Recover and recycle your existing reviews and testimonials

Anyone who has worked in a service business will know how vital and valuable reviews are when it comes to shaping buyer decisions.

A potential customer who has never bought from you before will invariably seek validation from other sources, particularly when the service is expensive and/or intangible. According to research, more than 60% will read online reviews before making the decision to purchase. So ask yourself – are you doing enough to build a strong and positive bank of reviews and testimonials? Are you using them on your site?

There really is no such thing as too many customer reviews. Yet many of yours may now be buried at the bottom of your Facebook page or LinkedIn business profile. So before you start trying to generate new reviews and testimonials for your business's website, why not recover and recycle your existing ones?

Firstly, you need to find your old reviews. It's likely that they're scattered all over the place – you may have been sent email reviews from customers that you never got around to using and you will also want to scour your Facebook, LinkedIn, Google MyBusiness page and anywhere else your business has a presence on which customers can leave feedback.

Copy and paste them into a document so you can pick and choose the strongest or most relevant ones. Make sure that you also take note of the reviewer's name/handle etc as this is important in establishing trust between you and your potential customers. Would you believe an anonymous testimonial or review?

You need to consider where potential clients are likely to look when searching for online reviews of your business. And the most obvious place if your own business website.

People won't want to have to look through a whole host of pages, so any positive feedback needs to be easily found on your website. We suggest that you not only have a dedicated testimonials page on your site, but also add a relevant review to any service page as this will form part of the decision-making process. 'You're considering buying X? Well, look at what our current customers think!'

If someone has reviewed your service on a social media platform, or sent you an email with permission to publish it, you can put that review or testimonial in any way you wish.

However, if you have received positive feedback but that person has not officially agreed to it being used publicly, it's a fairly simple process to convert it into a testimonial. All you need to do is get in touch with your customer, thanking them for their comments and saying something along the lines of:

“I'm in the process of compiling some testimonials from people who have used our services. Would you mind if I used some of the things you said?”

In the same email or call, it's a good idea to have already condensed or tweak their comments into a testimonial that's phrased in a way that carries impact. Send that over asking if they are happy for you to use it. If, for whatever reason, they aren't 100% happy with the wording, it only takes a few moments to ask them what they'd prefer to say instead.

Not only are you making the process as easy as possible for them, but you've also got a fantastic testimonial!