How To Manage and Display Customer Reviews On Any Website

February 6, 2020

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How To Add Customer Reviews To Your Website

Customer testimonials! Love em or sometimes hate em, when building a website for a client, or for your own small business, you may come across a scenario where the business has multiple reviews online that you'd like to feature on a website BUT they're all from disparate sources. How can you create a collective review or testimonial widget that pulls in the best feedback from multiple sources and easily aligns to your sites color scheme?

Hi, I'm Tom Connery of Ayni Media and I build websites for digital marketing agencies and small businesses on the Duda platform. What's duda? It's the secret web design platform agencies use and most of them don't want you to know about it. Initially built as a mobile-only solution, Duda morphed into a fully responsive website builder, added Ecwid for ecommerce, and then began to devour WordPress as a solution for small business websites. Today, Duda is also well suited to convert users from Squarespace, Wix, and other popular DIY website platforms.

Now, I've been building Duda websites since 2016 and just recently began using an addon service that, not only can it help collect customer feedback, but it also adds a layer of governance and will organize and display hand picked reviews on your website or anywhere you can embed div and script html.

The Solution... is Repuso!

Prefer a video version of this content? Watch on my YouTube channel instead!

You start out by connecting to channels that you'd like to monitor. Take for example, Facebook, Google, Thumbtack, and Yelp. Once you have setup the channels, Repuso will begin importing your current reviews where you can then either auto-select all 5-star reviews or hand pick which exact reviews you'd like to use for widgets. The Posts tab displays your review or listening inbox. From here, you can continually check or monitor channel feedback on a routine basis and manually approve feedback or comments you'd like to share. Why is this helpful? Well, not every positive comment comes in 5 star reviews. If you're monitoring Twitter for example, people may @mention you with something positive and if you've connected Twitter as one of your channels, then you can share that mention within a Repuso widget.

Once you've configured one or more social channels to display what you want and you have 'Approved' content ready to go, you then navigate over to the widget setup screen and begin designing your widget.

It's super easy!

At the time of this post you can currently create flash, floating, grid, inline, photoset, and badge widgets. Flash widgets are essentially floating boxes that cycle the reviews as they appear and disappear in the bottom left or right corner of your website. The floating widget is similar but permanent and stays present in either the bottom left or right as the user scrolls down the page. The grid widget is my favorite so far and it simply lets you choose how many rows and columns of reviews you'd like to display in a table form. It looks really good embedded into a live page and if you pair it up with a "Click here to leave a review" button above the grid it can inspire more customers to leave reviews which can sometimes be difficult for some small businesses. The inline widget is also nice to embed on a page or within a blog post and it cycles the reviews or feedback either automatically on a timed basis or by manually clicking the next or previous arrows. Lastly the photoset widget will let you display feedback with photos but I personally have not yet tried that widget.

Are you a Duda team or agency customer? If you'd like this custom blockquote widget, please let me know! - Tom C

Each widget's configuration area has three tabs to go through. The Setup tab will provide your embed code and preview what your widget will look like. If by chance your widget preview area is blank, you may have an issue with the channel configuration or you may not have any approved content so double check your channel configuration. I have seen a slight delay sometimes, right after you create a new channel so you also may need to give the app a minute or two to ensure the reviews are coming in and are populating. Again, all of that can be confirmed in the channel config.

The second tab is for the layout. Here you can set the widget as active or not, change fonts, colors, sizing, remove Repuso branding if you're on the premium plan, as well as a number of other attributes. There's even a custom CSS section if you need it.

In the third tab, Content, you can easily add a filter to your widget using tags. Tagging is a cool option because if you want to label specific mentions or reviews with a tag, you can then build a widget that only displays the reviews where those tags are being used. For example, if you are a dentist who sells a teeth whitening service and you have total of 20 online reviews - 6 of which are related to whitening - I'd label those 6 with a whitening tag in Repuso so I can build a widget that only shows whitening feedback because I want to use it on a specific whitening page or within the website where we're showcasing the whitening service.

Affordable Customer Review & Testimonial Widgets

Ok, I know what you're thinking. Tom! What are the services that Repuso currently works with and can import information from? CHECK OUT THIS LIST! Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Zendesk, Delighted, iTunes, Google Play, Google or Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Capterra, GetApp, G2, Thumbtack, Trustpilot, Yellow Pages, Airbnb, Healthgrades, Vrbo & HomeAway, Booking.com, GetYourGuide, Expedia, and Zillow. WOW! Umm, just a few….

Oh, and if you use Slack for collaboration, you can integrate Repuso to post to one of your Slack channels. This is cool because as new reviews or mentions hit the channel's inbox, new slack posts automatically come into you slack channel feed. It's a nice way to be in the know.

There's even more to Repuso that I won't cover in this video. You'll have to try it out for yourself to see how it can benefit your business or your customer.

And now the big question! What does it cost? Repuso has three tiers currently. FREE, $6 per month, and $12 per month. The FREE tier is perfect if you want to kick the tires. They allow you to share up to 10 reviews from one channel leveraging one widget. At the $6 per month tier you can use the collect routing feature, jump up to 2 channel monitoring and can build 2 widgets. At the $12 per month tier it's basically unlimited everything and you can even add additional users to help you manage posts, setup channels, etc. The catch for agencies at the $12 per month tier is that each new customer account you add will cost $2 per month. To me that's not bad though. $144 per year to leverage the service for your own business and then an added cost of $24 per year for each customer you want to sell review monitoring and custom review widgets to? I think it works.

Signup For FREE Today!

Monitor Your Business Reviews With Collect Routing

Wait? Review monitoring? You may have heard me say the term 'collect routing'. What's collect routing? If you're on a paid tier, Repuso, will provide a unique url you can add to your email signature or send to customers to request feedback, or add a 'leave a review' button on your website. That specific feedback gets routed to a webpage where the reviewer is offered two choices. Did they have a good experience or could it be better? The press either the green button or the yellow button. If it was good, the next screen will prompt them to leave a review on the channel of your choosing. If it could be better, the reviewer is taken to a form where they put the number of stars, leave a comment, and their name. This adds a basic level of control or governance in your review process and allows you to follow up with a less than thrilleds client to see if you can win them over and it prevents their not quite 5 star review from being published.

To me, this is a lot of value that most small businesses or agencies would appreciate which is WHY I had to make a video about it. It serves both of my audiences very well.

You may have guessed it and YES, I am an affiliate for Repuso and my unique signup link is used on this page if you'd like to try it out. Of course, for any of you who do signup using my link and subscribe to the service, I will receive a small commission. One of the key reasons small YouTubers or bloggers create content is to share information, to educate, to inform, and to help you discover and leverage new products and services that can benefit you (or your customer). Or at least, that's the way I'm doing affiliate marketing. I hope Repuso will be just as valuable to you as its been for me and my customers. Thank you!

Whether you're building a website for yourself or you build them for many agencies or small businesses, Repuso provides an excellent service for organizing and showcasing customer reviews.

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duda website builder youtube channel thomas connery expert

Hi, I'm Tom! I help agencies and small businesses with Duda website design, local SEO, and support. On the Ayni Media blog, I create content that helps people discover Duda as well as other website and digital marketing services. Need help with Duda? Hire a Duda Expert today.

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