customers on your website for the entire checkout experience. Start a 90-day free trial now and Ignite Your eCommerce at VendorFuel.com!
Tevya recommends ChartMogul, especially used with GiveWP (who doesn’t have great analytics).
Jason recommends Band.us for group chatting — especially groups of parents and kids. Not everyone wants to be in Slack/Facebook Group.
Bridget recommends Sleepcasts that are part of Headspace. If you have trouble sleeping, check it out.
Do you have any tools or tips we should know about?
We’d love to hear from you. What are your experiences with this subject?
Tell us in the comments below.
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