Valentine’s Day is a perfect opportunity to ask your customers to share some love for your small business. Customers are generally willing to write reviews, but you need to know how to ask for them. Today’s retail tips newsletter post will provide specific examples of how and when to ask for reviews and what to do with those reviews to leverage them into more sales.
We need to get past the idea that sharing reviews is bragging!
Below is a social media post image I created for using Valentine’s Day to ask for some “love” reviews! Feel free to copy and share it.
Instagram does not have a mechanism for reviews, but you can direct your customers to Facebook, Google, your website or wherever you want more reviews. Hint: Use a direct link to your reviews landing spot, not just to the platform. Many people do not know how to navigate to where they can leave a review.
Here’s an example of a link directly to reviews on a Facebook Business Page:
https://www.facebook.com/TheRetailDetails/reviews
Your link should be in a similar format. If you are like me, you have a number of spammy reviews, so getting new ones helps to bump the irrelevant spam reviews out of the way.
Hint: I use Linktree as my “link in profile” mechanism on Instagram and on my Facebook About page. If you use Linktree, consider adding an entry titled “Leave us a review!” I created one last night to accompany the Valentines Reviews social media post and titled it “Leave Retail Details a FB review for Valentine’s Day”. What’s nice about Linktree is that it’s super easy to create quick links and then remove them, reorganize them or replace them in a snap for quick promotions like Valentine’s Day.
Emailing Review Requests
For many retailers, email is the most effective approach to getting customers to write reviews. Here are a few review request email templates: