ReviewScale provides an online service which helps in improving your online reputation and generating leads. This is done by providing online tools to capture your customer’s feedback through reviews, ratings, and testimonial forms and using that to make potential customers take action by filling out a Contact Form or clicking on a Buy link.

Its simple, More trust leads to better Lead generation.

When you join, you can start creating a Review form for free with an easy to use editor. Using the editor you can set weightages to your questions. This will help you highlight the strengths which your customer’s can rate. An automatic score is calculated across your reviews.

You can publish the captured reviews on to your website or blog or even email the url of the forms to your customers and clients.

If you want to collect reviews and dont want others to see this, you can set your reviews or testimonial page to private. This can be used to collect feedback or for making sure that you have enough reviews collected before you make it open for the public to see.

A landing page will be automatically created for you whose information will be emailed to you shortly after you register.

Through ReviewScale’s online product you can do the following :

For Businesses

Increase trust levels with potential clients – Your reviews (if required) can be verified by a third party. This helps in increasing trust with new customers. Your reviews and testimonials willnot be ‘deleted’ but they can be hidden. This is transparent to visitors and helps in the process of improving your online reputation.

More reach – If you use our landing page, we will list the page on one of our main pages. Search engines will pick these links up and enhance your search rankings.

Increase sales – the more powerful and relevant your reviews and testimonials are, the more it will help in conversion rates on your website. Potential clients will have a reason to contact you through a contact form.

Collect reviews easily – The reviewers of your services or products donot have to register to submit a review and hence makes the reviewing process easier.

Continuous improvement – Feedback forms can be used to collect data about certain products or services and to improve your offerings.

For Individuals

Employee reviews – You can create you own employee review form and send it to your manager by email. Your managers can review your strengths and you can publish the reviews on a site and provide a link to the page from social networking sites (eg : LinkedIn)

A meaningful exchange (in context of a business) is when one party exchanges a product or service for money or another product or service.

Identity – The identity of your business or your professional self image.

Reputation – Is an extension of your business identity. This is distinct from your image and is a social meta-evaluation (read more about Reputation on Wikipedia)

Interaction - Is the experience and communication during the exchange

Trust – Trust develops when you have some level of interaction and when the exchange satisfies some of your criterias

Now lets go straight to the bottom line

Better Interactions = More Trust = More Reputation

That is if more people know about your good reputation, the more powerful your marketing is which leads to more sales

Recently when we (myself, my wife and my kid) were back in the evening from a 1 day trip to a beach in Ontario, we had no intention of making dinner. We stepped into our neighbourhood pizza shop to buy a couple of slices of pizza. We bought 3 veggie slices for $6 inclusive of taxes! ( cheaper than the other pizza franchises Pizza Pizza and Pizza Nova).

We went back to the car to have the slices. As I finished the first slice, I noticed something. The serving paper on which they served the Pizza had this written on it – “Your next slice might be FREE, fill this out, it will only take you a minute“. There was a form with first name, last name, phone number (optional), email address (required) on this serving paper. Even though the grease did not help the writing, I filled it out (since I love free pizza and free beer) and handed it over to the lady (the Mom) behind the counter. She dropped that into a cardboard box on the counter. Assuming that I might get a free slice then and there, I was kind of disappointed. She turned around and said – “Check your emails from us, we will give you free pizza soon“.

Back at the car, I thought to myself – Interesting, permission marketing at its best.

Lesson #1 – Build email campaign lists creatively. Use baits which customers will fall for.

Couple of days passed by and surely there was an email from Pertosa Pizza Place with the subject – “Free Pizza – Hurry only valid today – 24 Pizzas left – Made at 11am today”. The email body had the type and sizes of the pizza. After my work that day, I headed over for my free slice. I said to myself there are only 24 left and I might be too late for this. I had a printout of the email with me, you know in case I need to argue with the lady about my free pizza. I stepped in to the place, walked straight to the counter and started saying – “I got an email…” . Before I completed my sentence she asked – ” Do you want veggie, three toppings or two topping with pepperoni?”. I went for my veggie and planted the commitment for my next pizza purchase.

Lesson #2 – Always deliver what you promise, otherwise don’t promise

I waited for another customer to leave and to ask the lady why she was giving pizza free. A man came over ( I assumed this was her husband) in his apron and answered this. He said that there were certain corporate orders, returns or bad planning from their part which would result in surplus pizza on a particular day. He said these usually happened in the middle of the week during the day. He said he never gives a pizza which is more than 3 hours old to paying customers. However, if it gets older he would give it free. That is why he used emails to give it free.

Lesson #3 – Turn business disadvantages (excess inventory) into marketing advantages

This all happened two weeks ago. I haven’t received another email from them yet. But one thing for sure

I am still eagerly waiting for my next slice of Pizza and my next lesson in marketing from a local pizza shop.