8 Tips to Gather More Reviews (and Beyond That) with Email Templates
By Lily Vuong
Nov 20, 2020
It’s important to keep your review request emails stand out from the crowd. In today’s fast-changing world, our attention span is affected by multiple marketing channels. 87% of marketers are using emails, and a typical American worker receives 126 emails every day. In this 2-part article,
We’ll outline some UX design tips to help you to improve your email conversion rate and gather more verified reviews with Judge.me, and
Showcase example emails from our Judge.me users with high review conversion rates
*Note: Need more info about building templates? We recommend our previous article about using our drag-and-drop email template editor.
1/ Align your email look with your brand
Brand consistency is vital to the success of all your marketing activities because it helps you build brand awareness and establish trust among your customers. Therefore, your review request email campaigns need to align with your brand identity as well. Our email templates provide you with various customizing options, such as adding your own logo, changing the background color, font family, and so on.
2/ Keep your layout simple
Simplicity is best. And simple design doesn’t mean sketchy design - rather, it’s how you make your design single-minded, especially when you are designing content in a limited space like email. Try not to overwhelm your customers with too many components in your email.
You can choose among four types of layouts: full-width, 50-50, 34-66 and 66-34. A single-column design is a better option to make important elements stand out, but a two-column design is also useful in some cases where the content is better grouped together.
3/ Keep your message concise, engaging and personalized
A concise and engaging message greatly contributes to the success of your email campaign. Start your email with a warm greeting and go straight to the point of why your customers are receiving this email. Judge.me provides you several variables to customize your message, such as “buyer name”, “shop name”, “order quantity, “product title” and so on. Just play around with the variables to bring a more personalized experience to your customers.
4/ Use high-quality, relevant visuals
Research points out that if you hear a piece of information, three days after you'll remember only 10% of it. But if that information is paired with a picture, you’ll remember 65%. These stats prove the importance of visuals in email marketing. Adding a nice picture of your product can help attract your customers’ attention as soon as they open the email and remind them to give you a review.
5/ Have a good mix of available Judge.me Review Request Components
Judge.me provides you ready-made review request components that make your life easier, test them out and find the best combinations for your email. Some Review Request components available:
Forms: collect reviews for a single product via an in-email from
Multi-Product: collect reviews of multiple products following the predetermined sequence (most expensive, least expensive, random, least reviews)
Stars: step-by-step review form for a single product asking customers to upload a picture or video first
Shop reviews: collect overall reviews for your shop
Suggestions: recommended products to up-sell and cross-sell new products to your customers
6/ Be mindful of your email targets and schedules
Who?
Of course, it’s important to gather as many reviews as possible from customers who fulfill your orders. However, there might be some customers who you wouldn’t want to send a review request email. For example, these customers have already given you the reviews via different channels and you don’t want to bother them with duplicate requests.
When?
The optimal time to send a review request emails depends on your business. For example, if you are a delivery service provider, you may ask reviews right after your service is fulfilled. In the case of e-commerce, especially if you are selling high-value products like electronics, you may need to wait from 7-30 days until your customers have experienced the products and can give you detailed reviews. Learn how to configure the timing and other settings for your review request emails.
7/ Localize your Emails
Email localization is necessary, especially when you are selling in multiple countries. Do you know that you can send review request emails in multiple languages based on your customer’s choice of shop languages? For example, if you are a Canadian store, you may want to have separate stores and emails for English and French-speaking customers. Now you can totally do that with Multiple Language Emails.
8/ Make use of A/B testing feature
A/B testing helps you send out different versions of your email templates to determine which one works better. Judge.me provides you an easy-to-use A/B testing tool. What you need to do is create different email templates and create an A/B test with your desired stopping rules.
Examples of well-designed templates
1/ Mudpuppy
Align the email look with the brand identity
Use the combination of Form & Suggestion
Customize the message and provide 20% discount for each submitted reviews
2/ Bidetry
Align the email look with the brand identity
Customize the message, starting with an engaging question: Did you have a life-changing experience?
Use the custom form to ask: How did you hear about us?
Use the combination of Form and Shop Reviews
3/ Zazu
Align the email look with the brand identity
Customize the message
Use Picture block to showcase the product image
Localize the email language (Spanish)
Use the combination of Form and Multi-Product
Email conversion rate increased from 8% (January 2020) to 15% (March 2020)
4/ Pawz
Align the email look with the brand identity
Use Picture block to showcase attractive headline and hero image
Customize the message
Use the combination of Form and Suggestions
5/ Ruby Olive
Align the email look with the brand identity
Customize the message
Use Picture block to showcase the product image
Use the combination of Form, Multi-Review, Shop Reviews
6/ Respire
Align the email look with the brand identity
Customize the message
Use Picture block to showcase the product image
Localize the email language (French)
Have your own tips!
The above tips help you make use of the features in Email Templates and collect more reviews. However, you can also develop your own tips based on the nature of your business and how your customers are engaging with your emails over time.
For example, text-heavy emails can be useful if they are made to serve a special purpose. Standout Designs use a text-heavy email but make their message convincing and engaging enough, together with a Star block that encourages customers to submit a review with a picture or video first. In fact, they received a 17% conversion rate in March 2020 thanks to this email template.
All email insights can be found in our Reports, which helps you make more informed decisions for your review collecting process.
See more examples of email templates and Judge.me widgets on our inspiration page.
