GEEK QUEEN
Blogging to address a bad review.
Jenny Marsden • Feb 11, 2020
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A Case Study - Use Your BloG To Recover From a Bad Review
Blogging is not just for yoga, foodies, travel and "how to blog" websites. It is possibly one of the most powerful tools in your website arsenal and so many businesses are just not making the most of it. Apart from using a blog to drive traffic to your website and of course for keeping Google happy, you can use your blog for so many more things...
What is a blog?
I'm going to explain a blog in a way in which it relates to this article. We all know what a blog is, however consider that a blog is a way of adding content to your website that
- doesn't clog up your menu,
- allows you to go slightly off script
- shows your business personality
- allows you to capture visitors you otherwise might not
- keeps google happy that you are always working toward a better website
- is an opportunity to reinforce your revenue, conversions, branding and
- a place where you can insert very specific calls to action without looking spammy
- it is also a place where you can reinforce your company values and
- somewhere that you can address client concerns easily.
How Susan turned A Bad Review Into Raving Fans Using Her blog
Let me give you an example of what I mean here. This is actually a client of mine however I've changed her name for the purpose of the story. Susan is no longer running her business as she has moved to Canada with her husband and children and is now running kids craft classes!
Lets hear the story:
Susan ran a very successful wedding invitation business. She did hand drawn calligraphy and had a very specialized luxury brand customer base. Susan had embraced a blog to help her drive traffic to her website but she wanted to be very clear about her pricing. In the beginning she had a few visitors take the action (awesome!) and call her but they were stunned at her prices and one even then left her a scathing review about how expensive she was. A review from a person who hadn't even used her services.
Susan was devastated and immediately noticed the effect on her business. We put our heads together on how to try to repair the damage and decided that Susan would write a few blog posts about how her services weren't for everyone and how you could still use her at a more cost effective rate. We worked out some packages that didn't include everything that Susan had offered to date.
For example:
Up to that point, Susan's wedding package pricing was based around guest numbers. Obviously being hand written invitations, it was based around a per invite cost. Susan's product was actually really incredible when you heard what the full package included, however when clients called and asked a ball park figure, Susan's per invite cost seemed exorbitant. What she wasn't imparting however was that it wasn't just her writing someone's name on an invitation it was so much more than that.
Susan's package included:
- A custom drawn logo for the bride and groom (usually based around their initials, the date and any other relevant factors).
- Hand written Invitations,
- response cards,
- envelopes,
- return envelopes,
- table plans,
- thank you cards &
- "sorry you couldn't make it" cards. The "sorry you can't make it" cards were actually Susan's idea. She included the same number of cards and envelopes of the people who declined, with a lovely photo insert card inside that the bride and groom could send to those that couldn't make it. It was SO popular! Imagine getting a photo the week after a wedding your couldn't attend with a "You were missed" message inside. What a fabulous idea!
- the pack also included the postage for the invitations. Susan could get a heavily discounted deal for volume post and passed some of that on to her clients.
- She even included a lovely video of her writing the invites for the bride and groom to include in their wedding video.
Talk about over delivering!
Once you are aware of what the pack included, it was good value. It wasn't cheap for sure but Susan was converting about 75% of inquiries just by sending out a link to a blog page that showed exactly what was included and how she went about creating the invites. Her embeded YouTube video was getting a massive 93% click through rate to her ordering enquiry page. That is the percentage that was visiting the page from the email link. So of the people that enquired, and of those that clicked to watch the "how I do it" video, 93% of those also clicked the "enquire now" option at the end of her YouTube video.
If you haven't gathered - Susan was my hero. What that woman thought of and committed to was outstanding.
Why the info on the blog page and not just on her website?
From the start, Susan's goal was to sell primarily her full package option. By systematizing her process she was able to create all the little extra's (return envelopes, thank you cards etc) in a really time constructive way so those extra's was the "money for jam" component of her business. She kept herself busy with her current website traffic and referrals and after thinking everything through, realised that if she was to offer smaller more cost effective packages she probably wasn't going to be able to do that work herself.
Susan had a few colleagues who she knew she could call on but was concerned about the lack of time she could dedicate to supervising the work. Knowing this, she made the decision to offer these lesser packages via her blog only and not on the main pages of her website. Her line of thinking was that direct visitors to her website or those coming from her tried and tested advertising channels would have some idea of what her services cost so she wanted to direct them to her highest level package. Smart thinking. While they could find the other services if they searched her website it was important to Susan that the full package stay front and center.
In my mind, this decision was genius and I have no trouble telling you that I've recommended this in varying forms over and over and over again to clients. It's like a soft launch. If it works great, if it doesn't you haven't diluted your other products.
Susan wrote 2 blog posts herself offering the smaller more cost effective packages, and then engaged a copy writer to write the post that addressed the bad review. Susan was adamant that they call it "I Caused My Own Bad Review" and took full responsibility for not explaining exactly what her package included and how her skipping straight to the money question scared the living daylights out of a potential client. She apologized (I have to take credit here and tell you that was my suggestion - you all know how much I love saying "sorry my bad") and made sure that everyone knew that she felt personally responsible and had learned a valuable lesson.
We published the first two posts a week apart and they did get some traction for sure. 1 or 2 bookings from memory however they were clients Susan was pretty sure she could have gotten over the line anyway. Then we hit publish on the bad review post.
Now I have to mention that Susan pulled out every weapon in her marketing arsenal here and made sure that post was everywhere. She shared it to facebook, instagram & twitter and sent an email to ALL her previous brides asking if they could share it via their own social channels. Within a week it had been shared over 4500 times. I wish it was still up so I could show you but Susan using her existing clients to help her get the message out was an outstanding achievement. Her email subject line was "HELP - I messed up!" and a whopping 63% of subscribers opened it within the first 5 hours.
Her real stroke of genius was to very subtly include a link for her past brides to post their own review on Google My Business. Within 3 hours that bad review was nowhere to be found. It ended up buried under all these 5 star reviews.
The Outcome
OMG - people love drama!
The response was swift and immediate. The term "viral" occurs to me now even though this was years ago and before that term was coined.
I promised Susan I wouldn't tell you just how many bookings she got from that horrible review, but I am going to tell you that she immediately hired another full time calligrapher and also hired a PA to handle all the business stuff for about 30 hours a week. I do know that another part time calligrapher followed and when she moved to Canada a few years later, Susan sold her business for a very nice chunk of change.
All from a bad review!
things to consider:
The success of Susan's response to this incident was very dependent on a few things.
- Susan had a very generous email list of all her past brides which was invaluable in getting the message out there. I'm talking over 700 women.
- She thought outside the box about how to address it. Initially she wanted to offer the offended bride a completely free package but after talking it over with her husband and friends came to the conclusion that all clients aren't good clients and she didn't want to start a business relationship on less than great terms. I have so much admiration for her for this. If someone is going to write you a nasty review when their only interaction with you is a phone call about price - not a client I would probably take on either.
- The wedding industry is HUGE and has massive engagement. If she was in any other industry I'm not sure she would have had even 10% of the success this achieved.
- Google was not impressed with the amount of reviews Susan's business received in such a short space of time and we had to show them the entire blog/email/sharing thread before they would release a lot of those reviews. Google is always suspicious of your GMB getting a lot of reviews in a short space of time so in hindsight, we should have somehow split up the email with the review link and sent out a staggered campaign probably.
A footnote:
Feb 2020 - I messaged Susan to tell her I was finally writing this blog post and she said that she found out only last year that unbeknownst to her, the bad review woman had actually ended up purchasing Susan's full package about a year after the event. I loved that!
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About Jenny
I started my IT career in Database Administration and .Net coding. While I LOVED that work, I realised very quickly that I also wanted a life. To be a top end coder or DB Admin, you have to comit your downtime to constantly learning and evolving and while that is also something I love, I wanted it to be my work and not my life. So I morphed my love of design with my knowledge of all things SEO and moved into building small business websites.
Why small business websites? I'm a small business myself and I know how hard it can be so I wanted to give my clients a great service, with an approachable point of contact where no question was a "stupid question".
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