How to Ask for Reviews: 6 Ways + Examples

Knowing how to ask a customer for a review is a powerful tool that can boost your marketing game and help with retention. Reviews can do wonders for your business and marketing. Moreover, you can build your online reputation and presence, provide new customers with social proof, influence loyal customers' behavior, upgrade credibility, and much more. Even the smallest review can play a big part in your website promotion and bring purchases, but it doesn't mean that you should ask customers to write good reviews. You should care about your product and service so that people will happily answer your “Please leave a review” message after the purchase. Besides, reviews influence your SEO ranking factor. 

Learning how to ask customers for reviews is a necessary skill that each business should know and use properly. Many get new clients via reviews and review websites like Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc. 

Here you’ll find the information and examples of effective ways for asking customers for reviews and learn what to do with them. 

Why Ask for Reviews: Key Benefits

Most people read online reviews before purchasing a product or a service. As Statista states, 43% of US citizens regularly search for online reviews, and only 2% never check them. More than that, 21% of people occasionally check product or service reviews. 

Among all the benefits that a simple review can make, the most prominent are:

1. Promotion. You can spot the most loyal customers that speak about your business a lot. Most likely, they will help you with raising your Net Promoter Score (NPS). You just need to send them an email asking them to fill in the scale about recommending your business to friends from 1 to 10.
2. Get new customers. You can provide your new users with reviews and social proof so they feel certain when ordering your products or services. 
3. Build an online reputation. Positive reviews upgrade your business ratings, which helps build credibility for those who see your products or services for the first time. This can drive sales and boost shoppers’ confidence. 
4. Boost ratings. It is said that review ratings are higher if you ask your customer to leave a review. This is how you get more 5-star ratings — just be specific with your customers, especially with the loyal ones.
5. Outreach. The more you ask for feedback, the higher the chance that users will leave them. And this is a powerful tool used to activate your brand promoters 

Asking for Reviews From Customers

There are several general suggestions that will help with asking for a review. You can be sure that customers will be happy and you will get better stats and the desired results. 

1. Ask for feedback, not a review. The feedback is a thing that will help you upgrade your business and please your customers. If the customers give you bad feedback, you have a chance to solve the issue and please them. Such action will prevent a poor review post, and you'll have a chance to keep the customers. 
2. Tell the customers why they should leave a review. Describe its benefits, for example, that it’s important for other people to find out the truth about the product or service. Remember to state where you need the review to be: your website, Google reviews, Yelp, etc.

Let’s see where and how users can leave reviews.

Reviews via Email

Some business owners might hope that the customers will leave reviews on their initiative actions. But you shouldn’t rely on that. Ask your customers directly what you want from them. 

There are several rules that you need to keep in mind before writing to your customers via email. These are considered the best practices to achieve the desired results.  

1. Personalization. This is always a good idea to create personalized emails, so make sure to address your client by their first name.

2. Make it easy. The customers should clearly understand what you want from them: place a link where you want the review to be. 

3. Keep it short. The longer you write, the less motivation clients have to read your email, meaning only a few will leave you the review. 

Ask for Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews

To be sure that users won’t leave a bad review or write that you are annoying, use the right words. You should politely ask for a review to create a positive vibe and represent your business as a caring brand. Use the following templates to achieve the best results when asking customers for reviews.

Google Reviews

Google Reviews is one of the most famous review platforms where people write their impressions about a brand's product or service. This is why you need to think about your online presence and reputation. Besides helping you to connect with people, Google Reviews can increase your visibility when people search your brand’s name online, as well as improve your SEO. 

Let’s check an example of what you can write to your customers when asking to leave a review on Google Reviews. You can do this via email or a short text message via mobile phone or even any social media contact you have. 

Facebook Reviews

Facebook is another powerful tool that you can use in favor of your business. First of all, you can place information about your business and create a content plan to share news and other important things about your brand. Most importantly, you can get reviews and feedback about your business and communicate with your customers. 

Many people have personal Facebook pages. To be specific, 2.9 billion people use Facebook on a regular basis, according to Statista. See below how you can ask your customer to leave a Facebook review. 

Yelp Reviews

Yelp is another extremely popular platform where people search for reviews for specific businesses, places, services, etc. As Yelp states, 97% of customers make a purchase after visiting Yelp. Yelp doesn’t allow business owners to ask users to leave a review on the platform. It is stated in their review policy. We respect that and do not suggest you force your clients into writing any reviews. You should just show them the opportunity in case they want to share their experience. 

With this platform, you can add a link to your Yelp profile page in the letter where you state several ways to write feedback or a review. 

Review via SMS

Nearly 66% of people read reviews from their PCs or Macs, Statista states. Moreover, there are 56% of users who check reviews from their mobile browsers, and 41% of those who check reviews via mobile apps. So, you can ask customers to leave a review via the short message and include a link that can lead the clients to any above-mentioned websites or suggest using an app to leave feedback. 

Here’s how you can ask for a review via SMS. Use the following templates when you start forming a message to your customers. You can use them as they are now but don’t forget to adjust them to your tone of voice. 

These are quite short options, but you can always go for a bit longer messages. Follow your brand’s style and voice to be more recognizable and connect with your customers more!

Review For a Landing Page

You can create your landing page to collect reviews. This is a popular practice among many business owners and their marketing teams as it allows them to get valuable feedback from many users and store them in one place. Besides, you can use it as a social-proof museum. 

With this tool, you can encourage customers to be more vocal about their opinions. Here they won’t be limited by a number of characters or any rules that many platforms have. More than that, you can create specific survey forms or use SEO software to be more visible to your future customers. 

After creating the landing page, make sure to understand how to promote it and why users will choose to leave a review over all of the above-mentioned platforms. There should be a specific reason and some kind of reward. First, share this link across all pages you have: social media, websites, influencers, etc., and notify users about your new landing page where they can leave a review and read those from other customers. 

Review from a Vendor

If your business is B2B oriented, you can ask vendors or business partners for reviews. This is the best option among all of the others as vendors are businessmen too, and they understand the importance of a true review. So, you can exchange your thoughts about each other’s businesses. 

The most important thing here is to be sincere as you both know what you need from each other, and the review is just another part of the business deal. Simply say to your partner when you meet next time: “Mr. Jones, thank you for your loyalty! It is always a pleasure to work with you, and I hope you think the same. Would you share your experience of working with us for our testimonial page?” 

Review on a Website

Use the call to action buttons when asking people to leave a review on your website. Many businesses have a spare page or a block for testimonials. And as we learned before, most people read the reviews before purchasing a product or a service. Leave a CTA button with a “Leave a Review” text somewhere near it. You can also add some to the cabinet page, product pages, comment sections, etc. Such buttons and testimonials block/pages should be easily accessible from any part of the website, so think about placing them into the navigation menu. 

You can also place the existing reviews on your page. Many content management systems have special scripts or plugins that help to use previews from other pages on your  website. 

Reviews are extremely important to your website as they are packed with specific keywords that are important for SEO. It means that you can even boost your Google position just by reposting reviews. Note that these reviews should be in the form of text as Google won’t pick up on these reviews if they look like an image. 

How Can Claspo Help You Get More Reviews?

We can help you with building messages and mediums via which you can contact your customers for reviews. Also, we can boost your SEO game with the help of the above-mentioned reviews. 

Basically, we can help you with any digital-marketing related question or issue that will bring your business to a new level. So, while we’re  working on your marketing game, you can focus on running your business.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways you can ask a customer to leave a review. To finish this topic, we would like to highlight the most important ideas that will help you write the best message asking for feedback or a review:

1. Reviews and feedback aren’t just for you. They help customers learn about new products from those who’ve used them already. Each person can help other people understand whether they need the item or service at all.  
2. Don’t force people to leave a review. Be human-like: a bit naive, genuine, and friendly — you are the face of your brand.
3. Create short messages as people won’t read long texts about the importance of leaving the reviews. State the benefits and make them clear. That’s it. 
4. Make sure that it is easy for your customer to leave a review: add a link to where you want the final review to appear. 
5. Yes, customers want to share their opinion on your products and services, so they will gladly leave a review in most cases.
6. Make sure to respond to all the reviews (including good and bad ones) you receive on all the possible platforms. 

Any review of good quality is precious to your business, so make sure to encourage people to leave nice reviews.