How To Turn Written Customer Testimonials Into Online Reviews
Originally Published August 2021
It happens all the time – a customer loves what you’ve done for them, and writes you an excellent testimonial. But its a review in a thank-you card. Or it’s an email review. Or they gushed about you in the front office or lobby, but didn’t put anything in writing. If you want to show these written customer testimonials to the world, you need to turn them into ONLINE reviews, right? But how do you do it?
This situation was illustrated for us when a client of ours emailed us with the following (paraphrased and anonymized) question:
“When a customer gives a positive review like this, is there a way to push it forward as a 5-star review into Google?”
Now, luckily, our client has contact information for this customer, so there are ways to make sure they can use this review. Let’s go over a few ways to turn written customer testimonials into online reviews.
How To Turn Written Customer Testimonials Into Online Reviews
1. Copy The Review And Post It On Google My Business Personally
Simply plagiarize the review. Copy-paste the review text, or hand-type it if you need to, create a fake Google profile, and post it to your Google My Bus- . . . NOOOOO! DO NOT do this, and don’t listen to anyone who tells you to do this. It’s shady, deceptive, and not only will Google eventually delete the review and possibly suspend your Google My Business listing, your customers could find out and it could ruin your reputation!
Don’t have a Google My Business (GMB) listing? Learn more about GMBs and how to set them up here.
Let’s start over.
2. Ask Politely For An Online Review
If you really want to get that excellent written customer testimonial on Google, Yelp, Facebook, the BBB, etc. – you have to ask them.
Online reviews need to come from the user’s personal account. Yes, there are people out there who cheat and do Option 1 above, but you don’t want to be those people. At Cohlab, we report those people all the time if they compete with our clients. You can bet you’ll get reported at some point.
Whether you have their email, phone number, or know that they’ll be coming back in soon, be ready with a nice message letting them know you LOVED their review and want to share it with the world – you just need a little more help. And give them a direct link. Something like this:
“Thank you so much for the kind words! The whole team really appreciated your note. We were hoping we could ask a small favor – could you share your words with our future customers? It would go a long way to helping our business grow! Here’s a direct link to leave us a review on Google, and another for Facebook – choose whichever you’d like. Thank you so much again, and take care!”
And whatever you do, don’t forget to follow up! It may take two or three asks before the person is in the perfect position to leave this review. People get busy, or they’re not at the right device, or they don’t have the emotional energy, so give them the chance.
3. Use Online Review Software To Showcase Offline Reviews & Online Reviews Together
If you aren’t able to ask them to leave the review online, or they simply don’t “do” the internet as may be the case with some demographics, then you can add that review onto your website using review software.
At Cohlab, we use our own Cohlab.Reviews online review software. This is useful for a few reasons:
- It pulls live reviews on a single page of our website from all of our online accounts like GMB, Facebook, YellowPages, BBB, and others every 12 hours, and updates them on our website automatically.
- It gives us an easy, single page to send people to leave reviews on any of our review sites, so we only have to send clients one link.
- It allows us to manually add offline written customer reviews, and label them as coming from “Cohlab” rather than Google, Facebook, etc.
So with this client, we simply advised him to send us the review in question, we would add it to our software for his account, and in a few minutes, it will be on his website!
If you’re having problems time-and-again getting reviews from your clients, or getting them from offline to online, I encourage you to check out the articles linked above, or get in touch with the Cohlab team today to learn how our Cohlab.Reviews software can help.
Cohlab Digital Marketing
Cohlab Digital Marketing