In today’s competitive marketplace, positive customer ratings and reviews can be one of the most valuable and powerful customer acquisition and marketing tools for your restaurant business.
- Consumers are likely to spend 31% more at a business with excellent reviews
- 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
If you’re currently not paying attention to your ratings and reviews, take a look at our post, Why Every Restaurant Should Care About Customer Ratings, to discover the potential revenue you’re undoubtedly leaving on the table.
It also goes without saying that receiving more positive customer reviews can not only help you increase foot traffic and revenue, but consumers will have more assurance and trust that they will have a pleasurable experience at your establishment.
Here are a few ways in which you can get more of those valuable positive ratings and reviews from your restaurant visitors.
Put Your Reviews Where Customers Can Easily Find Them
If you want your customers to leave you ratings and reviews, you need to make sure they know where to do it. One of the best solutions is to utilize your guest WiFi landing page, sometimes referred to as a captive portal. When customers log in to your WiFi network, you can ask for a review there, or provide links to your review pages on the popular review sites.
Other ideas might include adding signage on your tables or at your POS or adding a review form directly on your website.
When you have an automated WiFi marketing platform, you can set up an automatically triggered email to go to your customers after they leave your establishment asking them for a rating. If the rating is good, you can follow up with links to the popular online rating sites and encourage them to share.
If the rating is bad, you can follow up with an apology and an incentive to get the customer to give you a chance to make things right. This will potentially mitigate a bad rating making it online.
The strategy is known as a rating feedback loop and it can be very powerful in gaining consistent, positive ratings and reviews. Blow, we’ll show you how Bloom Intelligence can automate this process for you.
Ask Your Customers for Ratings and Reviews
There’s nothing wrong with asking happy customers to give you an online rating and review. When you see a guest having a pleasant experience, strike up a conversation. Then ask them to visit a site like Google or Facebook and share their experience.
Requesting a review while face-to-face with your customer can be incredibly effective. According to marketingland.com, “asking in person can garner you seven to eight times more reviews than asking via email.”
Strike at The Right Time
Yes, a mixture of good and not-so-stellar ratings can appear more authentic to internet surfers, but you obviously want a lot more of the positive ones. When asking your patrons for ratings and reviews, look for those who:
- Are outwardly having a great time
- Are “regulars” at your location
- Seem to be dwelling longer than your average patrons
- Compliment your food or atmosphere
- Finished their entire meal
- Gave a large tip
These customers can become your best online advocates, so be on the lookout for them and don’t be afraid to ask for a rating or review.
Go Where Your Customer Go
You can ask for ratings and reviews online, as well as in person. The key here is to find out where your customers are online. For instance, if a large portion of your customer base is active on Facebook, make sure you have a company Facebook page that you are actively posting and commenting on. This engagement generates trust, loyalty, and comfort.
This applies to any social media channel. The time you spend engaging with your customers will be well worth it. And when they feel comfortable with you online, they’ll likely leave you a more positive review when asked.
Offer a Reward for Ratings and Reviews
Asking for a rating or review is a very effective way of increasing positive online ratings. So why not reward customers who rate or review your restaurant? You could offer every customer who gives you a rating a free item from your menu or a discount on their next visit.
Make sure to mention that the offer is for any rating or review – good or bad. If they feel “bribed” and leave a good review solely because of the payback, your data can become skewed, and you will miss out on the valuable reviews that you can use to improve your business.
Be Best at What You Do
Above all, you should always strive to present the best food and drink with amazing service in an incredible atmosphere. When you do this, great ratings will inherently follow. And when you begin encouraging customers to give you ratings by following the tips above, you’ll be sure to see increases in overall foot traffic, customer frequency, and customer spend.
Manage Your Ratings and Reviews Effectively
With Bloom Intelligence, not only can you automatically reach out to your customers asking for ratings, but you can manage and reply to your ratings and reviews all in one place. With Bloom’s integration with Google and Facebook, you won’t have to spend time managing them separately on different platforms.
Having all of your ratings and reviews all in one place allows you to easily spot trends and make appropriate changes to your marketing and operations procedures. And you’ll have graphical reports to further help you spot trends.
This can save you time and money, and let you do what you do best – run your business!
To see a free demo of Bloom’s rating tools, and all of the other valuable marketing tools Bloom has to offer, click here for a demo or call us at 727-877-8181.
You will save huge amounts of time, increase customer lifetime values, get more new customers, bring back churning customers, and improve your online restaurant reputation with ease.
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