Last week you sent two emails, one to each pile from your list. Locals who hadn’t been in for a month. Past visitors who saw one scary headline and needed the real story. Some of them are walking back through your door because of it.
Here’s what happens next, more often than not. A customer has a good visit, pays, leaves, and takes the one thing worth more than her purchase with her: an honest opinion of you.
Nobody asks for it, so it goes home in her head and never shows up anywhere a stranger can see it.
That matters more than it used to. A visitor deciding whether Ely is worth the drive this fall isn’t reading the news the way you are. She’s checking reviews, the same way she’d choose between two lodges or two lunch spots. A business with three reviews from 2019 looks closed even when it’s thriving. A business with a dozen from this month looks like the safe, obvious choice.
This week’s tip: ask for a five-star Google review. Not everyone, and not a sign by the register nobody reads.
Ask your good customers directly, in person, the same day, while the visit is still fresh in their mind. “Would you leave us a quick Google review?
It genuinely helps.” A law firm I work with in town has pushed this: every good client, every time, for months.
They’re at 56 reviews now. Nobody stumbles into a number like that, somebody asked, every single time.
Here’s where a lot of owners give up too early. Someone agrees, taps the link, sees a sign-in screen asking them to create an account, and bails, because it looks like Google wants them to set up a whole new email just to say something nice about you.
They don’t. Tell them that first: no Gmail required. On that screen they tap “Create account,” then on the next screen “Use my current email address instead,” and their regular Yahoo, Outlook, or work email works fine.
One sentence from you before they hit that wall themselves is the difference between a review and someone walking away.
Make the link itself a 15 second find, not a hunt. Open the Google Business Profile you claimed back in week one, look for “Get more reviews,” and it hands you a short link built for exactly this. Text it to them on the spot, hand it across the counter, or do what that law firm does and put the same link and a plain ask at the bottom of your own homepage, so it’s working even when you’re not.
Next week: the weekend everyone in town already knows about, and how to make sure it doesn’t just happen around you.
Richard Stuart builds websites and revenue systems for owner-operated businesses from his home in Ely. Have a question you’d like answered in a future column? Send it to [email protected]. If something’s quietly costing you customers, let’s talk: richardstuart.me.
