Here's how to grow your business without the need for technical knowledge.
Potential customers like to read reviews but existing customers usually don't go out of their way to write the reviews, so you've got to make it easy for them.
Wouldn't it be great if a happy customer could leave an online review for you before they even walked out the door? There are ways!
Online reviews are popularly left through Google+ Local, Yelp, Frommers, TripAdvisor, and several others. I mention those 4 because that's what seems to appear in Google search results right now.
Anyone with an account on those websites can leave a review using a desktop computer, but most of your satisfied customers will not remember to write a review when they get home. To solve this memory fault, you should send your customers a thank you email at the end of each business day with a link to your Google+ Local or Yelp account with a request for a review.
There's a camera store near my home in New Jersey that emails a thank you every time I buy something in person. As a technology person I think this is a nice touch, and I was inclined to write a review for them after my first visit there. Their point of sale system is programmed to send an email as soon as the sale is completed.
Your POS is probably not as sophisticated as that so you would have to figure out your own best process for sending emails at the end of a work day. On the other had I find it's much more useful for you to ask your customer to write a review while they are still in your store, and still smiling, but to do that you need a mobile review application on a smartphone.
Google+ Local reviews is really where you want people to post your reviews, but Google's Local/Places is going through growing pains right now and they've removed the ability to write reviews from a smartphone. Yelp allows people to write "draft review" that can be finalized later from their desktop. This is still not ideal, but it's the best solution we have at the moment.
HERE'S HOW TO MAKE IT WORK:
Go to Yelp.com and look for your jewelry store name in your town. Find your dedicated store page, and copy the website address. It should look like this:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/perosi-jewelers-totowa
THEN:
Go to http://qrf.in to create a QR code using that web address. Save the QR code to your hard drive, but also copy the short website address that they give you. It will look like this:
http://qrf.in/a123bcd
NEXT:
Using Microsoft Word, create a sign to hang near your POS. The sign should say something like this:
"Do you Yelp? Scan this QR code to leave a Yelp review for us, or visithttp://qrf.in/a123bcd on your smartphone now."
LASTLY:
Hang up the sign and make sure to point it out to every happy customer making a purchase.
There are several technologies in use with this suggestion, but you don't need to know how any of them work, you just need to do this.
