A follow-up email—reaching out to customers to make sure they’re satisfied, providing links to Yelp or Google Plus Local to write reviews—improves your small business’s chances at creating customer evangelists and fostering customer loyalty. As quoted by Melinda Emerson (@SmallBizLady), Matt McCormick of JCD Repair says, “Depending on their e-mail address, we provide them with a link to either Google Plus Local, Yelp or Facebook. We then use these sites on our own Web sites to help show people how awesome we are. It’s really amazing how many people click those links and write reviews.” The option for feedback (through email, through Yelp) has long been a staple to successful business planning. But, for a small business in ecommerce, reviews on sites like Yelp allow customers to share their loyalties to your brand at rapid speed and to a larger audience of “followers,” “friends” and “circles.”
To read more about how a “bad” review can help your small business evangelize customers and improve loyalty, read Emerson’s article for the New York Times, Even Bad Reviews on the Web Can Help Your Business.
-Christopher Lin, Lexity
