6+ Genius Ways To Create Review Reminder Emails That Captivate

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What’s the best way to ask a customer for their review?

A standard piece of advice is that you should ask for what you want directly. This approach is good, solid, and works most of the time. But I can’t help but wonder if there is more to it than that.

I’m talking about other ways to succeed in asking or reminding customers to review. And, for eCommerce companies, you already have a valuable tool to ask for a review - email marketing.

When you ask for a review, your chance of success can skyrocket if your request email includes the right ingredients. This article will show you what those ingredients are and help you have customizable templates to use in your online business for review generation.

It’s also crucial to understand the value of customer reviews, whether they’re reviews on Google, Facebook recommendations, reviews on Yelp, or reviews on any third-party industry-specific review site. Recently, Google has also started using Google reviews as suggested search results to questions asked by people on Google My Business listings!

Therefore, let’s dive in and see the genius ways to create review reminder emails that can generate valuable feedback for your company.

For more straightforward navigation, I’ve got a table of contents that can deliver you to the exact section that you want to jump to. Let’s begin.

Why should you create review reminder emails?

Chances are, you can already feel the power of customer reviews based on your own shopping experiences. Think about how many times you’ve been on the fence of purchasing only to follow through because other customers’ glowing reviews gave you the confidence to hit the Buy button.

The fact of the matter is that what people have to say about your online business carries much more weight than what you say about your business, even if those people are complete strangers. In fact, based on a ThanX article, 91% of consumers regularly read online reviews and 84% of them trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.

If that is not enough to convince you to start collecting reviews by using emails for your own business, here are some more stats that can give you the boost you need:

• Consumers find reviews to be helpful. In a Podium’s study, 93% of consumers replied that they think online reviews for local businesses are as valuable as product reviews on major sites like Amazon.

• Consumers are willing. A BrightLocal study in December of 2019 showed that 76% of consumers asked to leave reviews went on to do so, and this was a 70% increase from the stat of the prior year.

• Consumers look for reviews. According to Google, the term “review” has increased by 35% on mobile searches, and the term “best” has increased by 80% by search volume.

How to create review reminder emails that actually work

There are many ways to ask your customers for reviews as there are multiple communication mediums within your online business and marketing efforts. You can ask in person, over the phone, through social media, etc. But in this article, let’s focus on emails as they are incredibly effective and highly responsive, especially if the reminder email is sent at the right time.

First of all, email marketing is still a fantastic channel for communicating with your customers since 91% of people open their email on a daily basis, while 58% of consumers check emails first before doing anything else online. Secondly, you can include a link that takes people to the review platform and even test out different formats and methods.

When asking customers for a review using email, it’s crucial to think from your buyer’s perspective.

After all, they’ve already bought what they want from your store, be that a product or service, and can certainly use a little encouragement to take the time and write feedback. Think like a customer yourself and consider what is more likely to make you submit a review.

Here are some simple guidelines you should follow when creating review reminder emails and be as successful as possible:

• Keep it brief – your recipients are short on time, so present your offer right away!

• Be polite – don’t forget that you are the guest in their inbox. So say please and know that customers are doing you a favour by leaving a review or feedback.

• Reinforce your brand – make your review reminder instantly recognizable by following your brand guidelines. It’s easy to create emails on your own with customizable templates (which I will show in the next section). You’ll see some great examples and inspiration for your brand emails.

Basically, you can manually create and send review reminder emails through any email service provider such as Gmail or Outlook. You only need to create an email template and send it after any customer making a purchase. But imagine doing that every time you receive payment; it would be way too time-consuming.

With the guideline above, let me show you a better way of creating reminder emails using my favorite email marketing tool - AVADA Email Marketing.

AVADA Email Marketing - the tool to create captivating review reminder email

Email might be the most effective and fastest way to request a testimonial from customers. If you set up a landing page to collect reviews, email has the added benefit of directing the customers straight to the right page. That said, if you have to create every review reminder email manually, it would take a lot of time and effort.

This is when an email marketing software like AVADA Email Marketing comes in. With powerful automation features and customizable templates, you can create review reminder emails that not only look good but also have a touch of personalization to be more appealing.

Let me introduce you to the app.

First of all, the app is an email marketing software that aims to help eCommerce businesses make the most of email marketing. So, inside it, you can find all the most essential features for email marketing, such as audience segmentation, automation campaigns, lead generation forms, analytics, and more.

The app is free to start using, so don’t hesitate to give AVADA Email Marketing a try and see the dashboard such as above.

Here, when clicking on “Automation”, you can see all kinds of email automation campaigns that can help an eCommerce store run email marketing campaigns. We are talking about asking for a review here, so I checked the “Buying Transaction” for event type and immediately found the email automation template I was looking for.

This “ask for review” or review reminder email is an automation workflow consisting of only one email. As the description said, this type of workflow helps you send emails reminding customers to leave a review after they placed an order in your shop. It has an automation trigger for every purchase on your store, so you won’t have to create and send emails yourself.

Let’s take a closer look at the automation workflow.

In the Workflow page, you can edit the automation flow and make necessary changes as you wish. In the right panel, you can see the detail of each workflow’s asset. For example, the picture above shows how you can edit the start of the event and what would stop the workflow with a subscriber. In the left panel, you can see the items that you can add into the workflow, such as more email, SMS, split, or wait time.

We already have a simple review reminder email workflow here, which will automatically send an email to remind the customers to leave a review and ask them about the experience with your products. The wait time is 7 days, which means the email will be sent a week after the completion of purchase.

For the email, you can click on it and edit the name, status, internal note (for co-workers), and also further adjust the email’s content. The edit process is very straightforward too since you can simply drag and drop items to the email’s content.

In the email editor, you can customize the review reminder email to match your brand’s personality and design guidelines. Do you want the copy to be a bit more quirky? Or perhaps you want to change the color a bit? It is all possible with AVADA Email Marketing. Simply click on any element and you can see the tab to edit them in the right panel.

The product name section in the email will automatically update based on the cart of each customer, the same happens for the customer name field. This way, your customers will always receive personalized review reminder emails and can view what they bought. With a bit of reminding like that, they are much more likely to leave a review of the purchased products.

You can also edit the subject line, from field, and preheader text. This will tremendously help increase the open rate of your review reminder email. After you are happy with the result, simply click on Save to continue with the review reminder email workflow.

The last step is for your email campaign management. By inserting the name, description, and adding some tags for the review reminder email automation workflow, you can easily find the campaign in the app later and see the performance. After finishing inserting necessary information for those fields, you can click Launch and the campaign is live!

See? That is how you can create a review reminder email that is automated, personalized, and suitable for your customers. With AVADA Email Marketing, the workload is cut by half, and you can generate more reviews on autopilot.

However, that is only one type of review reminder email. You can use the app to create many more types of ask for a review email. Let’s see them in the next section and see how AVADA Email Marketing can help you create those as well.

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6 Genius ways to create review reminder emails

To have the most success with collecting reviews, I recommend you to make email marketing a key component of the testimonial strategy. Whether you have an email workflow set up for all new customers, or you have your emails dedicated to reaching out to post-sale customers, email is a powerful tool to gather reviews.

If you can’t find the right words to convince your customers and give reviews, I created a collection of review reminder emails that can work wonders. Let’s see what they are.

1. The professional approach

If your eCommerce company’s customer base tends to be more reactive to professional communication, this approach is right for you. You can have the CEO of your company writing a personalized letter-style email asking customers for a review. Take some time to perfect the copy with some personalized details and make sure that the email includes the link to the web page that houses your review forms.

If your products or services have high pricing, this approach is extremely effective. This review reminder email is courteous, professional, timely, and brief. It’s best to use this kind of review reminder email a while after the sale happens since high-pricing items have a longer use time. But don’t wait for too long, send when the product is still fresh in the customer’s mind.

Before sending this professional review reminder email, you can see how customers reacted to your previous work and whether or not they are likely to give you a positive review, so you can easily adjust your message.

Ideal sending time: 2 - 4 weeks after the purchase.

2. The short and simple approach

There’s a clear link between the rate of conversion and the number of paragraphs included - the more text the recipients have to read, the less likely the customers will submit feedback. So, try to keep your review reminder short, sweet and to the point. You can view the example above from Papier for inspiration.

A simple email, including a clear call to action, always can work well to generate testimonials. Remember, most people view your review reminder email on a mobile phone, so my advice is to keep text to a utmost minimum.

Ideal sending time: 24 - 48 hours after the purchase.

3. The email blast approach

This is a type of email that would go out to all of your customer list. You can try doing one broad email campaign or segment the subscribers out as you see fit. This type of blast email can be as short and simple as including a 1-10 scale rating, or it can have some brief copy.

The goal of this type of email is to gather the most reviews or feedback from a certain group or all of the customers. For example, you want to do an annual research on how the customer support team is doing. Or you just want to show all customers that you are listening to their feedback and trying to improve their experience.

Check out the example above from BarkBox and see if you can copy the design, or take this template I created for you:

*"Hey {customer name}!*

*Receiving positive reviews from awesome customers such as yourself helps many consumers feel confident about choosing [your business name] too. Can you please take 60 seconds to go to this link [link to review platform] and share your experiences with others?*

*We will be forever grateful. Thanks in advance for helping us out and here is a 10% coupon to show our gratitude!"*

**Ideal sending time:** Annual or quarterly review 

4. The branding approach

Your review reminder email should also be instantly recognizable to the customers. With the drag and drop email templates of AVADA Email Marketing, it is easy to customize your email’s content and take your branding to the next level.

You can see the example below from Biscuiteers for yourself. By having a unique visual style and tone of voice that suits their brand and website, they’ve created a review reminder email that draws the customer in with consistent branding. This email is reported to convert at over 18%, which is well above the standard 3% among industries.

The important thing to remember is that you need to understand your brand’s style to design the email well. See the colors, icons, graphics that represent your brand then implement them into the review reminder email.

Ideal sending time: Any time

5. The rewards approach

Incentivised review reminder emails have two big benefits:

• They help drive customers back to your eCommerce site once a review has been completed

• They help increase the rate of collecting reviews

AVADA Email Marketing allows you to add discounts and voucher codes that are sent once a review has been completed or before that. For the best result, you can set up a reward system for different customers and review types.

Remember though, if you’re offering a reward for a review, you have to give it to every customer, regardless of the positive or negative review they leave on your site.

It’s important to know that while offering rewards has certain benefits, it can also have drawbacks. Your customers can become too familiar with discounts associated with your brand, which can prevent them from shopping with your store when items and services are full price.

Ideal sending time: Take some time to test this type of email with a small group of customers to see the right approach for your reward program. In my opinion, loyal customers and first-time customers should have different rewards for leaving a review.

6. The personalization approach

Customers respond better to review reminder emails that have a personal touch. You can do that by simply mentioning the recipient by name – i.e. Mrs Summer. You can do this by using placeholders in the AVADA Email Marketing email templates.

A nice touch that I find increases conversion even more is to include a personal message from someone inside your company, like Chapelle Jewellery did in their highly successful review reminder email.

You don’t necessarily have to do much when it comes to personalizing your email. Sometimes, the sentiment of the message is far more effective. By expressing how much a review would mean to the company, you can make customers more inclined to take some time and leave feedback. Plus, you can always include a time-limited offer for customers to gain a reward with their testimonial.

Go the extra mile

There are many ways to remind customers to leave reviews with email marketing, but the most effective method and/or app will be different for each eCommerce business. If you are ready to go the extra mile and show the customers that they have many benefits leaving a testimonial, you are already on the right track with review reminder emails.

Here are some key takeaways before you go creating your captivating review reminder emails with AVADA Email Marketing:

• Be genuine and don’t force the reviews.

• Empower your customers to help other prospects make smart and confident decisions.

• Make it easy for customers to leave a review.

• Respond to reviews, bad or good!

• Remember that your customers are willing to leave a review.