The process of buying products and services has changed over the years. For starters, buyers now carry out a considerable amount of research online.

Even though the medium of research has changed, some fundamental things can never change. For instance, people still look towards other people before they make their buying decisions.

What are people saying about a business? Is the company bad? Is it good? Here enter reviews.

Reviews are a way for current and past customers to provide feedback about their experience using a product or service.

What are some benefits of reviews for your business?

• Positive reviews can increase sales: when current and past customers have positive comments about your product or service, it can encourage prospects to patronize your business. After all, if the majority of people who have paid for your service have positive things to say, that means your business offers remarkable services. Here’s an example from a chiropractor:

• Improve local rankings: one of the factors for local rankings is acquiring reviews from your customers. Having reviews increases your credibility in a local area. Also, it shows that you’re actively serving people in the locality.
• Provide feedback to improve business: no matter how remarkable your business may be, it’s impossible to please all your customers. Therefore, you’ll have negative reviews. And even in positive reviews, customers will provide feedback on how you can improve your service. When you pay attention to reviews, you’ll get more ideas to improve your product or service.

Capture and manage customer reviews with Grade.us

As beneficial as reviews can be for your business, it’s difficult to acquire them. Because very few of your customers think of writing reviews – at least, not without some encouragement.

In light of this, you have to encourage your customers to leave reviews. Luckily, this is what you get with Grade.us. Beyond this, Grade.us also helps to organize and reply to reviews from your dashboard.

Undoubtedly, there are so many useful features you’ll find on Grade.us. In a moment, we’ll go through these features and how they can help acquire more sales and serve your customers better.

First of all, you have to register an account with Grade.us – you can get try it out for free for 14 days, with the free trial option. Before using the tool, you need to add a business.

Here, you can enter details such as your business name, industry, URL shortname, language, and internal ID.

Funnel

In this section, you have access to tools to help create a landing page for your reviews. First, you need to connect your location. If you operate businesses in various locations, click on the “Convert to Multi-Location” button.

Below that, you can add your review site listings. These include Google, Facebook, Yelp, and over 150 other listings. To even make it easier, Grade.us has separated the listings into different categories so that it’s easy to find the most relevant listings for your business.

When you click on any of the listings, a box will pop up where you can enter your business details. If the local listing is missing on this list, all you have to do is contact Grade.us and they’ll add it. By selecting the green icon in front of a review site, its reviews will show up in the “Reviews” section.

Going further down, you’ll see a box to add email addresses to receive notifications about your listings. Also, you have the option to display social media links from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on your review page.

In the content section, you can enter texts for different aspects of your campaign.

Furthermore, there are options to add even more elements to your page.

For instance, you can create a threshold for your ratings. This means for a particular rating (say 3) and below, you can take your customer feedback for why they’re giving your business a low rating. This way, you’ll be able to provide customer support internally and are less likely to receive a public negative review.

Below that, you can label each rating and attach an offer for people who drop reviews. Although, you need to keep in mind that providing incentives for reviews is against the policies of some review sites.

More so, you have the contact info auto-fill which makes it easier for reviewers to fill in their details. Lastly, the review stream shows your average rating of your existing features from all of your review sites.

In the setup section, there are tools to customize your brand details and the landing page design. Hence, you can edit business details and even upload your logo.

Likewise, you can edit the brand colour, upload the header image, and add custom CSS and HTML. Furthermore, you can use CAPTCHA on forms to prevent spams, prevent search engine indexing, and select a custom domain for your page.

Widgets

To insert your landing page into your website or rating button into your email signature, you need the widgets. You can access the tools by clicking on “Widgets” at the left sidebar.

Once you do that, you’ll see the embed code for the landing page you designed in the “Funnel” section. All you have to do here is to copy the code into your website.

Besides the landing page widget, you’ll find the email signature snippets. This allows customers to rate your business in the emails you send to them, pretty much removing a step completely in the review funnel.

After the rating, they’re taken to your review page where they can leave a review. Also, you have the QR code you created that you can print on flyers and business cards. Customers can scan the code using their smartphone camera and it takes them directly to the review funnel landing page, right on their phone:

Finally, you have the “Review Us” button code that you can copy into your website sidebar. This way, your visitors can open up the review funnel as a modal window, right on your website.

You can select one or more widgets depending on your needs.

Review requests

Sending review requests is a vital aspect of collecting reviews. So, how does Grade.us make this effective?

Grade.us allows 3 types of campaigns which are:

• Email
• Phone/Text
• Print

Let’s say you’re setting up an email campaign. You can fill in the form with the necessary details.

Below that, you can deactivate customers after they click-through your link to leave a review. After filling in the details, click on “Continue Email Setup” to complete your campaign. On the next page, you can write your emails and personalize them with your recipient’s details such as the first name.

Once you’re done with this, you can add recipients to your campaign. Here, you’ll enter their email address, first name, last name, and tags.

If you have a file containing many recipients, you can also upload using the button at the top right corner. Grade.us supports both CSV and XLSX formats.

Reviews

If you collect reviews on many review sites, tracking them can be a hassle. Luckily, in the “Reviews” section of Grade.us, you can see all your important reviews in one place.

For instance, if you’re a lawyer, you’d like to track reviews on Google, Facebook, and other important legal directories like Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, and more.

To access the reviews, click on “Reviews” at the left sidebar.

Also, you have the option to add your reviews manually or upload a CSV (or XLSX) file containing those reviews.

Likewise, there are filters to see reviews from a specific publisher or of specific ratings. This can help track your performance and see common customer complaints. Another useful feature here is the “Respond” button. By clicking that, Grade.us will take you to the review page where you can reply to the customer.

Beyond that, you can share the review on social media using the “Share” button, and you can even set up Grade.Us to automatically share your best reviews on Twitter and Facebook. In the customer feedback tab, you’ll find comments from your unhappy customers.

When you navigate to the review stream, you’ll find options to embed reviews on your website. Here, you can copy the code and paste it into your website. Plus, you can also grab the code for “floating carousel”, which is a little badge that will show up at the bottom of your website and cycle through your positive reviews:

In this section, you have the tools to manage your reviews in one place.

Reporting

This section of Grade.us makes it easy to track your performance. How many reviews did you acquire during a period? What’s the average rating? What’s the breakdown of the ratings?

To answer these questions, click on “Reporting” at the left sidebar.

When you scroll down, you’ll see charts displaying the change in review over time and the review sites. Going further down the page, you’ll see the funnel activity for the period in consideration.

Another useful feature is sentiment analysis. Here, you’ll find the common words associated with your positive and negative reviews. As a result, it’s easy to diagnose the common sources of customer complaints.

Beyond viewing these numbers, you can also generate reports. This is valuable if you want to compare your performance for different periods. More so, it’s vital if you have clients and need to show the results of your hard work.

You can schedule this report and even white-label it to look more professional.

Links

This section allows you to sign in to different review sites. Thereby, you can reply to reviews from your Grade.us account.

You have Google and Yelp on the page by default. If you need to sign in to other review sites, click on “+ Add a Link” to do that.

Manage

In the manage tab, you can add users and brands. In the users’ panel, you can add different team members and set their access level.

Furthermore, you can add businesses and brands in the profiles and brands sections respectively.

Listings

The listings section allows you to search for your business listings in various review sites.

With this, you can claim your listing on review sites that already display your business. Likewise, it becomes easier to see review sites where your listing is absent.

More importantly, this section helps to verify that your business details are consistent across various review sites.

White-labeling and more for digital marketing agencies

If you’re an agency (particularly a digital marketing agency), you’re likely going to love this: you can completely white-label Grade.Us and use it to impress your clients.

And when you set up your account as an agency, you get a plethora of other useful features and resources available:

For example, here are some of the unbranded resources that you can white-label and use for your own agency:

How does your business appear on local review sites?

Do you know what your businesses’ online reputation is really like?

Grade.Us offers a free tool that I urge all business owners reading this to try:

All you have to do is enter a few essential bits of information about your business and Grade.Us will quickly scan your reviews and present you with a report so that you can see what kinds of reviews you have.

What’s really cool though is that as an agency, you can embed the code to the review scan widget and add it to your own website – helping you drive more traffic, generate more leads and convert more into sales.

How to find reputation management clients for your agency

Another really cool thing you can do with Grade.us (a recent and very exciting feature!)  is that you can actually use it to find potential clients for your business: local businesses that need reputation management.

In other words, it can generate a list of local businesses that are qualified for cold outreach so that you can start reaching out to them and sell your services.

To start your search, all you need to do is enter a keyword and a location in the local client finder; then, Grade.us will start looking for relevant local businesses that have few Google reviews or who get reviews infrequently.

The list will include all the information you need to reach out to them with your pitch:

• Phone number
• Business name
• Google rating
• Last review they got

Then, all you have to do is export the list of names and phone numbers and start your outreach.

Here’s a quick video from Grade.us that shows exactly how it works and how you can find clients:

Customer support

Without a doubt, customer support is one of the best parts of the Grade.us service. Easily in the tool, you can access customer support through the “Support” button at the bottom right corner of your account.

Here, you can search for a specific topic. Grade.us will display relevant help articles. If these are insufficient, you can leave a message to the support reps.

Conclusion

If you’re serious about capturing reviews for your business, then Grade.us is a tool you should definitely check out – it provides all the features you need to capture and manage customer reviews.

Online reviews let customers promote your business and Grade.us makes the process a whole lot easier and more effective.