Is your startup business struggling to get reviews it deserves online? It is very hard to compete with all the big guys who have thousands, of lovely online reviews about their products and/or services. That fact has made all of them the more important because, almost nobody buys something without first checking out the online reviews these days.

So, if your potential clients are meeting with your small business online and running away in the opposite direction once they see your lack of endorsements, what can you do to turn that around?

If your online profile is still looking very lonely, with only one or no reviews, try check out these three tips to get more online reviews for your small business.

1. Create an email campaign.

One way to welcome and encourage online reviews for your startup business is to deploy the habit of creating an email campaign. If you have an active email list, you are off to a good start. Your email subscribers are simply your biggest fans, so there are chances, if you send all of them an email asking them to leave your business an online review, they’ll do it.

If you haven’t built an email list yet, get started by signing up with an email marketing software and adding a popup on your website to encourage people to join your list. In addition, if visitors can place an order from your website, you should already have their email addresses to be able to add to in your email list.

if you want to get the most responses, try sending an email triggered campaign. This actually means your online review emails will send out automatically any time a customer places an order on your website.

Sending an email immediately after customers’ purchases, while the most positive experience is still fresh in their mind, will get you the most online reviews.

2. “Ask” them in person.

I don’t mean that you should start asking every single person that walks through your doors to leave a good review for your business online; that would be time-consuming and exhausting. Instead of doing that, gently encourage all your customers to always leave an online review in various places around your physical location.

These are various number of ways to make the most out of your space to generate more online reviews including:

• A Yelp sticker added to your front window
• Tabletop signs
• A message at the bottom of receipts
• On business cards

Your regular customers who like to walk through your door might not have checked you out online beforehand, but by advertising offline that you want more online reviews, you will be able to get to all of your customers — old & new.

3. Reply to every online review.

When asking audience to review your business online, you will surely open yourself up to bad reviews, and that’s okay. Just remember always to respond to every review you received, in a careful, helpful style and seek to try turn any poor review into a positive experience. What’s important is that you shouldn’t respond just to negative reviews; you should also respond to positive reviews, as well. Replying to your reviews timely will show other coming customers that you are very active in your online communications.

In fact, according to a recent study in the Harvard Business Review that i read, replying to your customer’s reviews results in better ratings overall. Through their recent studies, the researchers found out that users exposed to more management responses. E.g, new users who read your response to a more negative comments from another user — left ratings 0.1 “stars” higher than those who had not.

This finding should also be applied in the same way to responses to the positive reviews. All additionally, customers who read all management responses would also less likely sure to leave a trivial or unsubstantiated negative review.

This sure works like magic. Give it a try and you shall be happy afterward