How to Get Your Customers to Leave an Online Review

Whether you're providing lawn care, landscaping, or hardscaping services, online reviews help you get more leads and close more deals. We all know this and many studies have proven it. What you may not know is that online reviews help increase your organic rankings, especially in map results. The problem is getting your customers to take the time to leave a review. Two common questions we get regarding online reviews include:

1. What's the best approach for getting customers to leave a review?
2. Should I give some kind of incentive to get a customer to leave a review?

First, make leaving reviews easy with direct links.

If leaving a review requires many steps, then you're working against yourself. For example, telling your customers "go to Google, search XYZ Landscaping, make sure it brings up our Google listing, then select Write Review", you're going to struggle to get reviews. Fix this by creating direct links to where you want to build reviews.

To create direct review links, set them up as redirects on your website. Depending on your website platform, this can be done many different ways. If you're one of our customers, just go to Settings > Redirects on your admin control panel. This enables you to have links such as:

• xyzlandscaping.com/google-review redirects to your Google My Business listing with the review box popped up.
• xyzlandscaping.com/facebook-review redirects to your Facebook page review tab.
• xyzlandscaping.com/angie-review redirects to your Angie's List review page.

The most effective method, ask for the review in-person.

Based on reports from our clients, we've found that asking for a review in-person, after a completed job, is by far the most successful approach. Just ask your customer if they'd be willing to leave an online review, and after they agree, take out your cell phone and text them the direct review links you've created.

When asking in-person and texting direct links, 50% to 70% of lawn and landscape customers will leave a review.

If you're not in-person, send a carefully crafted email.

Sending an email to ask for a review is effective, even months after you've completed a job for a customer. For the best results, send a personal email that looks like an ordinary email, not one that looks like a promotional email with a bunch of graphics and colors. The email should look like you've taken the time to type it up yourself, specifically for the customer. Here is a script we use on behalf of our clients.

Based on our data, you'll see about 30% to 40% of customers will leave a review after receiving the initial email request. For those that don't leave a review, wait 10 days and send a follow-up email. Here is the script we use for the follow-up.

After sending a follow-up email, we typically see another 10% to 15% of customers leave a review.

When asking through an email, we see 30% to 50% of lawn and landscaping customers will leave a review.

In conclusion, make it easy and just ask for the review.

As you can see, there is no need to provide any kind of incentive to get a review from your customer. In fact, it is against Google's terms of service to offer a monetary incentive for reviews, therefore, we can't recommend it. If you just make it easy with direct links and ask nicely, you'll find that many of your customers will happily leave you a review.

Have you used another approach to encourage your customers to leave an online review? If so, we want to hear about it! Tell us in the comments how you build reviews and what types of results you see. We love data from others!