How To Grow Your Google Reviews

There are three methods to grow your Google reviews:

Method 1: The Verbal Ask

Way back when, I used to ask clients to search for my business and leave a Google review. Although they had good intentions, there was barely any follow-through because there were too many steps involved. In essence, verbally asking for a Google review is not effective.

Method 2: The Direct Link

Google My Business offers a way to find your business’s PlaceID, which can be added to a pre-set URL to create a direct review link. (Are you confused yet?)

For instance, the PlaceID for my digital marketing agency, BJC Branding, is ChIJo8FcdTVj44kRga5RffGZmoE. If I add our PlaceID to the preset URL, I now have a direct link to my Google My Business reviews page: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJo8FcdTVj44kRga5RffGZmoE.

There are two drawbacks to this method:

The URL is very long and overwhelming to your customers
The PlaceID can easily be truncated or “lose a character” in the copy and paste process, rendering it useless

Ultimately, this method gets the job done, but there is a more effective and efficient way to grow your Google reviews.

Method 3: The Review Engine

The easiest way to grow your Google reviews (and reviews on many other sites like Facebook, Yelp, etc.) is by using a review engine service. One service to consider is MyReviewDashboard, which is offered as part of BJC Branding. These kinds of review engine services provide a slew of benefits, including:

Proactively solicit Google reviews
Get alerts when new reviews come in
Quarantine negative reviews before they become public
Resolve issues with unhappy customers
Promote positive reviews via social media, email marketing, and on your website

A service like MyReviewDashboard sets you up with a custom domain name to make it easy to solicit reviews from your happy customers. That custom domain can be shared on social media posts, business cards, invoices, receipts, and more. Best of all, you can use that same custom domain in your Constant Contact Email Marketing campaigns to grow your Google reviews.

How To Grow Positive Google Reviews with Email Marketing

Let’s assume that you have an email list of 100 happy customers and you were using a review engine service like MyReviewDashboard. You could spend hours sending each customer an individual email with your new custom domain name (e.g. www.reviewcompanyXYZ.com), or you could leverage the power of Constant Contact’s Email Marketing platform.

Constant Contact would allow you to custom brand your email campaign, personalize each email with a custom greeting, and streamline the content to save you time.

For instance, here’s an example of an email marketing campaign we recently sent to our clients.

In case you’d like to copy the text for your own review request email:

Hi [First Name],

I want to thank you for doing business with [Company Name]. I’m reaching out personally because I want to ask about your experience with our team.

Were we amazing? Just OK? Terrible? In any case, I’d like to know.

We always strive to be better, and your feedback will help us accomplish that. If you’re willing, it will only take a minute of your time.

Thanks Again,

[Your Name]

[Review Link in Button Form]

For more review request templates and tactics, check out the BJC Branding blog.

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