4 Ways companies can tailor review invites to match the customer journey

You can place the Trustpilot review form right on your site to ensure a wide audience is exposed to the review form. While most companies utilize email as the channel to collect reviews, they’re competing with a high-traffic inbox and the email may be lost or ignored. By placing the review form on your website, there’s no need for flashy subject lines necessary. As an e-commerce company, you could implement an embedded review form on your site, post-checkout. Alternatively, a software company might choose to integrate a form for users within the platform, post log-in.

Next, decide: what’s the best way to introduce the review form to your customers from a UX perspective? You can choose a passive or direct approach. If you want to quickly draw users’ focus, have the form pop-up. If you’d rather the form be subtle, include a button inviting the customer to leave a review. When your customer clicks the button, a review form appears.

To follow best practice, it’s important to A/B test your options to see which option leads to higher engagement.

If you choose to trigger your invitations at a delay, as many of our Trustpilot subscribers do, it’s important to learn the best timing to do so by testing your timing. If your invitations are triggered by shipping time, we recommend identifying your longest shipping time and adding a day or two on the invitation delay. However, if you’re shipping a product, we recommend waiting until your customers have received the product before requesting a review.

If you are a business who wants reviews of your service, not a product, you can personalize your invitation to reflect the kind of feedback you’d like. You can ask for feedback on your site’s user experience, your customer service team, and your marketing efforts. If you clearly identify the type of feedback you’re asking for, your customer will review your business accordingly.

Don’t be afraid to ask again. Just like an email marketing campaign, sending reminders to your customers to supply reviews should be an adopted strategies. When supplementing invitations with reminder emails, our subscribers have seen an increase in response rate of up to 50%.

Your customers do want to review you but they can get distracted. Their new puppy, the new House of Cards season, happy hour - these are all fighting for your customers’ time so you’re allowed to keep reminded them. Trustpilot sends an automated reminder a week after the initial invite to provide the push the customer needs to leave your business a review.

Also make sure you’re testing reminders to determine whether reminders are right for you. When testing delay options - consider your client base. If you’re a software company with a longer term relationship with your client base, you can send a reminder a month after the first invitation. Your customers are still using your software, so you have a long window of time to send a reminder email. However an eCommerce company selling khakis should send a reminder closer to the time of the initial invitation. Again - A/B testing is your friend!

Consider incorporating a review CTA (call to action) into existing emails. If you’re running a fabulous marketing campaign, newsletter, or promotion, including a CTA to review your company is a good way to increase your response rate. Depending on your customer base, it might be ideal to send out Trustpilot invitations and supplement invites with a review CTA in your email campaigns. However, if you feel that may detract from your overall engagement and response, keeping the review invitations at a minimum might be best. As always, A/B testing will help you make a choice.

If you decide to send an emails with multiple calls to action, make sure to prioritize your CTA’s accordingly. What’s the most important thing you need from your customers? An eCommerce company might include a review CTA as part of an order confirmation or thank you email. This example ensures the CTA isn’t fighting for interest compared to a marketing email where a membership CTA might be more important to your business. A link to review is incorporated easily with our unique link or API solution.

Timing also plays an important role here! If you’re sending an email to hundreds of customers simultaneously, you won’t have the same level of control, and you won’t be able to target everyone at the same moment. It’s important to balance your level of personalization such as timing, while also ensuring the method of delivery will expose your review invitations to a wide audience. If you are a software company, or a B2B service used regularly by customers, there may not be an ideal moment, so an email campaign utilizing a review CTA could be a great fit. Be strategic with the incorporation of a CTA - and if it doesn’t work for your business, there are other options to consider.

For non-traditional industries, there are endless ways to customize and send review invitations to your customer base. For Trustpilot users, the platform offers a wide variety of pre-created templates and review forms that can be incorporated in emails or websites, optimized to collect reviews. An eCommerce company that incorporates a review invitation to an order confirmation email, a B2B software company that utilizes a pop-up embedded review form, a moving company that invites customers at a one week delay following their big haul - these are all good industry-specific examples of how the companies we work with every day utilize customization to make collecting reviews work for them.

You never want to interrupt your customer journey. By taking these solutions and strategies into consideration, you can have your invitations to review feel like a natural next step for your customers, one you will occasionally nudge them to take. Our recommendation? Using reminders are key.

The Trustpilot platform can help you optimise your review response rate. Find out how, and request a demo to speak with one of our review experts.