• Increased Sales: Using online reviews is a Marketing activity, it helps your customers in their decision making. With over 75% new customers happier to purchase online with recommendations and positive reviews from previous existing customers.
• Gain Customer Insight: Online reviews will be able to give you an insight into what your business is or is not doing right. This will allow you to address any internal issues, create a more positive shopping experience for your customers and increase sales.
• Improve SEO Rankings: The more quality content that is write about your website, the higher it ranks. It also shows Google your business is authentic, getting clicked on and actively engaging with customers.

Get it right online…

From a practical point of view, make sure you give your customers multiple opportunities to review your business. Whether it is a pop-up box, fixed bar or dedicated page on-site give them more than one opportunity to review.

Leading sites such as Trustpilot and Yelp offer several tools to embed on-site in a range of styles, just pick which suits your business more and make this available on your businesses site.

But it is all well and good having these on-site, but the next challenge is getting your customers to use them. Encourage your customers to leave reviews offering special offers, bonuses and discounts in return for their feedback.

One last thought, managing reviews…

Not all the reviews will be 100% positive, there will be the odd negative review and it is important how you deal with these.

There are 100s of online and in-store training courses specifically aimed at how to deal with online reviews. But the solution is simple - manage reviews like how you deal with customers in-store, be polite, professional, balanced and offer a solution for that customer, quality customer service goes a long way in-store and online.

How to capture an email address?

There are a few basic methods to grow your businesses mailing list and capture your businesses data. 

Data capture bars

Data capture bars are simple to place on your businesses site, it requires a single snippet of HTML to be embedded in the page source.

There are 100s of data capture providers out there with the main one being Hellobar, which is free of charge. These can also be created within CRM packages (Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot etc) to grow your data list and help your leads/sales. Within Hellobar, whatever CRM package plus whatever email campaign software you use you can monitor, manage and maintain your businesses mailing list accordingly with each one offering differing levels of detail.

A data capture bar feeds contacts straight in to your mailing list. Different pieces of software will be able to feed the data into different programmes, but the popular email software like Mailchimp, Zoho etc are available on most capture bar providers.

The bars in several forms – fixed bars (a static or moving bar that appears at the top of the page), pop ups (a sign-up forming appearing after a few seconds on-site often found in the centre of the page) or page takeovers (a sign-up form that appears after a few seconds taking over the full screen itself).

The most common method is a simple static bar at the top as this is not obstructing customers trying to navigate the website whereas pop-ups and takeovers appear after a certain amount of time and be deemed annoying by a website visitor.

Visually the pop-up and takeover creating more of a lasting impact, but users have a love-hate relationship with these whereas the simple static bar lacks the striking impact. However, it proves more successful as customers are happier, more trusting and comfortable with a simple less obtrusive method.

Landing pages

A landing page is a standalone web page created specifically for Marketing a certain product or service. Landing pages are specifically designed to generate interest and have a CTA (call to action on-site).

Incentivise your customers

You may have customer who visit in-store or follow you on Social Media, but you do not have their physical information to target them. Run competitions & offers in-store and on Social Media channels incentivising existing customers to sign up to your mailing list in exchange for a reward or discount.

On-site architecture

You can build opt in options into your business’s website seamlessly. Wherever you capture any customer information on-site (contact us forms, checkout etc) ask customers to tick the box if they would like to sign up and opt in to your businesses mailing list.

Lastly & IMPORTANTLY, GDPR

The four letters everyone loves to hate. New regulations that came into play last year to look at how your business uses customer information. Ensure any method you use is GDPR friendly and any customer that signs up gives you their full consent.