In this day and age where the vast majority of customers know you online, being able to display a wide selection of reviews from satisfied customers through your website can help you to build greater trust among those hesitant people who have not yet booked your photography services.

Including customer reviews on a photography website can be a very good strategy to help you demonstrate the quality of your work. But the truth is that not everything goes when it comes to including testimonials on a website. In order for your customer reviews to really help other people make a decision, it is important that you learn how to ask your customers for them correctly and that is exactly what we are going to explain to you today in this article on how to collect good customer reviews.

Thanks to customer reviews, people who visit your photography website will be able to discover your approachable side and your involvement in your work.

Why is it important for you to collect customer reviews?

As we said in this article, adding customer reviews on your website will help you to show other future customers the degree of satisfaction of people who have already had a photo shoot with you.

But customer reviews not only serve to improve the credibility of your business, they can also help you:

• Improve the positioning of your photography website. Search engines value customer reviews positively and if you include testimonials on your website, it can help you to improve your ranking on the Internet.

• Increase conversions on your website. Conversions are the number of users who visit your website and end up taking an action, for example, contacting you for a photo shoot. It is proven that adding testimonials to a website helps to improve the conversion rate of the page.

• Help you understand your customers. On a personal level, it can be very useful for you to hear from your customers how you work and how they feel about the way you treat them.

As you can see, adding customer reviews to your website only has benefits, but do you really know how to collect good customer reviews?

Steps to gather the best reviews from satisfied customers

To get a good amount of feedback from your customers, you have several options: ask each of the people who pass through your studio individually or have a tool that allows you to collect and display on your website the testimonials of your customers.

If you opt for the first option, we advise you to plan the moment when you are going to ask for the testimonial in advance so that the evaluation received from your clients is as good as possible. Below we are going to share with you a series of previous steps that will help you to better plan the request for recommendations.

Identify the right time to request testimony

If you are a photographer, the time to ask a client for a testimonial is very clear. After they have viewed their photographs, although depending on the type of photo shoot you do and the way you work, this moment may be slightly modified.

If, for example, you are a wedding photographer and in addition to giving them all the photos of the day of the ceremony 1 month after the wedding date, you offer them an advance with the 20 best photos before they leave for their honeymoon. The most ideal time for you may be when you give them those first 20 photos. The couple will still be excited about their wedding and seeing the first images will excite them much more than when they have had a little more time to view the rest of the photos.

If you do studio shoots, even if you later send your clients the photos of their shoot through a client gallery, you can take advantage of having them in person to show them a small part of the work and encourage them to give you their testimonial at that moment.

And if your style is more artistic and the post-production process is essential for them to understand your way of working, the best time to ask for client feedback is when they have finished viewing their images through their private gallery.

If you are in the business of selling images over the Internet, where customer contact is almost non-existent, you can encourage customers to leave a rating right after they receive the notice that they can download the pictures.

Create a list of questions to get a good review

Whether you are going to ask your own studio for reviews or your clients are going to have the option of emailing you their reviews, leaving a few simple questions prepared can help both you and your clients to get a better assessment of your work. Here are some of the questions you can ask them:

• How did you hear about us? This first question, rather than serving as a testimonial, will help you to find out through which channel more clients come to you and is a very good way to break the ice.

• What did you like most about working with us? This is where your clients will be able to explain what they liked most about you.

• And what’s the least? It is always good to know what is the weak point of our work and even if you don’t include this part in your own testimony, it will help you to improve as a photographer.

• Would you recommend us to others and why? This is another question that, if you get a positive answer you can use as a review and if it is negative it will help you to measure what you are not doing well in your photography business.

With these 4 simple questions you can get acceptable customer reviews and very useful for future undecided customers.

Select a good tool to help you gather customer feedback

When sending this short list of questions to the client, you can also use various methods. Here are some of them:

• The quickest and least time-consuming option for you is to send a Word document to the client with the list of questions. This option, although quick, is a little more informal than the others.

• If you want to make this process a little more professional, you can use free tools that you can find on the Internet that will allow you to conduct online surveys, such as encuesta.com, but there are many more. To use this option you will have to spend a little more time learning how to create the survey and if you limit yourself to the free service, you will not be able to use many of the options.

• If you use an email sending service like MailChimp, you can also create a form that will be sent automatically to a specific list of clients. This type of alternative is very good for photographers who have their subscriber lists well organised, if this is not your case, it is better to use another option.

• Through your Arcadina website, you can create a landing page (hidden page in your main menu) and add a form with the questions already written, so that when you consider it appropriate, you can send the customer in question the URL address of your landing page to collect their testimony.

In the following article we explain how to create a Landing Page.

>> Arcadina Help. How to create a Landing Page

Learn how to motivate clients to give you testimonials about your work

To begin with, the vast majority of your customers are not going to be very willing to give you their opinion even if they have been really satisfied with your service. You have to “catch them in the heat of the moment” to get them to write about their experience working with you.

If you want to increase the number of clients who finally leave you a review, it is important that you motivate them to do so and a very good way is to offer them something in return. It can be a discount for a next session, an extra photograph or an enlargement of the photo of their choice. We assure you that if there is a reward involved, the number of opinions you will receive from your clients will be much higher.

Another recommendation we give you is that when you tell them that you want them to tell you about their experience working with you, make them see that their testimony is important to you and that with a small gesture they can help you to improve your business and the services you offer.

How to use customer reviews to improve your photography business?

Once customers have already sent you their feedback, it is important that you know how and where to use it.

First and foremost, respond to your customers by thanking them for their collaboration. And if a review is negative, try to see why they were not happy and, if you can, try to rectify it.

It is always advisable to show customers’ opinions as they are, but sometimes it is necessary to make some small adjustments such as correcting spelling mistakes, eliminating badly worded expressions or phrases that are repeated too many times.

Once you have your testimonials ready, you can use them in different parts of your website, for example:

• Services page. If you do several photo shoots, ideally, after explaining each one, you should add several testimonials from clients who have hired that very service.

• Bio. If you get some reviews that focus on your good manner or your way of being, you can add them to your “about me” page.

• Emails. If a client asks you for more information about a photo shoot and you reply to them via email, you can include reviews from satisfied customers before you say goodbye and after you have answered their questions.

• Dossier. The same goes for your dossiers, once you have shown them your rates and services, you can add several testimonials from your clients.

On Arcadina’s websites you can collect your own customer reviews

demovenezia.arcadina.com  

In case you didn’t know, in Arcadina you have available a page of opinions where you will be able to collect the reviews of your customers. It is a section that you can display both on your website and in the business section (customer area and online shop) if you wish, where anyone who wants to can write a review about your service.

Once it has been sent, you will receive a private message and you will be able to publish the review on your website and reply to the customer.

Examples of photographers using customer reviews on their websites

And so that you can see how this feedback page can look and the confidence it can give to your visitors, we are going to share with you some examples of fellow photographers who have this testimonial page very present on their websites.

1# Arturo Carrasco

Arturo Carrasco’s website is dedicated to show his most amazing portraits and some of his fashion, book, boudoir, catwalk, etc. reports.

This photographer with a studio in a municipality of Guadalajara has added to his website a section of Opinions where clients and even future clients who follow his work have left a comment.

2# Francisco Ruano

Francisco Ruano is a nature and landscape photographer who shows an extensive gallery of images on his website and tells his story of how he became interested in this type of photography.

On his website, as well as showing some of his images, telling his story and presenting some of the exhibitions in which he has participated, Francisco has set up a section called Guestbook where a large number of followers have written a very good review of this photographer.

franciscoruano.com

3# Kids & Photos Rubén san Nicolás

On Rubén san Nicolás’ Kids & Photos website you can find all kinds of children’s, newborn and lifestyle photography and some of his other work.

A very good way to find out if this Barcelona photography studio has good references is to go to their Reviews page where some of the clients are already writing a review.

rubensannicolas.com

4# El Creador de Recuerdos

Pablo is the Sevillian photographer behind El Creador de Recuerdos and is dedicated to wedding sessions, children’s reportage and portraits in his photography studio.

On his website, Pablo has incorporated an Experiences page where he encourages clients to tell about their experience working with him. If you look at some of the comments there is a link to the photo report of each client. A very good way to back up his words.

elcreadorderecuerdos.com

Use customer reviews to improve your online reputation

Using customer reviews on the web is always a very good decision, either by asking your customers personally for a review or by encouraging them to write on your review page, this kind of feedback will give other visitors a better image of your way of working and professionalism.

This time we are going to share with you the interview with Maru Serra, a great photographer and friend of Arcadina.

>> “The best option for photographers who want to move forward”, Maru Serra

If you want to read the testimonials of some colleagues who have left us about our service, in the following link you will be able to see some of them.

Testimonials from Arcadina customers

And if you want to leave us yours, you can do so by clicking here.

Finally, we would like to know what method do you use to solicit customer reviews? We’d love to read your ideas in the comments.

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