How to Grow Positive Online Reviews in 2024

Improving Your Online Ratings and Reviews

You can find Bloom’s hints, tips and strategies to grow positive online reviews and ratings all over the internet.

These tips are important to employ and many will surely help you improve your ratings. However, the tips on these pages have all been suggesting the same things.

So, as countless thousands of restaurants have employed the tips and strategies, the playing field has leveled and it has become difficult again to keep your ratings and online reviews superior to those of your competition.

Fortunately, there is a new way to not only get more online reviews and ratings, but to get better ones while mitigating postings of the bad ones.

This new way of gaining online ratings and reviews can quickly and easily give you the upper hand on your competition once again.

Before we discuss this new way of improving your online reviews, let talk about why they are so crucial for restaurants.

Let’s first talk about why you should pay close attention to your ratings and how they can be used to greatly improve your revenue.

Why You Should Focus On Reviews for Your Restaurant

More and more, consumers are turning to online reviews and rating sites when making a decision about where to spend their money.

In fact, in a 2019 survey by BrightLocal, 82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses.

In addition, 52% of 18-54-year-old’s say they “always” read reviews.

Online reviews have a direct correlation to a company’s revenue. Customers are willing to spend 31% more on a business with great reviews.

And research from Harvard Business School found that a one-star increase in your Yelp rating leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue.

The power of these major online review sites – Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and others – is strong and can affect your business’s success.

Therefore, it only makes sense that you have active strategies to manage your online reputation. Likewise, they need to be proactive about any bad reviews.

A New Way To Improve Your Reviews and Ratings

Bloom provides a unique and powerful way to grow a restaurant’s customer reviews and ratings.

In addition, this will help reduce the number of poor ratings that reach the online review sites. Here’s how it works. 

When a customer visits your restaurant, the Bloom platform can be configured to automatically send them an email asking for an online review about their visit. The email will contain links for the recipient that will lead them to a respective page for each ratings site – Google, Facebook, etc. 

The customer can then leave their online review, and the rating will not only be recorded on the ratings site, it will also be recorded in the Bloom platform. This will allow you know when a rating is made, and to act swiftly if a negative rating/review is given. 

What if the Rating is Poor? 

On the initial email, there will be a button that will tell the recipient that if they had a poor experience, they can click on the button.

This will take them to different page where they can explain their experience and leave a message for the manager. 

Over time, your ratings will begin to increase while the poor ratings will also decrease. We see mid-sized chains building 100’s of new positive online reviews a month. 

Whether a rating is positive or negative, it is vital to engage with the reviewer and offer your thanks for taking the time to let you know about their experience.

Responding To Customer Ratings and Reviews

Likewise, if the customer gives a good rating, you can follow up with a message thanking them for their business.

Over time, this will greatly increase the amount of positive online reviews you have online, and show your customers that you care.

You will be automatically growing your positive online reviews on these ratings sites, which drives more business. You can also set up automatic feedback loops when a bad review is received.

If you receive a bad review, we can filter this so the feedback goes to your management directly. Then, you can react to the bad review in real time.

We do this through immediate notifications to your staff of choice. We can also create automated responses to any positive or negative review.

This can be done after a specific amount of time, or based upon the star rating.

If someone gives your restaurant a 2-star review, Bloom will instantly send an email to your manager letting them know about this bad review.

Likewise, we can set an auto-response to your customer. The response might provide an offer saying that you are sorry about their poor experience, and offer a free deal to give you another try.

How This Helps Your Business

Not only does this let your customer know that you care, but you are also giving them an incentive to return.

Think about this as a comp that you would traditionally have a manager give to a customer who complains.

The fact is that most customers will not vocalize to a manager or your staff that they had a bad experience. They will just leave and not come back.

Even worse they may share with all their friends and family, or make a negative review online thus hurting your business.

By creating a feedback loop you can ask your customer to give you feedback easily and discretely after they leave. This will let you catch more bad experiences than you could before.

Furthermore, after a customer comes back to your location after receiving a digital comp, you will know when they return via Bloom, and can send them a follow up survey again after they leave from their new experience.

This will show you if their experience improved.

Ultimately, you are creating a feedback loop that automatically improves your customers’ experiences and lets you know in real time of bad experiences.

An Additional Strategy To Save Unhappy Customers

As a last line of defense, Bloom uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers.

So if a customer has been marked as churned by Bloom (or that they have stopped coming to your locations), Bloom can automate an offer at the right time and place to your customer.

Bloom users are seeing up to 38% of churned or lost customers return to their restaurants after receiving a specialized, personalized offer.

It is much cheaper to save an at-risk customer than to gain a new one.

Thus, setting up proper ways to identify unhappy or churned customers is a key factor to your success.

Then, create parallel automated strategies to provide a incentive for your customer to return. With proper transparency for your management, this will allow you to to stand out from the crowd and succeed.

At the end of the day, all operators at some point will have an unhappy customer.

What’s important is that you have automated strategies to keep your customers happy, and coming back.

Using Online Reviews to Make Your Business Better

The first step in using reviews to improve your business is to monitor and evaluate them consistently.

Once you are on a regular schedule, and creating an active process to show customers you care, you will begin to see patterns emerge.

When an issue is identified, good or bad, take swift action to improve it, and continue to optimize your online review strategy over time.

For instance, if you are seeing consistent positive comments about a certain menu item, you might want to feature it as a special.

Or, if you see consistent negative reviews about a certain menu item, you could try modifying the recipe, or removing it from your menu altogether.

Perhaps you notice positive comments about the cleanliness of your front-of-house. You can use those reviews in your restaurant marketing to tell the world what other people are saying and experiencing.

If, on the other hand, you notice consistent comments about uncleanliness, you can begin paying more attention to keeping your restaurant clean and clutter-free.

Start Improving Your Ratings and Reviews Now

At the end of the day, you and your team are busy.

It can seem intimidating and time consuming to set up such strategies around online reviews.

The good news is that Bloom has automated and tested strategies that work to build positive online reviews.

Likewise, we have tools to address unhappy customers, and a process to make them happy customers again.

The reality is that any restaurant cannot afford not to have a strategy around their online reviews.

Not only does Bloom have the tools, we also have the white-glove experience to set up, automate, and optimize your online review strategy over time.

Our job is to make your job easy!

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