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To optimize the campaign, we need to understand which parts it consists of and which we can influence. Here are the parts that are changeable:
- Email subject line
- Email template
- Number of reminders
- Send timing
- Customer targeting
- Incentives
Email subject line
Subject lines are often the most overlooked part of the review invitation process. They can give you the most benefits for the least amount of effort. When we set a subject line, our first objective is to land in customers’ primary inboxes. I also recorded a video explaining this i more detail:
Google (and most other email providers) introduced email categories some years ago, which pre-filter emails.
This means if an email lands into the promotion category, it is 65% less likely to be opened based on the following study done on 3 million emails:
Now, how can you ensure this doesn’t happen to your review invitation emails? Changing the subject line is one of the easiest ways to do so.
It won’t always work, as there are other factors like your sending domain reputation, the number of emails you send to customers, and the email content itself. However, the subject line has an outsized influence on this. From our tests, a simple/plain text subject line with 2-3 words, has the best chance of landing in a primary inbox. We even tested it with several brands with 10,000s of emails, and here are the results:
As you can see above, the subject lines that had emojis or were personalized had 15-20% lower open rates. We can’t say if it is because they were classified to land in the promotion folder or because customers were less likely to be interested in the emails. In the end, it doesn’t matter which is the reason as long as you can test it.
If you want to dig deeper into how to test your invitations, have a look at this video:
However, testing is not the only way to find out if your subject lines are making your emails land in the promotions folder. The other way is to run a test with multiple subject lines and see which lands in your primary inbox vs the promotion folder. Depending on which review platform/email provider you are using, you can set up a test campaign with a subject line, send it to your inbox, and check which folder it lands in. Then change the subject line and repeat it.
With StackTome we make this process simpler, as you can send multiple variations with a single send:
Email template
As with any email marketing, your template’s aim should be to get a person to click on a review link. This means the template's fairly simple text and clean design make it easy to understand the next step.
The email copy should be either straightforward and clear, just asking for a review, or it can be personalized to the customer/segment being targeted.
Below is an example of a Trustpilot review with a simple request copy:
Alternatively, if we are asking for a product review, we can follow the Amazon template approach, listing one or more products to be reviewed:
Which template works best? First, you need to decide whether you are optimizing for more service or more product reviews. To get more product reviews, you want to list bought products in the email, while for service reviews, a simple review button is enough. However, based on our tests with a few brands, we see that a simple button request tends to have a higher CTR than listing products to be reviewed.
The reason for this is mostly perceived effort. If someone has bought 10 products and receives an email asking to review them all, he will be less likely to start the review process than someone who receives just a button requesting to review.
If you are just starting and don’t know what template works best for your customers, then you can check the following time-tested templates we have used at StackTome with a number of brands that send 10,000+ invites per month: https://www.stacktome.com/review-templates
Number of reminders
Reminders are the second most overlooked tool in review invitation campaigns. They can improve the review rate considerably with little effort.
The consensus among eCommerce managers is to send only one reminder/follow-up if a person hasn’t left a review yet. The main reason for this is to avoid making their customers angry. However, this argument can be tested very easily. Here are the results of sending the second follow-up two weeks after the first one.
As you can see, the reminder is still converting at around 1% of the review rate, which lifts the overall campaign conversion by 10%. Is it worth it? If the reviews are positive and your spam rate is within the limits, then there is no reason why not to send more than 1 reminder.
Nowadays, people tend to receive a lot of emails, and receiving additional reminders is not likely to harm the brand as long as you are spreading them out in time. Of course, don’t trust your instincts; rather, use invitation performance data to verify this.
Send timing
Review invitation timing can impact if you get a 5* review or a 1* review. The basic rule should be not to send an invitation too early, especially before the product is delivered. If a customer receives an invite before he gets the product, in the best case, he will ignore it, in the worst case, he will leave a negative review. Here is an example of this:
However, sending the invitation long after the customer has received the product, is less likely he will bother to leave a review. So, the goal is to send it at the right time when the customer is most satisfied. For consumables or fast-deteriorating products like food or flowers, the timing should be 1-3 days after the delivery. For other products that require more time to see the results, it can take 7-14 days. In some extreme cases, it could be months if the customer sees results only after a long time.
The chart below from PowerReviews 10,000 consumer report shows the average time it takes for a customer to make a decision if he is ready to leave a review.
Note that this chart is self-reported, so should be taken with a great of salt. You want to check your own sent data and calculate the average time from receiving an invite to leaving a review. Then you can experiment with different timing and find the one that works best for you.
The above chart also shows that sending reminders is important because you want to capture customers who need more time to test the product before they are ready to leave a review. If they don’t get a reminder, they most likely will forget to leave a review even if they are satisfied.
Another great time to send a service review invitation (or recover from a negative review) is after fixing a customer’s problem. This is usually done manually by customer support agents, however, it can be automated with invitation campaigns by using customer segmentation, we’ll talk more about this in the next section.
It’s worth mentioning that no one timing fits all customers. It’s important to have a tool that allows you to configure multiple campaigns to target different customer segments. With StackTome, not only can you set which date you want to use for targeting (delivery, dispatch or order creation), but you can also set different timings per each campaign based on your customer's location or other criteria like products they bought, instead of sending customers all invites at the same schedule. Here is an example of campaign settings:
Customer targeting (segmentation)
We can divide customer targeting into two categories:
- Geo-targeting based on customer details like location & language
- Narrow targeting based on customer behavior, such as products bought, frequency of purchases, average order value, etc.
Geo-targeting
The most common geo-targeting options are:
- Segment customers by locality to send invites based on language.
- Send invitations based on location to match customers’ timezone for better open rates & optionally different delivery times, when the exact delivery date is not available.
Geo-targeting is the simplest to implement, but it does require a tool to support multiple campaigns. In some cases, this is done by the tools themselves in the background based on the order details. However, this is not always accurate.
The additional benefit of Geo-targeting is that you are more likely to get a review in the most relevant language to your brand. For example, if you are selling in Spain, you want reviews to be in Spanish so you can use them as social proof to acquire more Spanish-speaking customers.
Also, personalized emails by language will be more likely to get a person to leave a review. You can test the emails in different languages to determine if optimizing this for all your campaigns is worth the effort. With StackTome even though we can test this, we haven’t yet, as most brands tend to prefer one language per segment, but here are a couple of comparisons Spanish campaign vs any EU country campaign (UK included):
We can see that Spanish speaking campaign has a slightly higher overall review rate, but due to to small amount of sent data, we cannot draw firm conclusions if it's due to the language. We would need more volume & testing, specifically English vs Spanish templates, to see what is the exact difference. However, it is a good practice to just stick with customers’ language when asking for a review.
The next, more granular, segmentation based on behavior can provide a small lift in review rate, but it is more useful as a tool for optimizing the rating you receive from reviews. Let's cover two example use cases.
Segmenting customers by open/closed tickets
When customers leave a support inquiry, we want to avoid sending them any invitation until the ticket is resolved. When ticket data is available, you want to time the invitation to be sent only after the ticket has been resolved successfully.
To do this, you need your sending tool to be able to segment by customer tickets, here is how we use it in StackTome:
This is one way to prevent some of the negative reviews. I made a more detail video on how to implement this here:
Note that this won’t prevent customers from leaving a negative review organically, especially if the ticket hasn’t been resolved based on customer expectations. However, this will be less likely than asking them proactively to do so, especially when a ticket is still open.
Using this segmentation, we can also automate targeting customers who had a closed ticket tagged as successful or rated ticket 5* or have a positive sentiment reply. This will increase the positive reviews you get and free up your customer support agents from doing this task manually.
Segmenting by products purchased
Targetting by-product bought has several advantages:
- It can help you get more product reviews, especially for new products
- You can tweak the timing based on product type to make sure the customer had enough time to see the results before getting an invite
- You can personalize the messaging to improve the review rate, especially when you are targeting based on 1 or a few similar products
Getting more reviews for new products faster is critical for most D2C eCommerce brands as it affects the product page conversion rate. The more social proof products have the more likely other visitors will want to try them. Therefore even providing incentives to speed up this process could greatly impact how fast the product starts generating more revenue. We will cover this use case with incentives in part 3 article.
A bonus segmentation by gender
Finally, I want to mention another segmentation that can apply to some brands, and we do have customers that use it, which is segmentation by gender. For some brands gender can impact how likely a customer is satisfied with the product or service or the value they get out of it. For example, if we know women are more likely to leave a review & more likely to leave a positive review after buying flowers, then we could send more reminders to women than men, to make sure we are increasing the likelihood of getting more positive reviews.
However, to determine this, you need to analyze your order, review, and gender data. With StackTome we can sync this data directly to your datawarehouse like Google BigQuery, and you can find out which customer factors make the most impact on your review rating. Here is an example below of gender differences:
Incentives
Incentives are controversial tools for improving performance, as they can skew the rating towards the positive side. That's why some platforms, like Trustpilot, are against them and can take action if they catch any businesses using them.
Here is an excerpt from their terms:
That’s why if you want to use incentives on Trustpilot specifically, you should take steps in advance to avoid overusing them because Trustpilot can take action against your account. We will look later in several use cases how to reduce this risk while still using incentives. However, other platforms like Google and Yotpo don’t have rules against incentives. Therefore, you can use any tactics we will cover without risk.
An incentive can be any reward, such as a discount coupon for future purchases, loyalty points, or other giveaways given to a customer in exchange for a review. In most cases, it can be a win-win situation as a brand can get more reviews & increase the likelihood of customers buying again if they were satisfied with the purchase. In contrast, the customer gets rewarded for doing this small task of writing a review instead of doing it for free. Things can go wrong if a brand is paying for reviews & asks exclusively for positive reviews. This can create the opposite effect, and customers might lose trust in the brand and its rating.
One thing to note about customers' innate incentives is that positive & negative review incentives are misaligned. This means most customers won’t feel the need to leave a review even if their experience was positive. If the experience were negative, this motivation would be much higher. This is why if a brand doesn’t actively collect reviews on a platform like Trustpilot, most organic reviews will be negative, even for the most respected brands in the world like Apple.
Now let's look at several use cases on how you can incorporate incentives into your own review invitation campaigns.
Discount coupon or loyalty points incentive
The most straightforward way to implement this is by directly offering a coupon for leaving a review. Ideally, the offer and the campaign should be time-limited, so customers would take action faster. Here is an example email template we used with an actual customer in the past:
With StackTome, we can automate the discount coupon sending after verifying if the review has been left by the customer who received the offer within the time the offer was valid. This kind of automation is not supported by other email marketing platforms like Klaviyo.
Other platforms have review rewards as part of the invitation process for additional actions that customers take, like leaving a photo for a review. For example, Yotpo provides loyalty points as an incentive, albeit you need to pay extra for this module. Here is an example from their product:
Product samples
A more hands-on incentive program offers customers free product samples in exchange for reviews. This was popularized by platforms like PowerReviews, which are mostly focused on the U.S. market. Here is a chart outlining, based on their data, how much influence the samples have on someone leaving a review:
The program is implemented by selecting a segment of active customers. For example, loyal customers who have recently made purchases and have left reviews in the past, and, most importantly, the product sample you are sending would be relevant for them. The last part might not be clear if you are introducing a new product category. Then you will need to survey your customers to determine who would benefit from the sampled product.
Once you have the segment set, you can fulfill the product orders and run a campaign to target that customer segment after they receive the product sample. You should use two or more reminders, as customers are likely to be more receptive to taking action after receiving a free product.
Based on ProductReview metrics, the sample campaign review rate can be 90% or more. However, this really depends on how well your segment is targeted.
Giveaway lottery draft (sweepstakes)
The lottery draft is another type of campaign that is easy to implement and can lead to great results. Instead of offering a discount to all your customers, you can create a giveaway for one of the reviewers who received this offer.
Here is a sample template we implemented for one of our customers on StackTome:
The campaign worked really well and helped the brand to raise the rating from 1.8 to 3.7 in less than 60 days, and you can see here from the review rate:
Before, the regular campaign didn’t generate any reviews for months. This type of incentive can be a good way to boost your rating on some platforms you don’t actively manage, but they still influence your brand's reputation.
However, you need to be transparent about when the lottery is drafted and finished, announce the winner, and communicate with all customers who leave reviews. This way, you leave an open door for them to participate again; otherwise, they will not be likely to do so if you use the same tactic.
Product specific incentives
As an alternative to doing a product sample campaign, you can just run a targeted incentive campaign for new products without any reviews. It is less expensive to do it and doesn’t require upfront cost. The benefit of this kind of campaign is that you are giving away incentives like discount coupons only for relevant customers.
This type of campaign can help you boost your new product conversion rate, because, based on the Power review survey below, around half of the respondents indicated that they are not likely to buy a product with no reviews:
This might not be the case for your brand specifically, but you can easily measure it by tracking conversion rates between different products with or without reviews to see if setting up an incentive campaign like this is worth the effort.
With StackTome, we have implemented a product campaign with incentives for a customer by setting up an email template like the following:
Then, targeting customers who left a product review via a specific segment and sending a thank you email with a discount coupon automatically:
The campaign generated double the number of reviews compared to a regular one, allowing the brand to improve the conversion rate of those new products faster.
Note that because we are targeting only a small segment of customers with specific products and asking for product reviews, this reduces the risk of getting penalized by Trustpilot. The reason is that product reviews are not public therefore, they have no impact on the Trustpilot profile page, but they do have an impact on the brand's product page.
Negative review recovery with the help of incentives
Lastly, I want to mention another unconventional way to use incentives: recovering from negative reviews. If you can target customers who left negative reviews and match them to a resolved ticket, then you can use this to enroll them in a recovery campaign to ask them to change the review.
Based on feedback from most brands we spoke to, implement this process manually by customer support age. It is very time-consuming and has a fairly low success rate.
As an alternative to the manual process in StackTome, we provide a dedicated campaign that can automate this process. First, by setting up the templates for campaigns, here is an example of a recovery email:
In this case, the customer has to claim the gift after changing or deleting the review.
Then the campaign itself could be like follows:
The best part is that you don’t need to take any manual action to use it; just ensure that resolved tickets are marked correctly. Our tests with our customers show that it's possible to recover 20% or more negative reviews. Knowing that one negative review has the same weight as 10 positive reviews can boost your rating even more.
If you want to understand more about how this type of campaign works, I made a more detailed video explaining the process:
Summary
To conclude, simple short subject lines, clear actionable templates, and one or more reminders can easily increase your review rate by 10-30%. The good news is that these tweaks can be done in a few hours and don’t require special tools.
Bad timing can lead to a negative review, while good timing doesn’t guarantee a positive review. However, the closer it is to user satisfaction, the more likely it will result in a positive review. The segmentation can be as simple as language personalization for customers, which will give you more specific language reviews for your target market. More advanced segmentation, like gender, can be used to lift your rating, but access to your review data is required first. Even though these optimizations are a bit more difficult, they can still be implemented within a day or two with the right tool.
Incentives can be a very effective tool to improve your review rates, boost ratings, and increase customer retention. However, it is a tool that has to be used carefully to ensure it doesn’t cause more harm than good, especially when dealing with platforms like Trustpilot that don’t approve it.
If you want a tool with the most flexibility to implement these strategies, look at StackTome - which you can try for 14 days for free.
