Collecting Reviews: Best Practices?

I think you need to find a way to motivate your customers to give a review by giving them something. People are motivated by emotions so by giving them something in advance you have already created a positive emotion and they are sure to give you a positive review if you ask them. Using your 50% take a survey by calling them and telling them that you want to give your customers or clients the best service so you want to know about their experience with your service. After the conversation thank them for their time and give them a free gift and ending by saying, "...by the way, if you have time we would really appreciate if you could leave us a review, it would do so much for our business."... then give them the site you use for your reviews. If you come across customers that were not satisfied with your serice assure them of a better service or compensate them with something free like if it is a restuarant you could offer them a free meal.etc.

Since you have lots of review sites you could decide the number of reviews you want per site and work on sending your clients to one review site at a time until you reach your target and then move to the next site until you have enough reviews on each site or you can build your review sites at the same time by sending each of your customers to a different review site each time.

If you want to motivate your customers to leave feedback you can offer them some gifts/discounts for future orders. Or contact with customers to find out their impressions of working with you and then ask to give a review.

Getting a good review highly depends on what you offer.

If you want to receive a good review of your product of course you have to create a good quality product.

If this is for local business, search for Whitespark and find their review request generator.
Enter the NAP and you'll get a PDF that can be printed or emailed.

Recently, reviewers on Google no longer need a Google+ account to post a review; only a G email address which will make reviews much easier to get.

Whitespark is a good suggestion. Just look for their review request generator.

It's easy to use, just follow the instructions there.

Don't forget that you also have to provide a high quality product or service to get a good review from the consumer.

Thanks for the great insights,

I like the idea of giving something in return like future credits for something - as I said we are in digital marketing (primarily web development, on-page SEO and PPC) - but I have no idea what! What's everyone else doing?

* We're definitely not a local business - more like NY entire time zone

Future credits, coupons & discounts work great because you also continue to build on, and strengthen, your relationships with your customers. The more they work with you the more they trust you and your company.

Win/Win - They leave reviews across multiple sites + you strengthen your relationships resulting in more word of mouth referrals and repeat business.

Hi Anna, I would work with one review template and I would use one website for reviews only, so reviews do not end up on all those different sites. It is much more powerful if they are all together. You could always link back to the review site from another of your websites. Best, Christina