After reading the previous post, Why are Reviews so Important? we hope you understand the appeal of reviews as a marketing tool. If you only have a few or no reviews at all, there are still ways to leverage the benefits discussed.
While having a handful of reviews is better than none, recency, or the time since a review was last submitted, can be just as important to travelers as the total number of reviews. According to a survey conducted by Power Reviews, 64% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy a product with fewer, more recent reviews than if it has a higher volume of reviews published three or more months ago. This number jumps to 86% when considering a product or brand they haven’t purchased before.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic tool to get thousands of reviews overnight. Still, you can build a collection of recent reviews to increase the appeal of your products and capture the attention of high-intent travelers right now. Let’s get started!
Tips to Get Reviews
1. Understand the reviews process
As an operator, your experience with reviews has been limited to seeing the final product: the approved review listed on your product page. If your goal is to get more reviews, you need to know what the reviews process asks of your customer. You can’t effectively persuade someone to do something you haven’t ever done yourself!
Let’s walk through the review process from the traveler’s perspective.
Please note: this is the process for submitting reviews to Viator only. We’ll discuss the other forms of reviews in the next post.
Submitting a Viator Review
Viator sends up to 3 emails and 1 SMS to remind travelers to leave a review after an experience concludes. The reminder emails stop once the traveler leaves a review.
The review consists of three short sections and takes only a few minutes to complete. The entire process is shown in the slideshow below.
2. Demystify the process for your travelers
Now you understand how quick and easy it is to submit a review. Describing the entire process will encourage travelers to participate and reassure them that it is fast and requires minimal effort. The scariest part of sharing feedback is not knowing how long it will take to complete. Transparency goes a long way with customers.
Compare leaving a review to creating a caption for an Instagram post or even writing a tweet. Satisfied customers should be more than willing to share their photos with a 100 character description when they think of it as content they would have produced anyway.
3. Highlight the human impact behind reviews
Travelers will want to leave reviews if they can see the direct human impact of their actions. They want to feel helpful! A personal appeal from you or a staff member will prepare travelers for Viator’s forthcoming email review request. Face-to-face requests are hard to turn down, especially if they follow the unforgettable experience that your business just provided.
Explain the value of customer reviews to improve your business and benefit future customers. Remind your customers that reviews are likely the reason they found your business, and that leaving a heartfelt review can help them pay that service forward.
4. Timing is everything
The best time to ask for a review is right after your experience concludes. Ideally, your customers will be buzzing with excitement to channel into creating that enthusiastic review. Unfortunately, the more time passes from the end of your experience, the less likely a review will be submitted.
What’s next?
Getting your travelers to submit a review is step one of the journey. You may be wondering where published reviews appear and how Tripadvisor reviews fit into the picture. Stay tuned for the next post in our series, Understanding Different Types of Reviews, for an in-depth explanation of traveler feedback on both the Viator and Tripadvisor platforms.
