Of the many ways that you can request reviews from your customer, the most impactful is to ask in person after you’ve finished providing a service or completing a transaction.

Don’t get too caught up in the weeds when determining what to say when you ask. Try something like, “We’d love to hear how your experience was! If you wouldn’t mind giving us a review on Google or Facebook, it would help us a lot!”

When you take the time to ask for a review in person, it tells your customers how much a review from them means to you.

While asking for reviews in person is an effective way to get reviews, it can sometimes feel awkward to bring up reviews in a conversation. And, that can take away from the customer experience you’re providing.

A smooth, easy way to get reviews without having to bring it up in person is to follow up after service or a transaction with an automated email marketing campaign.

Email marketing is a powerful tool for getting reviews because you can direct customers where to go based on how happy they are.

If they have positive feedback, send them to Google or Top Rated Local to write a review, but if they have negative feedback, you can direct them to your customer service team who can help to correct any issues.

Text message marketing, like email marketing, makes it easy to ask every customer for reviews without having to put in a lot of time and effort.

Send a follow-up text after service or a transaction to find out if the experience was overall positive or negative for your customer. Based on what they select, either send them to customer service or ask for a review.

Text message marketing works because it’s instantaneous. It’s easy for people to ignore emails or calls, but most people are accustomed to reading text messages right away.

Customers who visit your store or office need to know where they can go to leave you feedback about their experience. One way to communicate this information is to hang signs in your location telling customers where they can write reviews.

Signage is helpful because it directs your customers where to go, which means that you’re more likely to get reviews where you need them most. Signage that says something like “We’d love to hear about your experience,” invites feedback in an unthreatening way that isn’t awkward.

However, signage has its limits. A lot of your customers won’t read it, and it often won’t be enough to get someone to actually write a review.

Another passive way to let your customers know where they can leave reviews about your business is to include that information on your website.

The upside of this is that you can link customers directly to the review sites that are most important to your business, but the downside is that, like with signage, it has its limitations when it comes to actually getting more reviews.

One effective way to showcase existing reviews and to get more is to include a reviews widget on your website that will display your latest reviews. This has multiple benefits, from building trust and social proof to letting your customers know where to write reviews.