How to Prepare for Award Seasons
Awards are a pivotal part of marketing and can be used to push your product to the front of a buyer’s decision making journey. Awards showcase that you may either be top rated in your category or a buyer’s first choice when purchasing a new product. To make sure that you qualify and hopefully win an award with TrustRadius it is important to start early with driving new reviews.
Each TrustRadius award has different qualifications, which you can view here. There are deadlines in place for each award and you can use these deadlines to give you an idea of when to run your campaigns. Of course, running them throughout the year is usually best, because you can gradually build up reviews and get ahead of the game by the time the award deadlines are due.
At the very least try to get your campaigns completed one month before the deadline to give yourself a few weeks to reach the review count. You can submit customer lists and request certain campaign types for TrustRadius to run on your behalf, and you can maximize the review generation efforts by running DIY campaigns. Below is a guide to running DIY campaigns to qualify for awards.
1. Get all of the key information per award
Like mentioned earlier, each award has different qualifications and deadlines. It is important to keep track of those and communicate with your CSM on the best ways to reach the qualifications. For example, our newly announced award, the Buyer’s Choice Award, requires 10 new reviews to be published from January 1, 2024 through September 26, 2024. Whereas the Top Rated award can be 10 new or updated reviews from the last 12 months. Leading up to the award you will want to monitor your review count to make sure you are getting the quality reviews that you need to qualify.
2. Start the DIY Review Generation Campaigns
Once you have an idea on how many reviews you need to gather, start deciding what type of campaigns you want to run. As early as you can, you’ll want to start running campaigns. Email campaigns are a great place to start, but if you are interested in running other campaigns such as social media, website, or SMS, read this blog post.
You can submit a request for a DIY campaign link or request it directly to your CSM. Having a campaign link is important because you can add a gift card incentive, whether it is $25, $30, $50 or more. The incentive increases the likelihood of your customer writing a review because they can get something back. Campaign links can also be tracked for clicks and the campaign code associated shows where the reviews are coming from so you know which campaigns are performing higher if you decide to run multiple. Once you have received your DIY campaign link, start plugging them in to your campaigns and send away!
As for the email campaign itself, feel free to use this generic template for your email campaigns, or if you want to spice things up, I’ve included a new email campaign template below to help you drive reviews for awards season.
Email 1:
Subject Line: Awards Season + Your Review = $25 Gift Card
Email Copy:
Hi {first name},
We have loved having you as a customer this year and we hope that you have enjoyed using {product name}. We are currently trying to gather new reviews this year in hopes of winning the TrustRadius 2025 Buyer’s Choice award. TrustRadius is the most trusted review site for B2B software.
If you have a few minutes, we’d love to hear about your experience using {product name}. Just click here to start your review.
{Review us} button
And to show our appreciation for helping us get closer to winning this award, you will receive a $25 gift card once your review is published.
Thank you for being an amazing customer,
Sign-off
Email 2:
Subject Line: Last chance: $50 Gift Card for your review
Email Copy:
Hi {first name},
We are following up with our previous email about leaving a review on TrustRadius. We only need a few more reviews to qualify for the award, however we know that you are busy so we would like to sweeten the offer. If you write a review by {deadline} you will now receive a $50 gift card.
We look forward to reading your review soon.
Thank you,
Sign-off
Fun Tip: Did you know that TrustRadius can actually look over your campaigns before you send them out? If you have an email campaign and would like our team to review the copy, submit a request here. Just select ‘Review Campaigns’ under request type and then other.
3. Check in on your campaigns and award qualifying status
Once you have started running your campaigns, check in on the vendor portal or with your CSM to see how many reviews have been published and what your statuses are on the other award qualifications. Do this step at least 1-2 months before the deadline so you can review and see if you need to continue running campaigns to generate new reviews. If you are still a few reviews away from qualifying then try switching up your approach to campaigns. Maybe try a new subject line in an email or really push hard on social media. You can also try upping your gift card incentive amount or add in an extra incentive like a free branded shirt or a product discount.
It’s important to start preparing for awards as early as you can. Sending TrustRadius your updated customer lists and running your own campaigns throughout the year is the best way to stay prepared.
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