How To Get 5 Star Reviews Later

You may have wondered how to get 5 Star Reviews later.

Let's say you once had a successful and thriving business but never leveraged 5 star review opportunities. Like myself, you may have had an unexpected setback, and are now are attempting to restart the business again. 

Let’s paint a scenario that you may be surprised how common it is. Here it goes....

You once ran a service business where you were always very busy pleasing many happy customers. Those customers were loyal to your company, and adored your product. In fact, for many years long they consistently raved to you and others about how great your company and your product was.

However, if you were once like me, you may have been kicking yourself how stupid you were.

How absolutely idiotic you were for never leveraging those raving comments into 5 star review testimonials. Sure, you have their adulations strewn all over scattered content within Thank You Letters, emails, and old social media postings. 

Even if you have never faced a disaster of unheard of proportions like myself causing you to take a long hiatus away from a once successful business, you can still get 5 Star reviews later.

As long as you've had past happy customers, have a good plan, and a driven go-getter mentality to achieve you can always reconnect with old customers.

As long as you are breathing you can always reconnect with many of your past happy customers and figure out how to get 5-Star Reviews later.

There are affiliate links within this post. What this means is that if you decide to purchase anything through one of my links, I'll be rewarded with a small commission at absolutely no extra cost to you. This small commission helps me run and maintain my website.

Our Survival Instinct

It is truly amazing how adaptable we as human beings can be when we are faced with overcoming daunting challenges and overbearing obstacles. I believe WE all have this gene within our DNA.

The human instinct to survive and thrive when subjected to overwhelming and devastating circumstances is ubiquitous.

If you read my previous post “Living with Focal Hand Dystonia” about how my bout with focal hand dystonia and its debilitating muscular affects has changed my life and led me to my current state, you also will know that my coping with the five stages of grief and loss has led me to acceptance of a new status quo.

What does this all have to do with booking a band for a wedding or a live concert venue for Kaju’s Off the Hook, NYC’s Most Exciting party band- or any other private event?

In case you still have not read or would like to re-read my related article Living with Focal Hand Dystonia you can read it here. ​

How To Get 5 Star Reviews Later: Re-establishing Connections

Fast forward to near the present day.

Kaju’s Off the Hook decided to embark on a complete relaunch by broadening its marketing efforts toward booking NEW high level private events after such a very long hiatus.

As previously mentioned, over the past 13 years, Kaju’s Off the Hook had performed over 1100+ shows, including over 300 private events.

Some more good news: of those 300+ private events, we attained a high percentage back log of very satisfied customers, and within that happy customer group there is an smaller sub-group of “overjoyed” happy customers who had given us very impressive written testimonials that qualify as 5 star reviews.

However, the cold reality was that essentially we had to start over.

Now here is the bad news. Although we accrued and stored so many great written testimonials from our past clients, back in the day for whatever reason I never marketed the band well enough consistently nor substantially leveraged these client’s testimonials by converting them into online reviews.

Why Reviews?

Save less frequent and reliable referrals from previous satisfied customers and friends, creating outstanding online REVIEWS is the most essential factor component in driving the private live entertainment business.

In order for Kaju’s Off the Hook to comeback all the way and return to its highest form of money-making potential, I realized it was absolutely imperative that we reconnect to our erstwhile “overjoyed” customers in order to find new happy paying ones.

And get them to write 5 star reviews.

I also realized that we could not rely on SEO that drives traffic alone to our band website to drive conversions to our business. This is not the primary predetermining factor that will increase business in high ticket service industries such as ours. Nor has this ever been one through my experience.

And historically this has never proven to be a reliable factor to drive conversions. For the high-end entertainment business model.

This is, and remains to be a “touchy feely” business. Good old word of mouth, seeing the band perform live in person, handing out business cards, and direct referrals by mutual trusted sources is still the BEST way to attract and get new business in this industry.

Traffic to the website is great validation and support of the band service, but it rarely will make conversions solely by itself or of its own merit. It serves more as a “lead generator” and in a secondary capacity to provide background information of the band service, videos, recordings, performance dates, and song lists.

Therefore, the key in our business was connecting with the customer in-person to make the sale. This was first established through establishing communication by way of the contact form or by an email catcher in order to establish initial contact to make a one-on-one appointment.

Once mutual trust was established, repeat business could easily be conducted over the phone or online, but the most effective way and BEST way I’ve found over the years to create the initial relationship of mutual trust with new clients is by setting up a one-on-one meeting in person.

Other than good of fashion word of mouth, what most potently drives first contact are great online band reviews.

How To Get 5 Star Reviews Later: The Online Review Process

So the tactic now was to locate and contact as many of our past "overjoyed happy customers" as possible who have given us their past written testimonials, and to receive their permission to write an online review on all the major directories most relevant to our business such as Yelp, The Knot, The Wedding Wire, Angie’s List, etc.

To accomplish this and to make the process as easy as possible for these past wonderful overjoyed clients, I would provide an online Review Request Letter to them via email which will include a friendly re-introduction, their outstanding past written testimonial, and links to the major relevant directories we seek reviews for.

Personally, I am still old school; so I would rather proceed to make the initial re-contact this way via email and via direct phone contact to avoid using any social media unless necessary for now as in this manner my re-introduction will provide a greater “personal touch.”

Within the review request letter I would then instruct that they copy and paste their past 5-star written testimonial into the “Write a Review” section of each major directory by way of the access link provided in the letter.

And of course, ask that they check off “5-star review” in the directory

In such a competitive environment as wedding bands and live party bands for hire, I felt the most powerful, most potent, and ONLY way to attract new business would be accomplished by having ONLY 5-star reviews on ALL the search engines and major directories which were most relevant and attractive to the business.

Taking the “Off the Hook” Challenge

So here is the “Off the Hook” challenge I was now faced with:

To complicate and add stress to this already tedious issue, most of these same “overjoyed “ happy customers were from private events and weddings we performed anywhere from 5 to 13 years ago.

Task 1: Gathering All the Information…OMG!

My first challenge was now locating and gathering all of these happy and overjoyed customers email addresses and phone numbers. Oh, lucky me, or shall I say, “Woe is me!”

Way back in those days, unfortunately I ran a very brick and mortar type of business; none of my records i.e. customer booking contracts, or records of customer’s events and testimonials were ever automated.

Everything was done on paper.

Since I never properly organized our client names or email addresses alphabetically or in any other order on one spreadsheet or even in one place, you can only imagine what kind of ordeal it was in finding all the information this had become!

This now would require me to rummage for many hours through mountains of paper contract agreements, old emails on different servers, a myriad of different spreadsheet and Microsoft Word files, various indexes, and even band journals and appointment books to gather all of this information

When you’ve been around long enough and never kept records the proper way, this was the price you pay. Fortunately, I had kept all past paper contracts on file in brown boxes and not deleted any of our band emails since 2004! I was a bit of a pack rat that way. That is one trait that has served me well.

No sense crying about it. Better suck it up and get to work!

Task 2: Organizing All the Information

After nearly 15 hours of rummaging through past paper contracts, written testimonials on paper, various spreadsheets, and through nearly 25,000 emails I now found ALL the past information I need. Yay!

By individually inspecting every one, I had now located the best testimonials, identified them with each past client who wrote them, gathered all necessary client’s contact information, and transferred them in writing all by consolidating them onto one spreadsheet.

Task 3: Drafting the Review Request Letter

I was now prepared to draft my official “Review Request Letter” which I would later email.

Okay, that was fast! The official Review Request Letter has now been drafted!

And after one additional hour of proof reading and corrections, the final official Review Request Letter now has been written as is in complete form.

One additional ½ hour of checking formatting changes was needed when transferring from word text file to the email. Additionally, each separate client name, past venue location, and written testimonial was needed to be copied to each corresponding individual client email.

My first client email with Review Request Letter was now in the body of the email. I had further proofread one final time for errors in spelling and syntax and I was now satisfied with the letter, The final product was now complete.

All looked good to send.   I was now ready!

How To Get 5 Star Reviews Later: My Official Review Request Letter

In a new upcoming post, I will show you the actual draft of the 5-Star review letter I composed that brought me several 5-star reviews later.

Please feel free to use this Review Request Letter when posted as a template for your own business needs.

Hope this post has given you some clear insight of how to get 5 Star Reviews later. It’s all about reconnecting with past overjoyed customers. If you were not organized (like me) it could take a lot of work, but given no business vs. resurrecting a once great business, it is SO worth it.

Once again, if you still have not read my other related blog post “Living with Focal Hand Dystonia” click here on this link to read that post. The 5 Stages of Grief and Loss.

Please feel free to leave your comments below.

Thanks for reading!