December 2018
Holiday Launch Schedule
Depending on the nature of your business, you may consider not launching surveys to customers during the 7 days between Christmas and New Year's Day since this is a popular vacation time and response rates may suffer. Our normal survey launch days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays, and since holidays fall on Tuesday this year it may give you more reasons to skip that week for surveying.
SurveyAdvantage will be closed on Monday December 24th, Tuesday, December 25th, and Tuesday, January 1st. We will be launching only Wednesday and Thursday during those holiday weeks. If you're using data automation and wish to pause your launch during one or both of those holiday weeks, simply let us know by sending us an email to support@loyaltyloop.com before Thursday, December 20. If you manually send your launch list, simply hold-off sending your data during those weeks. Otherwise your surveys will launch as planned during either Wednesday or Thursday.
NEW FEATURE - Launch List Visibility
LoyaltyLoop now provides visibility into your processed and launched survey recipient list so you can monitor who received your survey invitation.
Remember, the raw data that you provide to LoyaltyLoop is not your survey launch list. Your raw data is processed to remove duplicate email addresses, remove any customer who you opted-out, and remove bad email addresses. It also removes any customer previously invited to give feedback within your specified Customer Survey Filter - the default filter removes any customers invited to give feedback in the prior 90-days (or a range specified by you).
To view your survey launch list:
- Sign in to LoyaltyLoop
- Click Launch from the main left menu
- On the Launch page, the “List Count” column tells you the number of actual survey recipients
- Click the count value (see image below) to display the list of customers who were invited to give you feedback
NEW FEATURE - Hide Testimonials from View
As you review your Testimonials for publishing to your website, invariably you’ll read some that you may not want to publish. You can just ignore these comments and keep reading to find the ones you do want to publish, but this can cause additional work for you the next time by forcing you to re-read a comment you already decided is not publishable.
The new “Hide” feature solves this issue by removing the testimonial from your Testimonial Publisher view, so you are not forced to re-read them each time.
Here is how to use the "Hide" feature:
- Sign in to LoyaltyLoop
- Click Testimonials from the main left menu
- Set the dropdown filter to view only your “Unpublished” testimonials
- Select the checkbox on the far right next to one or more testimonials, and then click “Hide”
On the top of your Testimonial Publisher view, notice the green widget that displays the count of total hidden testimonials from your view. To unhide and view those testimonials, click the gear icon and select “Show Hidden”.
Generate High-Quality Online Reviews
If you are subscribed to our LoyaltyLoop Promoter plan, your customers can be automatically encouraged to post a review to Google, Facebook, and other review sites during the feedback process. Since reviews can be posted by anyone who stumbles upon your review page, it is important to continually drive high quality reviews about your business, and there’s no higher quality review than one provided by your best customers.
Reviews are not just about the feel-good effect you feel when reading them or seeing those little golden stars. Reviews are a key component to your digital marketing strategy, particularly as it relates to improving your SEO. Just like the recipe of Coca Cola, Google keeps their search algorithms secret. However, Google uses Google My Business reviews as a component in their search algorithms and will assist in improving your local search results and SEO.
So how does LoyaltyLoop help you generate high quality online reviews?When a customer submits their survey response, your most satisfied customers (aka “Promoters”) are presented with a personalized ‘thank you’ page encouraging them to post their review on your chosen review sites. LoyaltyLoop can also automatically send a follow-up email 48-hours later reminding the customer to post their review if they have not done so. On both the ‘thank you’ page and follow-up email, your review sites are presented by the icons of the review site(s). When your customer clicks the icon, LoyaltyLoop lands them directly on your review page where they can post their review. To view the review sites LoyaltyLoop is presenting to your customers, click your Username then click Settings. On the Settings page click Review sites. You can easily enable or disable a review site from being presented. If you’d like to add a new review site, please reach out to Support and we’ll ensure it is configured correctly for you.
It is also important to understand the difference between a review and a testimonial. Simply put, reviews are comments about your business that get posted on review sites like Google and Facebook by your customers (or other users of the review site). Testimonials, on the other hand, are comments about your business that your customers have approved for you to use in your marketing, and hence you control if and when to publish them. Google, Facebook, and all other reputable review sites do not allow anyone other than a user of their site to post online reviews. And they typically allow their account holders to post only one (1) review on your review page. Any company telling you that they can automatically post reviews to your Google page is not telling you the truth. Steer clear of companies that make false promises like that.
Amplify Positive Feedback on Social Media
We all have those special customers who go above and beyond and provide highly emotional or compelling testimonials. Consider using the Testimonial Share feature of LoyaltyLoop to further promote these wonderful comments to your social media followers. Any “published” Testimonial can be shared using this feature, and sharing on social media is another great digital marketing strategy available to you to help strengthen your overall web presence. Whether you have followers on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, the share feature allows you to push the published testimonials to any one of dozens of social media sites where you have an account with followers. Here’s an example of how to share a published testimonial to your Facebook followers.
- Sign in to LoyaltyLoop
- Click Testimonials from the left main menu
- Set your filter to display all “Published” testimonials
- Find the published testimonial you wish to share, and click the Share icon on the far right
- On the ShareThis pop-up page, click the (…) button. Do not click the Facebook icon in the lower left of the pop-up as it may default to your personal Facebook page.
- Find and click on the Facebook link
- Once the “Post to Facebook” page loads, click “Share on your own Timeline” and select “Share on a Page You Manage” IMPORTANT: Many of us have personal Facebook pages, so make certain you follow this step to ensure you share your testimonial on your Facebook business page)
- Select the page you wish to share your testimonial on, include a caption to personalize the post and click “Post to Facebook” to complete your share
How to respond to negative online reviews?
While we all hope to receive only positive reviews on Google and Facebook, the reality is anyone can find your review pages and post a negative review. It is very unlikely you will receive a negative review from LoyaltyLoop since it encourages reviews from your Promoters by default, but you should still be armed with the knowledge of how to handle a negative online review.
First and foremost, do not ignore negative reviews online. Review sites like Google are public and leaving negative reviews unanswered can send the wrong message about your business to prospects. Our advice is to proactively address the negative review by replying in the forum (e.g. Google) with a short non-argumentative reply and take the discussion offline and private. Acknowledge the customer's concern in your reply, express your understanding, and let the customer know you will be contacting them directly via phone or email to personally address their issue. Always be positive, constructive, understanding, and professional. Do not get caught in the trap of engaging in a battle between you and your customer in a public place.
Google provides some good support documents regarding Google Reviews, and in particular some simple tips regarding replying to reviews. Remember to set up email alerts for reviews in your Google My Business account so you know when anyone posts a review. And remember to say thank you to customers who do post positive reviews online. This shows your appreciation of the customer's review and demonstrates to all that you’re paying attention.
Earn Recurring Profits - New Affiliate Program!
Would you like to build a recurring profit stream? Would you like to offer the benefits of SurveyAdvantage's LoyaltyLoop services to your customers without the overhead of maintaining and supporting the customers? SurveyAdvantage's new Affiliate Program will help you do just that!
The Affiliate Program allows you to offer SurveyAdvantage's LoyaltyLoop service to your customers at our regularly published prices and earn ongoing recurring commissions with little-to-no ongoing effort and expense. This is yet another way for you to benefit from your relationship with us and create added value for your customers. As an Affiliate, your only responsibility is to help your customers understand the value of LoyaltyLoop and direct them to sign-up via your SurveyAdvantage Affiliate Form. Since you're already enjoying our services, helping your customers understand the value should be easy. But you're not alone in the selling process. Should you need help with larger customers or more complicated sales situations, your SurveyAdvantage team is ready to help and give web demos.
The key ingredient to the Affiliate Program is your unique SurveyAdvantage Affiliate Form. This form should be placed on your website, and only those customers who sign-up to LoyaltyLoop via your form qualify you to earn Affiliate payments. Once your customer has signed-up, there is a clean hand-off to SurveyAdvantage to manage everything else from that point forward. We handle the service setup, any customizations, all training, phone and email support, billing, and everything else. You will earn a commission of 10% of the fees we collect for each customer who signs-up through your Affiliate Form - for as long as that customer is subscribed!