Before investing time and money into a company’s products or services, customers need to know that the company can be trusted. There is no better way to establish trust within a customer base than by providing honest and useful reviews. Sites like Amazon and Yelp already offer customer review capabilities, where verified buyers can leave comments on products and services, thus, helping future, potential consumers reach a more educated decision on whether to invest or not.

Gaining reviews for your business isn’t always easy, however, and dealing with negative reviews is a challenge in and of itself. The following is everything you need to know about getting reviews online and recovering from bad reviews.

Don’t Offer Incentives for Reviews

Offering incentives for reviews used to be a major method of gaining reviews for a business’s products and services online, however, customers will often take advantage of an opportunity to get free stuff and won’t leave a review after their freebie has arrived. In addition to getting scammed by people looking to get free things, incentives make it seem like you are literally buying reviews for your business. Reviews are best gained by being earned with a quality business.

Make Reviewing Easy

Try to make it easy for your customers to leave a review. Integrate a dedicated query for reviews on your company’s site or on individual product pages. Take a lesson from Amazon, who makes leaving a review as simple and easy as clicking a single link. Don’t email or pester your customers to leave reviews, as this will come across as desperate and annoying most of the time. If customers have to jump through hoops to leave a review for your business, they’ll most likely lose interest before typing the first word.

Prompt Reviews Immediately

Customers are more likely to leave a review immediately after a transaction. Your link or otherwise beckoning efforts of garnering review management tools should appear as soon as possible after a customer places an order, either in their email inbox or on the transaction confirmation page.

Send Out Reminders

Some customers honestly just forget to leave a review after buying a particular product. While annoying customers for reviews is never a good idea, simply sending out an email or message reminder is perfectly acceptable. Referencing Amazon again, this multimillion dollar company does exactly that. After around three days or so, Amazon will typically email customers, reminding them to leave a review of whatever product they happened to have bought. Reminder emails account for an overwhelming amount of product and service reviews online, today. Customers are more likely to leave one if they already feel indebted to do so and have simply forgotten.

Enlist Help to Gain Reviews

There is a multitude of review sites out there on the internet. These sites serve as directories for companies, products, services, and brands, promoting them to customers in exchange for reviews. These sites find people who have either already bought a product or are willing to buy a product, then they pay these people for leaving reviews.

Utilizing sites like RizeReviews, CustomerLobby, and DemandForce is one of the most effective ways of building reviews for your business. Plus, it takes all the work off of you, the business owner, finding reviewers for you.

Dealing With Bad Reviews

You can’t please everyone and should look at negative reviews as constructive criticism, including the rudest and pointless reviews that people might leave on your site or product pages. Never delete bad reviews, as your site will most likely be penalized in some way for doing so. Instead, you can simply respond to these reviews and address whatever complaints customers might have, promising to fix these issues in the near future.