• Ratings and Reviews
  • Restaurant Marketing

How to Get More Customer Ratings and Reviews

by: Allen Graves
4 min read

In today’s connected world, positive customer ratings and reviews can be one of the most valuable and powerful customer acquisition and marketing tools for your restaurant business. 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.

personalization-in-marketingIt 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, sometime referred to as a captive portal. When customers log into 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.

If 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.

Ask Your Customers for Ratings and Reviews

There’s nothing wrong with asking happy customers to give you a review. When you see a guest having a pleasant experience, strike up a conversation. Then ask them to visit a site like Yelp, Google or TripAdvisor 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.”

restaurant-operations

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
  • Are 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.

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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.

Related Posts:

– Why Every Restaurant Should Care About Customer Ratings and Reviews

– How To Deal With Poor Customer Ratings and Reviews

– Using Customer Profiles To Drive ROI for your Restaurant

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Restaurant Marketing FAQs

What is Restaurant Marketing?

Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.

Learn More About Restaurant Marketing Here

What is WiFi Marketing?

WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.

Learn More About WiFi Marketing Here

What is Restaurant Reputation Management?

Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.

Learn More About Restaurant Reputation Management Here

How Does Bloom Identify and Bring Back Lost Customers?

Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.

Learn More About Saving At-Risk Customers Here

SAVE TIME, INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUES, CREATE NEW CUSTOMERS

What our happy customers
are saying

“SaaS that covered so many bases for us instead of having to use multiple software products. Bloom Intelligence has simplified our responses to reviews, customer feedback, and more. I highly recommend Bloom Intelligence.”

Robert Sanderson

“Bloom Intelligence really is a step ahead in terms of marketing software and metrics. Their product is reliable, fast and innovative and has helped the company I work for really grow.”

John Marchetti

“Working with Bloom Intelligence has been amazing. They assist you every step of the way and work with you hand in hand to make sure you are optimizing your advertising potential. We are excited to use this tool to help learn more about our customers so that we can personally engage with them and understand our strengths/weaknesses.”

Ariel Ramirez

“In these challenging times, it has been a pleasure working with Bloom Intelligence to help facilitate our service offering to our clients. They were extremely responsive and provided support to mitigate risk and minimize revenue loss. Great partner!”

Stefan Kim

“We’re extremely pleased with the wealth of customer data that we’re able to gather, at a very attractive price.  In addition, we’re able to communicate our new product promotions by using  the landing page as a digital billboard.  A “no-brainer” for anyone working with limited Marketing $$.”

Bob Cross, Vice President of Operations

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