Recommendations from People You Know – All You Need is Email

Real Word of Mouth makes referring businesses easier than ever: all you need is email.

We make email even better…

• No longer lose recommendations
• Search and sort recommendations – smartly
• Business contacts are accurate and up-to-date

Why use email for recommendations?

• Email is everywhere – every device, every operating system.
• You use email. Everyone uses email.
• You probably already ask for and send recommendations via email.

However, email all by itself is not ideal…

• Past recommendations may be hard to find, especially if considerable time has passed.
• Past recommendations may get lost. Maybe you deleted the email, or perhaps lost some email during a hardware or software upgrade.
• Business contact information might be missing, incorrect, or out-of-date.
• You may not see all the other recommendations made by others when part of an email group, unless you are copied.
• Email is difficult to search and sort with only From, To, Date, Subject, and Body fields.  More powerful searches, like “reviews by my colleagues for printing services near me” are not possible.

Email + VendorBot™ = Awesome…

Through the power of AI (Artificial Intelligence), we effortlessly improve sharing recommendations via email.

VendorBot will:

• Automatically store recommendations you make or receive via email, and make them easy to find again.
• Return search results via email from all your recommendations by simply sending an email to Real Word of Mouth with a few keywords, like “plumber”.

Automatically turn an email recommendation into something powerful.

Example: You get an email from Kathy (a colleague at work), responding to your request for a plumber:

“we use Joe all the time. quality work, on-time, fair prices. (123) 456-7890”

Becomes:

Why not social media?

We get this question all the time.

Why not…

Yelp – 25% fake or incentivized reviews. How often do you know the reviewer?  On-going rumors of “pay to play” (i.e. advertising businesses have higher ratings).

Facebook – Try to search for “plumber reviews near me”.  What do you find? (answer: probably nothing.)

Nextdoor – Good for neighborly recommendations for local businesses, but  important people for referrals like your family, friends and colleagues often do not live in your neighborhood.  Not as useful for B2B.

Google – Although Google search is not social media, it’s worth noting that 40% of small businesses between $50k and $1M revenue do not have a website – that’s over 30% of all businesses in the USA. Many of these businesses can only be found and learned about via word of mouth recommendations from people you know.

How does VendorBot work?

VendorBot works quietly in the background, helping distribute your email requests for recommendations and collecting private recommendations from people you know.

We use a mix of algorithms and AI to identify and categorize businesses, and if you need your recommendations again, we provide a “searchbot” that makes it easy to access your collection of recommendations with a simple email.

How to get started?

Here are the basic steps:

• Get an account
• Create a group (work, community, school class, shared interest…)
• Invite people you know to your group
• Send your request for recommendations to a special email address @realwordofmouth.com (contact us for this)
• Wait for recommendations to arrive via email
• Send an email with some keywords in your subject line to search@realwordofmouth.com to access past recommendations from all your groups

Are you a power user?

We have a website where you can search, sort, and filter recommendations from people you know, or simply browse recommendations by category.