The ABCs of Reviews
By Alan Katz, Great Officiants, Long Beach, Calif.If you don’t have reviews, you don’t exist in the minds of wedding couples.Now, more than ever, couples want to see reviews on vendors before they decide who will handle their wedding. Among engaged couples, 95 percent use reviews to guide their choice of the perfect vendor. In fact, reviews, whether online-written or video testimonials, are among the top three criteria couples use in their selection process. Clearly, reviews are important. You can have the most impressive website ever, but if you don’t have credible reviews, you are just pictures and text.The secret to getting reviewsHow do you get couples to review you? You ask them. It is just that simple. However, people can be lazy, and newly married couples have so much going on after their wedding that remembering to place a review may not make their to do list. So how do you get them from saying, “Yes,” to actually reviewing you? It depends on your medium.Written reviewsFive highly popular wedding industry review websites for written testimonials are Wedding Wire, The Knot, Yelp, Google, and Yahoo. If you don’t have a page on these sites, it’s easy to set one up.Next, two weeks after the wedding, when they have returned from their honeymoon and have begun settling into their lives, send your clients an email telling them how wonderful it was to work with them. Highlight something special that happened, then ask them to share their positive comments so other couples might be able to have a similarly wonderful experience. For all of these sites, except Yelp, give your couples the exact link to post their reviews. You might want to simplify this further by using a bit.ly link to shorten the URL because big long links look funky in emails. For Yelp, provide clients with the link to the main Yelp page, and then ask them to search your company name and city. Yelp will hide your review if you give the exact link. Also, ask clients to tag your company and you on Facebook or other social media. This way their friends and family can know who you are.Don’t send the email to all of your clients. Sometimes, even when you did a great job, in the clients' perception, the slightest challenge or problem, whether within your control or outside of it, can be blown out of proportion. Solicit the couples whom you are certain had a wonderful experience.Who else can review you for your awesome event? Ask family or friends who attended, or other vendors who participated in the big day to do reviews also. Ask everyone to notify you once they have finished. Consider thanking them with a gift card.Video testimonialsA video review is much more powerful and believable than a written review. Guidelines for an effective video testimonial are:• Find an appropriate time, take out your smart phone, and get your testimonial.• Make it short, 30 seconds or less.• Prep the couple on what they need to say, for example, “I am (name) and this is (name), and we just got married at (location). (Your name and company) did a great job with our (wedding/event). We highly recommend (him/her).”• Give the person a three-second countdown, and hit record.• Make sure you turn the smart phone sideways and not up and down. If you do it up and down, there will be two black bars along the sides of the video.• Upload right away to YouTube or Vimeo. If you don’t have one of those video sharing accounts, open one.What do you do when you get a bad review?Sometimes, things go wrong. Almost all review sites have a way to either dispute a review and/or reply to it. If, indeed, you did something wrong, own up to it. Contact the couple, and let them vent. Be nice and apologetic and not confrontational. Sometimes, that’s all it takes for a positive resolution. Do what you can to either get them to remove the bad review or at least soften it. Consider giving a full or partial refund to resolve it. If you did a lousy job, then you don’t deserve to be paid for it. Strive to be the best at every event. Work as if your job depends on it—because it does.Make it easy for potential clientsThe goal of getting reviews isn’t to pat yourself on the back, it’s to assist couples searching for your services by allowing them to see what others think and then make an educated decision about whether or not to hire you. To get more reviews that hopefully lead to more clients, make it easy for your current clients by getting them the “how-to” information. Soon, you’ll see how easy it is to get reviews. ••
