Your Personalised Template For Emailing Customers To Request A Review
You can find a copy of the template shown in the video here: https://goo.gl/J3Tud7
Transcript of the video training can be found below
Thanks for taking the time to watch this training video. Look, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably really busy, so I’m going to try and keep this nice and concise and hopefully value-packed for you. My name’s Jason Schulz, and I’m from 5Tales, and I’m going to walk you through the exact steps of how to get more 5-star Google Business Reviews.
I know a number of business owners who have built the growth of their business on the back of the strategy of getting Google Business Reviews. It sounds crazy, but if you’re a local business, it’s hard to overstate just how important Google reviews can be to getting a flood of new inquiries.
Although the tool, being Google Business Reviews, obviously, might be new – the tactic I’m about to show you might even be more novel – the concept has been around for a long time. It is about social proof. People are hardwired to avoid risk, and one way to do that is when you’re searching for something, you choose the option which other people like you have already selected in the past and have good things to say about. In today’s digital age, that’s primarily seen through reviews, social media and testimonials.
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If you’re a local business, particularly a service-based business, the data tells us that an average 9 out of 10 new inquiries to a local service-based business start with a search engine in one way, shape, or form, and Google is by far the largest search engine – particularly in Australia. So as far as casting your net where the fish are, Google is a great bet.
Actually, let me show you John’s business just before we get too far into it. John’s business is based in Brisbane here. He started a mobile car detailing business with one van in Brisbane about 4 years ago, and now has five vans. When he got in touch with us, it was actually from Germany; he was living over there for 6 months while running the business back here. So it’s a great business he’s built. But the growth of his business has come from great branding and a strong strategy for getting Google Business Reviews.
You could even type into Google here, “car detailing Brisbane.” He’s got his ads at the top here. You can see the map here, and you can see Scrubs Mobile Car Detailing – this is John’s business here. Obviously on the map here, and right at the top of the rankings here as well. So obviously he’s received a flood of business here, and the click-through rate that he gets from appearing on the map at the top is obviously fantastic and even better than being shown in the organic listing, which is this section here just below. This map section is particularly valuable to be listed in.
With the local search results, Google will often show a series of businesses in the area in what is known as a local pack, which is this section here. It is from here that potential customers can see things like the address, the phone number, and obviously, depending on the listing, of course the reviews people have written about you. You can just literally click through.
You can see Scrubs here. Wait for it to load for a second. You see Scrubs Mobile Car Detailing here, 5 star reviews, 90 reviews. Fantastic reputation. Just goes to show a lot about the business. As I said, he’s got great branding as well, and you can see that even in the photos here. But really strong Google Review strategy. He did a lot of things to encourage his team to go about asking for those reviews from people as well, and just letting them know that it’s available.
All right, let’s jump in and show you how to start getting these reviews. First thing you want to do is jump in and search for your company by name on Google. I’m going to start with our company, so 5Tales. You can see here, again, obviously ads, but we’ve got the listing on the right-hand side here. What we want to do now is we want to scroll down and just click on “Write a review.”
If we click there, you’ll see a Google Review box has popped up, and what you want to do is just copy the URL address out of that bar – so we’ll grab it there – and then we’re going to go and paste that into a URL. Actually, I’ll show you, right at the end of this.
This is where the tricky part comes in. You can see obviously we’ve brought this box up, and it’s actually come up with no stars to review. That obviously doesn’t really entice anyone to do anything. But if we add a “5” right at the back of that URL – all I did was just go right to the end of the URL of the pop-up, just added a number “5” right at the end of it. Just stuck my cursor at the end, hit Enter – actually, we have to stick it in a new URL here, because it’s already loaded.
What we should see is 5 stars come up straightaway. There we go. So already it’s got the 5 star there, and just asking them to describe their experience, but it’s as though they’re already partway through the review when they get there. It’s ticking, waiting for them to start writing. Just adding that “5” on there significantly increases the chances they’re actually going to go ahead and leave a review when you do get this link to them.
But further to that, we actually want to shrink this link down, and the way we do that is you can use your favorite URL shortener. I like to use Google. You can see here, “goo.gl”, I’m tying into the browser there. That’s going to take us to the Google URL Shortener. You can obviously use bit.ly if that’s the one you prefer. Just paste the link in there. You can see it’s got the number “5” on the end of it; make sure it’s there. Now it’s gone and shortened that URL for us. Just click on “Copy short URL.”
Now that we have that short URL, we can actually paste that into an email or however we’re going to request a review from our customer, leave it somewhere nice and short, leave it on a counter if you’re at a store. And if you are using bit.ly as your URL shortener, you can actually customize this to say something nicer, if you are putting it somewhere public or putting it within a restaurant or something like that.
That’s an easier way to be able to display the link rather than this extremely long URL, which is why we use URL shorteners. The added bonus is you get some analytics with it as well; you can see how people are actually clicking on those links.
In Google’s local pack, once you’ve received five reviews – you need to get five reviews – your results will actually be accompanied by 5 gold stars in your listings. These have been shown to increase click-through rate by as much as 20%, so you do really want to get those first five reviews from your customers as soon as possible in order to be able to add those stars. So that’s your first goal, is to get to five Google Reviews.
I’ve included an email template for you. I’ll give you the link where you can actually download that, or it should be showing on the video now. This is an email template for client reviews, obviously. Have a bit of a read-through here, but the real meat of it – actually, I’ve just mentioned it in here – in order to streamline it, just make sure you’ve actually got these as canned responses or saved email templates, so whoever’s doing administration in your business and is sending them out to request reviews, they can do this nice and easily.
But look, all you’ve got to do is just plug and play with this email template. It’s down at the bottom here.
“Hi (FirstName), it was a pleasure working with you on (whatever it is),” but adjust that first sentence there to work for your business.
Second line here, “Would you mind taking a moment to leave (your business name) a short and honest review on our Google My Business listing? Leave your review here.”
Then we’re just going to go and grab, paste that link in there, and now we’ve updated it. And that’s going to take us – we’ll double-check it, obviously. That’s actually going to take us to the search engine results page, and the review box should pop up in a second as well. There we go.
Now, for some people, they’re actually going to be asked to log in when they get here, if they don’t have a Google account at the moment, which obviously might put them off a little bit. But if that happens, that’s why it’s good to have a secondary backup. Facebook reviews are the backup. “If the above link asks you to log in, you can leave one on our Facebook page here.”
Go through the same process: jump over to Facebook, head to your business page, grab this link, go back to your Google URL Shortener, paste the URL in here, shorten that. Now we’ve got the Facebook URL. We come back and we paste it in there.
“Thank you,” then stick your name in there. You’ll personalize those templates. Just to give you an idea. But you are primarily asking them to leave a Google Review; make sure you use that URL shortener, and then ask for the Facebook review after that if it’s going to be too difficult in order to get the Google Review.
But don’t be afraid to ask clients over the phone; if that works for your business, it’s a really effective method if they’re happy to leave a review. And certainly never be afraid to remind the clients, if they do forget, in order to leave a review. If you tell them how important it is, if you are delivering great work and you tell them how proud you’d be to have a review from them for the work you did, they’re more likely to take the extra 5 minutes to leave one for you.
And get creative. If you’re a restaurant, maybe you leave a computer tablet on the counter and get staff to request happy customers to leave a review on the spot before they leave.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this and received some value from it. If you have any questions, just drop them below if you’re on YouTube there, or you can shoot me an email directly. Happy to talk to anyone who needs a hand. Just walking through this, it’s so, so valuable for a local business. Thanks for watching.
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