Getting reviews from customers who loved you two years ago

Almost every established business is sitting on this list. Hundreds of customers who were genuinely happy, none of whom were ever asked, because nobody had a system at the time.

It is a real asset. It is also a one time asset, which is why spending it badly is worse than not spending it.

Is it even worth asking someone from two years ago?

Yes, with two adjustments to your expectations.

Response rate will be low. A person asked two years later is being asked to do you a favor from memory. Most will not, and that is fine, because the list is large and the cost per ask is nearly zero.

The reviews you do get will be shorter and less specific unless you help them remember. That is the part you can control, and it is most of the work.

What makes it worth doing anyway is that these are people who liked you enough to be memorable to you. That is a better pool than a random customer. And review recency is one of the strongest local ranking signals a small business has, which means old customers writing new reviews count as new reviews. Review velocity is the ranking factor most businesses ignore, and the date on the review is the date it was written, not the date of the visit.

The catch is that this is a recovery move, not a cadence. Once the list is spent, it is spent, and if you have not built an ongoing ask by then you are back where you started with a spike in your history.

Why is a single blast the wrong move?

Because the pattern it creates is a named policy violation, and the consequence lands on the whole profile rather than on the extra reviews.

Google's Maps user generated content policy prohibits content exhibiting unusual volumes or patterns of review contributions that are indicative of efforts to manipulate a place's rating. Read the words carefully. It describes a pattern, not a lie. Every review in your blast can be genuine, written by a real person about a real visit, and the arrival pattern can still be the thing that trips the filter.

What happens next is documented in Google's consumer alerts guidance. When Google detects suspicious review activity it may display a public banner on the business profile, impose review posting restrictions, or hide reviews for a period. A posting restriction is the expensive one. It arrives at the exact moment you have finally started asking, and it stops everything while your competitors keep accruing.

Sterling Sky's Joy Hawkins has documented the adjacent version of this: a client whose reviews were being filtered had not received a new review in over three years. A profile that has been silent for years and then receives thirty in a week is describing a change in the business's behavior, not a change in its customers.

Darren Shaw of Whitespark names the pattern from the other direction. The mistake he sees is businesses sending review requests in bursts, blasting hundreds of customers at once, getting a batch of reviews, and then getting nothing for another six months. His words for that are short: that is no good.

The list is not the asset. The drip is the asset.

How do I pace it so it does not look like a campaign?

Small batches, spread over weeks, sent by a person.

Ten to fifteen a week is a reasonable rhythm for most small businesses. That produces a steady trickle of new reviews rather than a wall of them arriving on one Thursday, and the trickle is worth more on both the ranking side and the credibility side.

Set the pace from your market rather than from the size of the list. Count what your top three competitors collected in the last ninety days, take the average monthly rate, add one, and let the backlog fill whatever your ongoing asking does not cover. That is the target the drip is serving.

Send from a real address, with a real name, not from a bulk sender. These people knew a person, not a brand.

And sequence by memorability. Start with the customers you remember by name and the events you can describe. Those produce the highest response rate and the best written reviews.

Leave Yelp out of it entirely. Yelp's own guidance tells businesses not to ask anyone to review them, and warns that proactively asking may hurt your rating because its software may not recommend reviews that appear prompted. A two year old customer contacted by email and pointed at Yelp is the clearest possible example of a prompted review.

What does the pacing look like in numbers?

Here is the whole plan on one page of arithmetic. Replace the inputs with yours.

The list: 240 former customers with reachable contact details.

The benchmark: your top three competitors averaged 5 new reviews a month over the last ninety days, so the target is 6 a month.

Your ongoing ask already produces about 4 a month from current customers. So the backlog only has to supply 2 a month.

Measure the response rate before you plan around it. Send the first 20 messages, to the twenty people you remember best. Say 3 reviews come back. That is roughly one review per seven sends, and it is your number, not an industry number.

Do the division. Two reviews a month at one per seven sends means about 14 sends a month, which is 3 or 4 a week.

Now see how long the asset lasts. 240 names at 4 a week is 60 weeks. Paced properly, this list covers more than a year of the gap while you build the habit that replaces it.

And price the blast. Send all 240 at once at the same one in seven rate and roughly 34 reviews arrive in a week onto a profile whose trailing rate is one a month. That is more than thirty times a normal month's volume, landing in seven days, on a quiet profile, from people who have not been customers recently. It is the exact shape the policy describes, and if it triggers a posting restriction you have converted fourteen months of cover into one banner.

What do I actually say to someone who has not heard from me in two years?

Remind them of the visit, then make the ask small.

The failure mode is a message that opens with an apology for the gap and then asks for a favor. It reads as awkward because it is, and awkwardness is contagious.

The version that works has three parts. A specific reference to what you did for them. A short honest statement of why you are writing. A single link.

Specific means specific. Not "thanks for being a customer." Name the thing: the anniversary dinner in the back room, the water heater on the Sunday, the graduation order for forty. That does the one job you are allowed to do, which is help a person remember an experience clearly enough to describe it in their own words.

Here is the line you do not cross. Google's policy prohibits requesting that specific content be included in a review. Reminding someone what you did for them is a memory aid. Telling them what to write, suggesting a phrase, or sending a template with the review pre drafted is a request for specific content, and a growing number of review tools ship exactly that as a feature. If your vendor offers to prefill the review box, turn it off. The reviews it produces read as written by one person, which is the impression you least want on a profile you just reactivated.

Be honest about the ask. Something like: we never had a good habit of asking for reviews and we are fixing that. People respond well to that because it is true and it does not pretend the gap did not happen.

Ask for one thing. One link, one action, no survey, no attachment. And do not offer anything in exchange. Google bans incentives flatly, and the federal rule at 16 CFR Part 465 reaches incentives conditioned on sentiment expressly or by implication. The same rule's section 465.2(d) gives you the safe path in a single phrase: reviews resulting from generalized solicitations to purchasers. Ask everyone on the list, condition nothing, script nothing, and you are inside it.

Getting the tone right matters more here than anywhere, because the gap makes everything read louder. Asking for a review without sounding desperate is largely about length, and the message that works is shorter than the one you want to write.

What should I have ready before I start sending?

Three things, and skipping them wastes the list.

A working link that lands on the right profile. Use the review link Google generates from the profile itself, which is built from the place ID and survives address changes, merges and rebrands. Hand assembled links break with no error message. If your listing has changed since these people were customers, confirm the link on a phone that is not signed into your business account.

A visible, current profile. These customers will look you up before they write anything, and what they find has to match what they remember. If your listing behaves oddly during the hours they are likely to check, that is worth fixing first, and a business can disappear from maps at exactly the wrong time for reasons that have nothing to do with reviews.

A response plan. Reviews are going to arrive and every one of them deserves a reply, including the two star one from someone whose memory is different from yours. Review response is customer service rather than damage control, and a reply on a two year old review reads especially well because it shows you are still paying attention.

Some of these people will also ask questions when they land on your profile. Having the common ones already answered helps, and seeding your Google Business Profile Q and A properly is a small job worth doing before you send anything.

What to do this week

Pull the list. Old invoices, reservation records, email exports, POS history, your own memory. Names and contact details, nothing fancy.

Sort it by how well you remember them. The top twenty are your first two weeks.

Write the message once, three sentences, with a blank where the specific memory goes. Do not automate the blank, and do not prefill anything the customer is supposed to write.

Send twenty this week, count what comes back, and compute your own sends per review. That number sets the pace for everything after.

Then build the ongoing ask so you never have to do this again.

Want the message written for your list?

Email me at eric@seod.com with roughly how many old customers you can contact, how you can contact them, and two or three examples of what you did for specific people on that list. I will write you the three sentence message and the batch schedule I would use for a list that size.

I will also tell you honestly if the list is too old or too cold to be worth working, which happens, and in that case where I would put the same hour instead. Nothing follows the answer.

Otherwise keep reading the reviews and reputation library.