Everybody knows that getting reviews is really the front lines of local business marketing right now, those near me searches and all those stars are being displayed on maps and pretty much everywhere that your business listing is presented. That includes places like yell, Yext, Yelp, Facebook, Google, you know, everywhere, a place. All these platforms are spots where your business is going to get literally ranked against your customers. So your businesses Goodwill is now in the public record. If you didn't think about it that way, that's the other way to think about it. And what's so important for local businesses is to keep that review review flow coming down every week consistently. And here is why two good reasons. First reason is if you do happen to have a customer that gets a bad experience and they decided to go post online, you really don't want that to hang at the top very long, because you know, it's going to effectively act as the headline for your business in the review stack. 

This negative is going to stick up there. So you really don't want that to stay any longer than it has to. You want to push that down and get some positive. Now negative reviews can be used to your advantage, but they don't work well when the number one most recent experience, because people understand that reviews are stacked by time and they definitely don't want to visit a business. That's pumping out negative experiences as, as recently as this week or within the last couple of days. So you want to push those down, that's your number one reason. The other reason you want regular review flow is because it's going to help your rankings and it's going to help you against your competition in your market. So how do we do it? Well, we do it in a way that's, you know, ideally automated and here's how we do it. 

Here. We create a series of emails that follows up with every single customer. Now we do this for e-comm stores and we also do this for in-person store. So it doesn't matter what type of vendor you are. If you're an e-com person, this is particularly easy to set up. Most e-comm platforms will allow you to integrate with a mail server, or sometimes they have their own series of mail follow-ups that you can fashion, and you can frame those messages so that you're asking the customer how their experience was and asking them if they could please leave a review or hopefully give you some feedback so that you can do a better job next time. Now, in the case of a local store, like where you have customers coming into your shop, this can be a little trickier to get them to opt in. However, not impossible. 

You can get them to opt in for things like loyalty programs, getting specials, getting on this month's event list, all sorts of different reasons why they'd like to engage with you. And once they do that, you can of course follow up with them in a series. Now, what does the series look like for us? It typically looks like three to five emails or SMS messages that follow up with that customer and simply ask them how their experience was when they were in the store. And, you know, maybe a couple of specific questions that you're trying to focus on, like KPIs in your business, you know, how was your server? How long did you wait? You know, did you find the pricing to be appropriate? Was your overall experience good? How was the atmosphere? Right? There's all these different metrics and things that you can sort of probe and get some idea of what's going on with your business, but overall paints the picture. 

It also really helps for them and obviously provide some links for them to click through and leave reviews publicly. Now that really helps because it's going to help you start to build reviews that are growing faster than your competition. Therefore, your business will be recognized as best in market. And when people search for best my business, right, your business is more likely to come up at the top. So this is an awesome strategy for SEO and outranking your competition. It also helps that review flow move along so that if you have a negative review, it quickly gets pushed now. So that's what I'm telling you. You guys need to do, you got to set up a way to follow up with every single customer, without counting on human staff and human error and putting your staff or yourself and your customers started in awkward conversations that makes the customer feel like they're being put on the spot. 

Also, I can tell you that even if they're really happy and you have a great way of asking them and they say, yeah, I'd love to leave a review. They'll log out the door. And most likely life will get to them and they'll be completely distracted and they'll never leave the review. Right? So that's why I got a follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up and politely remind to politely, ask for them to give you that feedback and hopefully post it for you if they're happy.