This post provides tips on how to increase the click-through conversion for your customers to leave online reviews using MagicRating.com

Tip #1 – Ask for “Rating Only” in your Feedback Request Form

Data shows that a customer is more likely to write a review on an online review site if he/she has not yet been asked to provide written feedback. A complete Tutorial on asking for rating only can be found here.

Tip #2 – Include Social Links and Online Review Links in the “Thank You” Email

Including your Online Review Links in your email gives your customers more than one opportunity to leave you reviews online. A complete Tutorial on adding links to emails can be found here.

Pro-Tip: If you are confident in your business and customer happiness, you can also include the online review links right away in the feedback request email. This will not trigger any filtering based on the NPS score (meaning all customers will see the links) but it will increase the online review conversion.

Tip #3 – Have a compelling subject line and customize your email text

Increasing the overall open rate of your feedback request emails also increases your chance of online reviews. Make sure to customize the email templates within MagicRating. A complete Tutorial on customizing the Email Templates can be found here.

Tip #4 – Offer an “Easy” Review choice.

MagicRating allows you to choose from a large variety of online review sites. Plus you can also add your own custom links. We highly recommend to choose only a small amount of review links to be included in your Forms and Emails. If you have very industry specific links listed make sure to include at least one “easy” choice such as Facebook. A complete tutorial on setting up online review links can be found here.

Tip #5 – Load your old and existing customers into MagicRating

Don’t just limit yourself to new customers. Go back and add existing and old customers into MagicRating. You will be surprised by the amount of additional reviews you can collect. Tutorial: You can add your customers manually or you can upload a Spreadsheet or CSV file.

Tip #6 – Change the Threshold of what is considered Positive Feedback

Change the threshold of what is considered Negative and Positive Feedback. Customers leaving you an NPS score of 6 or 7 may still leave you a positive online review  A complete Tutorial on setting the threshold can be found here.

Tip #7 – Set realistic expectations

It’s a long term numbers game. You need to think about this as an ongoing process over 3 or 4 years. Also you need to realize that every person that communicates directly with you is one less person that might leave a bad review out there on the web.

On average we see about 40% of the email sent opened, about 16% of the users give feedback and about 4% go through to the review sites.

More in some industries and less in others.

For example the average insurance agent in the US has less than 1 review. So in most markets it doesn’t take very many to stand out.

Tutorial: MagicRating has review monitoring and customer happiness dashboards  build in.

Tip #8 – Upload a high quality company logo and feedback page banner. Adding a high quality logo and banner will drastically improve the look and feel of your feedback request email as well as feedback page. Do not skip this step. Good looking pages and emails will convert better.

Tip #9 – Test, Test, Test Try different email body text and title variations to see if you can improve conversions.  A complete Tutorial on customizing the Email Templates can be found here.