How to get more product reviews

Start collecting insights from your customers

Hello! 👋

How ya doing??

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about why you should go out and get more reviews for your product.

As a reminder, here are the Top 5 reasons why:

1. They make you look great

2. They give you social proof

3. They improve your messaging

4. It’s instant, actionable feedback on tap

5. They can help shape your product roadmap

But I received a few replies shortly after hitting ‘send’, featuring an important request…

A fair point. 

So I’m going to throw out a few ideas for how you can get better at collecting reviews for your product. Hit reply if you’re still struggling after reading - I’ll be very happy to have a chat (or at least leave you a review myself!) 

1. It’s a family affair

If you’re just getting started with your product, you may need to get some help from friends and family. This is totally fine to begin with. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere. Plus it’ll help improve discoverability for other users on the various review platforms you’re featured on, so soon enough you’ll be able to accumulate reviews from people you don’t know.

Just ask your friends to be honest and frank with their feedback, to make sure you’re also gathering actionable insights (as well as boosting your onsite visibility and ratings.)

2. Partner with Product

Let’s be honest. The most likely scenario for someone to organically leave a review for your product is if you bake that experience into the product itself. Choose a moment where you’re not getting in the way of the user’s experience and request a review, linking to your platform of choice. Perhaps at the end of a purchase flow? Or after a user hits a certain session length?

3. Test and learn

Work with your Product team to experiment with the best way to surface a review request in your product. Play around with placement, messaging, the style of request (is it a chatbot popup or an interstitial takeover of the whole screen?) and other elements. Eventually you’ll find a combination that works best for your product and users, and become a review-gathering machine.

4. Show them the $$$

If you’re in pressing need of a lot of reviews, then the best method is to offer an incentive to your customers. Every internet company out there is asking customers for the same thing, so if reviews are important to your product marketing strategy you’ll need an incentive to make you stand out in the crowd. 

Some websites, like G2, make this incredibly easy, allowing you to fully automate review campaigns over email and offer your customers an incentive, like an Amazon gift voucher, in return for a short review. Even better, you can plug this in to a NPS score tool like Delighted, and encourage your most satisfied customers to add a review to your page. 

5. Run a social media competition

Similarly, if you want to create a sense of urgency, you could run a week-long social media campaign that enters everyone who leaves a review for your product during that time period into a prize draw. 

Perhaps you could offer a free year (or lifetime’s supply?) of your product to keep the focus of the campaign about you. 

6. Sneak ‘em into a survey

You could also add a final message at the end of the next survey you run (perhaps a Product Market Fit survey?) asking the participant to submit a review. If someone has completed a survey for you, they’re likely to be an engaged customer and will probably be open to posting feedback. 

7. Take it to email 

Other than featuring a request inside your product itself, the best channel for collecting reviews is via email. Include review requests in your purchase confirmation emails. And definitely include them in your Customer Support communications for when you’ve resolved an issue. 

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These are just some of the ways you can go about collecting reviews for your product. Give them a try and let me know how you get on. 

And if you’re enjoying these emails, please forward them on to your product marketing friends!

Cheers 👋

Rory