While customers rely heavily on reviews to make purchasing decisions, they’re not as diligent when it comes to leaving those reviews themselves. What’s even worse is that dissatisfied customers are always more motivated to leave a review compared to the satisfied ones. If you want good reviews, you’ll need to work for them. A review request email is a good place to start.

 

When do you send a review request email?

The length of time you need to wait before requesting a review varies depending on the product. Request a review too soon and the customer may not have gotten enough use out of the product to develop an informed opinion. On the other hand, if you wait too long, the purchase may have been long forgotten.

For products like ready to eat meals, flowers, or crafts, requesting a review within a day or two is fine. For cosmetics like lipstick, you might need to wait at least a week. 

For something like a computer, refrigerator, or a washing machine, you’ll need to give the customer about a month. They’ll have used the products enough times to write informed reviews and those are big purchases that play a central role in their lives so they’re unlikely to forget about them.

 

How do you structure a great review-request email?

• Personalize it with the customer’s name.
• Keep the subject line under 55 characters to avoid truncation on mobile.
• Keep it short and to the point. The higher the word count, the lower the conversions. Two or three lines of text should be enough.
• Include a picture of the product you need the customer to review and a link that takes them directly to the review page.
• Use a single column format. Multicolumn layouts don’t scale well on mobile devices.
• Personalize the signature i.e. don’t end your email with “Thanks, Random Brand”. Use a person’ name, “Thanks, John Doe, Random Brand”  

 

Study of email subject lines

Research by Yotpo of 200K stores and 163M orders discovered the impact of various elements in the email subject line on the number of reviews obtained:

 

1) Exclamation point (!)

• Health & beauty: +30.4%
• Food & tobacco: +83.5%
• Sport: -10%
• Electronics: 30%

 

2) Question mark (?)

• Electronics: +21.7%
• Apparel: +23%
• Health & beauty: -6.7%

 

3) Store name

• Health & beauty: +14%
• Sport: +13%
• Electronics: +15.5%
• Food & tobacco: -74%

 

4) UPPERCASE

• Electronics: +26.7%
• Health & beauty: -39%
• Sport: -21%

 

5) Incentives (coupon, discount, sale)

• Health & beauty: +31.5%
• Electronics: +16.8%
• Apparel: +8.7%
• Food & tobacco: +106%