How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 7)

 

How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 7)

TRANSCRIPT: We’re going to enlist these raving fans in step 6. Now I showed you a review a second ago, we’re going to dive into that review here in just a second. Step 6 is we’ve identified those raving fans in step 5. In step 6, we’re going to ask those people to go review us again, so remember that raving fan in that last step? Let’s take a look at this up close. She said just great thing about us. You can read her review here in the body of the email. Let’s send her a nice thank you email. We’ll go through the whole thing.

“Hi Keema. Thank you so much for the kind words you shared on dealerrater.com,” and then there’s her review, “Best car dealer ever. Donny Dunbar was the best car sales person on earth. He made sure I was given the best deal and affordable car on the lot. He worked it all out in my favor, I love my new car, I would send my grandma to get a car from Donny. Thank you so much, Donny. I will tell everyone about the wonderful customer service. I got a great car at an affordable price.”

That was her review. That was the review that Keema left, right? She said all these nice things about us. Now I’m going to say in my email, “It was truly a pleasure to assist you and I can’t wait to help your grandma buy her next car too.” Put a little smiley face on there. “If you’re up to it, I’d like to ask you a favor. Since so much of my business is based on referrals, I was hopeful you could place your review on other websites as well. If you have accounts already created in any of the following, would it be too much to ask for you to give us a 5 star review,” and I gave our links to Google, Yelp, and Facebook. “Also, please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

She’s already left one review for me on DealerRater which not a lot of people are going to see necessarily, but they’re all going to see it on Yelp and Facebook and on Google and I just asked her again. She’s a raving fan, I’ve said, “Please, rate me elsewhere.” If you think this is too much, if you think asking a raving fan who’s already done you a favor to rate you again is too much, then be prepared to live with your mediocre results. People who do you a favor are more likely to do you a second favor and a third favor. Folks, that’s called “The Ben Franklin Effect.”

All right. Now I’m enlisting my fans. The best email surveys where we’re trying to identify our fans are actually the best way to enlist our fans because they’ll do it automatically, they’ll both identify and enlist our raving fans, so this Friendemic email is one example.

This is an email where they’re using an email survey to both identify your raving fans and then enlist them, so they asked the one question survey, right? Then when I clicked yes, I’m automatically taken to a page that says, “Hey, review me on Facebook, Google, Yelp, cars.com, Edmund’s.” If I say no, that I wouldn’t recommend them to a friend. I’m sent to a page where I can tell the dealership or tell the business information on why I wouldn’t recommend them, and so I’m not only enlisting fans right away, I’m identifying fans, I’m enlisting them to go say nice things about me but I’m also calling out, I’m separating the bad reviewers from the good reviewers and I’m taking those people who had bad experience and I’m giving them a chance to tell management about their experience so that we can fix it for the future.

By the way, 3 Birds does this as well. We talked about 3 Birds Marketing a little earlier and we’re talking about them again. Let me show you 3 Birds email. Again, 3 Birds is only automotive. This is a terrific overall email social reputation service provider in automotive, but they’re so much more of course, all right? Their email is also an enlisting service.

Their email enlisting service is perfect for dealers, so they will enlist our raving fans and then they will identify them and enlist them and have them go leave you a great review, but even if the customer doesn’t leave notes, 3 Birds collects information on every click for you, so what’s great about this is if someone clicked no and then they don’t go fill out the review about us and we don’t know why they wouldn’t recommend us, 3 Birds is going to provide you that information. They’re going to say, “Hey, Mr. Bob Smith clicked no but he didn’t tell us why he wouldn’t recommend us. That gives your managers a chance to pick up the phone and call Mr. Smith and say, “Hey Mr. Smith, it’s Steve Stauning, I’m the sales manager here. I understand that you bought a car last week. I want to know how things were going.”

Then we’ll find out he wouldn’t recommend us and we can fix those issues preferrably before the CSI paperwork comes from the OEM. Also, I want you to understand, this is something you could do yourself. Everything I’m teaching you today about real reputation management, all 8 steps, you can also do yourself. You don’t need to pay a company to do it. If you have the ability to do these things, you can do it yourself, so I’ve identified my raving fans, I can actually send them a do it yourself email survey where I can enlist those raving fans. Remember that one question survey email? “Would you recommend us? Yes or no?” The people who said yes, I can send them an email back that says, “Hey, please rate us,” and if I’ve got the ability and the time, I can build a page like this on my website with links to the review sites that are important to me pretty easily, so I can send them an email back.

They said yes, they would recommend us. I say, “Great. You know what? Would you tell the world what you think about us,” and then I send them to a page like this and then they click through and they could leave me a review. Now it’s important, see these 4 little icons on here? It’s important that if I click on those as a consumer, that it takes me to the correct page of the review site and not the home page, so the link to Google should go to your Google reviews page, not to the home page of Google. Same thing with Yelp, Yahoo, wherever you’re sending people, Angie’s list, whatever you identified, remember in step 4.

All right, so what about the immediate leads, right? The people that we recognize immediately, they were in our dealership, they were either on sales or service, somebody put maybe the F and I manager or somebody at the cashier, they put a smiley face stamp on their paperwork. When that smiley face stamp, that paperwork goes up the paperwork chain, someone, a clerk along the way needs to send them an email like this. It’s just a single email request. This email or one with a single link back to your do it yourself reviews page is all you need to send. Now don’t overthink this. We’ll talk about it in a second, but this email just basically says, “Please rate us,” right? “I’d love to know what you think about us. If it’s not too much trouble, give us a review on one of these sites.”

If you want a copy of this by the way, you can send me an email, steve@undeniableadvantage.com, I’ll give you a copy of this email without a problem. Once we post this on stevestauning.com, we’ll post this email as well but that’s going to be a couple of weeks for this video series is posted on stevestauning.com, but don’t overthink this. Some of you are saying, “Steve, gosh, why would I identify who the raving fans are? Why don’t I just send every customer this email and say go rate us?” Because 2 things. One, only 1.5% of consumers are going to rate us online. We already know that. Only 1.5%, but on top of that, who’s more likely to give you a review from an email like this? Someone who’s happy or someone who’s sad? Someone who’s unhappy with you, right? Someone who had a bad experience.

We don’t need to shoot ourselves in the foot. We don’t need to go out there and start generating a bunch of 1 and 2 star reviews, so don’t send this email to everybody, just send it to your raving fans. “Now Steve, but what if we immediately identified someone that’s a raving fan and I don’t want to send them an email, how do I ask them right now to leave me a great review?” You can create like a one sheet or a business card that instructs your customers where or how they can leave a review of your business. Just have these ready to go when you identified a raving fan. That could be the wait staff has these. If you’re a hotel, the clerk has these, a cashier at a car dealership would have these, wherever the point of sale is at, you would have these, so let’s take a quick look. We’ll just look at this. I made these cards up, there’s nothing called “The Milk Restaurant,” but this is …

I’m the head milk server at The Milk Restaurant, somebody said they had great service today from me, I can hand this card. “The Milk Restaurant, where all we serve is milk,” and on the back I can say, “Hey listen,” take a look at the back. “If you love The Milk Restaurant, will you do me a favor? Will you go to any of these review sites or maybe all of them and give us a 5 star review?” If it’s possible, you want to have a website setup or a webpage setup where like I have on this card, themilkrestaurant.com/reviews where they can actually go to that page and then click from there to get to their review site.