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Your Review Hub is You

Today’s entry is more of a practical tactic, and one that has saved my bacon time and time again in both my own projects and in my marketing career. The lesson is the title - your review hub should always be you. We’ll cover the guts of a review in another entry, but for now I will say that you should always be asking for a review for a thing you did or a thing you sell. Whether it’s your first client or your 100k(th) ecom sale, reviews are a powerful way for prospects to look and see similar people buying your stuff for similar reasons as them. First we’re going to talk about how to get the reviews back to you, then we’ll cover why that matters. Let’s go.

Get them back to you

It’s super important that customers know where to leave a review of your thing. Without that direction, they’ll go any-old-where and write whatever they want, which is Not Good for a variety of reasons. So, give them that direction.

• For physical or digital ecom, you should be emailing your customers both right after purchase and then shortly after they get the item asking them to leave a review by whatever means necessary. It can even be an instruction to reply to your email - it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Follow up when no review is given for a week or two.

• For service businesses, ask for a review after your first win after signing them on as a client. This one kind of straddles the line of a testimonial, and I’ll cover that more in a future entry, but for now just direct them back to you and ask for some honest feedback about working with you so far. That’s it, that’s the whole ball game. But let’s take a look at some reasons why this matters.

Channeling the bad

Something I’ve seen time and time again is that even with so many options for leaving a bad review of a company online, the vast majority of people, even if pissed off, will leave their bad review exactly where you tell them. 99% of the bad reviews I’ve gotten only show up where I direct them, and that in turn makes it easy to curate:

• Customer service follow up - turn bad experiences into good ones

• Allows you to improve in places that need it

• Keeps bad review off the general internet for others to find (bad SEO)

• You can hide these bad one-star reviews in your system

• Keeps everything in one place for easy tracking

• Lastly, it gives you a sense of peace when you can track a bad review to a specific client or purchase. Bad reviews from “Anonymous User 399” that only say “this sucks” aren’t helpful but can still damage your brand. Funneling these bad reviews into one place gives you the peace of mind that you can at least try to fix the situation.

Bonus, use bad reviews for your own marketing:

Follow up on the good

Good reviews make you feel amazing, so following up on good reviews should be a no-brainer, even if it’s just to say thank you. Great reviews are where I’ve gotten some of my biggest wins as a marketer.

Good, enthusiastic reviews can lead to bigger testimonial projects, partnerships, more sales, and allow you to cultivate several “brand ambassadors” to help you spread the word about new products and services when they arrive. Some of them could even make good hires for your biz! It’s wide open, so always follow up on the good. Here’s some things I’ve done with good written reviews besides the above ideas:

• Recruit them for unboxing videos or product showcases

• Use them as the featured review on a landing page

• Customer review social media post

• “Review wall” page on your site

• Featured review on the product page

• Use them in ad media

• Use them in your emails (your business is sending out emails, right? RIGHT?)

Your review hub is the foundation of your customer feedback strategy. By directing all reviews—good and bad—back to you, you gain control over your narrative, improve customer experiences, and leverage feedback to fuel your marketing efforts.

Whether it’s turning a bad review into a win or showcasing glowing praise, the key is creating a system where reviews all come back to you. Make this a priority, and you’ll see how powerful a well-managed review hub can be in growing your business. Now go do stuff.