Do QR Codes Help You Get More Google Reviews?

TL;DR 

• QR codes lead to a 25% increase in reviews left. 
• Drumroll NFC tap cards championed by the manager alone lead to a 300% increase in 5 star reviews. 
• Drumroll NFC tap cards used by all employees lead to a 700% increase in 5 star reviews.

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As a local business owner, you have been told over and over again how much google reviews matter. It’s something that you may be sick of hearing, but unfortunately, they still significantly impact two things

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1. How well your google business profile ranks on google locally for a myriad of search terms. 
2. Whether or not potential customers choose your business over your competitors. 

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In this post, we’ll discuss a recent case study we performed between two local restaurants both trying to boost their reviews. One used QR codes, and the other used our employee driven Drumroll cards. 

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Before we get into the results of the case study, let’s briefly discuss the importance of reviews and why you as a small business owner need to make sure it’s not just included, but highly prioritized in your marketing strategy.

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Many think that once you rank #1 on google, you’re set. But that’s just not true. It used to be, but isn’t any more. Back in 2014, google began introducing the map pack above regular SERP’s on more and more search results. 

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The reason? Data. Google observed a high percentage of searchers beginning to look for restaurants and other local businesses within the google maps platform. Why? Because google maps showed how many reviews the business had, their overall star rating, their address, hours of operation, and many other quick and important pieces of information searchers were using to determine where they were going to take their business. 

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What does this mean for you? It means you first need to make sure your google business profile is optimized and contains accurate information relating to your business. You may have heard of the acronym NAP. It stands for Name, Address & Phone Number. You NEED to make sure this information is not only consistent between your GBP and your website, but that this information is accurate across the entire internet. So, if that isn’t currently the case, get started on updating your NAP across the internet. 

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Now, let’s discuss the case study our team at Drumroll Reviews & Referrals conducted. We recently signed on a long standing Mexican restaurant which had 750 reviews when we started with them. Many of their negative reviews were tied to an automatic tipping system they had in-place during Covid to try and help keep the restaurant open and profitable. Customers did not like it, but it was unfortunately needed to keep it alive and well during that hard time. 

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Drumroll is focused heavily on the daily interactions you and your employees have with your customers and taking advantage of those positive interactions to ask for reviews and private feedback with the Drurmoll NFC Tap Cards. There were hesitations however around putting the cards in employees hands as the restaurant owner did not want to “bother” his diners, but still wanted to try and find a way for them to leave reviews.

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In an effort to respect his concerns while still trying to find a way to garner more reviews than they previously were getting, we decided to print Drumroll cards that said, “Our team is compensated for the reviews we get, please leave us a review!” and place them next to every single table, in the bathrooms, and by the napkins. The hypothesis was that if diners saw that the employees were recognized and rewarded for the reviews they got, they’d be more likely to leave a review. 

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We tested this for 4 weeks and saw negligible differences. It was around a 25% increase in the number of reviews left (10 a month) compared to how many were being left before (7 a month).

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With these findings, I was able to talk the business owner into having the manager periodically go out and ask the customers how the food was, make some small talk, and then just mention the cards on the tables that allowed them to leave a review if they felt like the staff did a good job. 

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This change alone tripled the number of reviews they normally received. They went from getting 9 reviews every month to almost 25-30 reviews in a month for two straight months. Again, the only thing that changed was the manager being friendly to customers and reminding them that if they had a good experience, to leave a review and the staff would be rewarded and recognized. 

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What did this do for their local GBP SEO rankings? If you look below, you’ll see it took them from ranking on average 6.7 for the search, “Mexican restaurants in {city}” to 3.5. It also took them from ranking 8.7 on average to 3.7 for the search, “Mexican food near me”. 

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Conclusion: Putting out QR codes alone will have a negligible impact on the number of reviews you get. You will continue to receive reviews from either really happy customers, or really upset customers. In order to capture more reviews from those customers who would leave one if asked, but don’t organically, you need to have at least one person championing asking for reviews. The first best option if you’re a restaurant owner, dental office, or med spa is to have your manager be the one to ask customers for those reviews. But, in order to see the absolute best results is to get your entire team involved. 

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If you’re wanting to turn Google reviews into a team effort, consider using Drumroll. Not only can we make it extremely easy for each employee to ask for reviews by leveraging the Drumroll tap cards, but we can also then track and automatically reward the employees who generate and are mentioned in specific reviews.

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