While subject lines do not make or break a review campaign, it does help your overall conversion rate and gets more people to open up your email (or stay away). It’s also one of the easiest parts of an email to test to see what your audience responds to better.

Overall, we find that adding the gift card amount to the subject line catches someone’s attention – typically garnering open rates 13-20% higher than the counterparts not using a gift card amount.

Customer Campaigns:

For our customer campaigns, we send out three emails. Below is an example of what you can use for your subject lines to be high performing. Always consider your own audience and make changes or utilize A/B tests to get the best open rates.

For initial email review campaign:

Hi {first name or default there}, review {Product Name} for a $25 gift card!

• Straight to the point, stating the action and the reward is great for the first email send
• Including the first name to make it more personalized

For follow up email review campaign:

“Hi {first name or default there}, your $25 gift card is waiting for you.”

• Including a gift card amount has shown an increase to open rates! 
• You can use a preheader to state that a written review will get the gift card.   

For last attempt email review campaign:

“Hi {first name or default there}, it’s the last day to claim your $50 gift card!

• Stating it is the last day or last chance to claim something creates a sense of FOMO and will help to increase open rates, especially with an increase to the incentive amount as well
• Use a preheader to state that their gift card amount has been increased for a written review.

Get their attention with an immediate reaction:

Another top performing subject line is integrating someone else’s experience to have someone think, “do I think the same way about it?”

For example: Is {productname} really “set it and forget it”?

Head over to your reviews or favorite snippets in the Vendor Portal and take a look at your  options. You’ll want to find a piece that is short and sweet – and make sure to include parenthesis around their words.

Take it a step further and link to the review in the email so that people can get an understanding of what they will be talking about:

“This reviewer said that {productname} was essentially “set it and forget it,” and I’m curious if you had the same experience?”

Standard Community Campaign:

We find that the highest performing subject lines we use when sending out emails for our customers are very similar to those that work well with our community of reviewers. That’s why you’ll find that the emails below are eerily similar to the ones above. We’ve been testing and honing in on these subject lines for over a decade, and we find that the audiences perform similarly.

Within our community, we’re always learning tech stacks – so when we’re looking for reviews of those products, we know who to call on to leave their feedback.

These are the top-performing subject line for the 3-part email series:

Email 1: What do you think of {Product Name}? Review and earn $25!

Email 2: Reminder: Leave a Review by {DAY} and earn $25

Email 3: {first name}, today’s the last day for $25!

Post-Survey:

At TrustRadius, we have a campaign called Ratings-to-Reviews (R2R). We know the overall number sentiment of the user, but we want them to leave more useful details. You could pull this in to something similar from an NPS score or internal survey, asking them to expand on their thoughts by leaving a review on TrustRadius.

The best performing subject line we’ve seen from this campaign is:

Hey, {firstname}, would you still rate {productname} a {rating}?

Preheader: Finish a full review and earn $25!

The personalization for this subject line goes beyond the first name – it’s a reminder to the user of their previous thoughts and invites them to think about it a bit deeper. Would they still rate the product the same? How has their experience been since then? It allows them to start reviewing the product in their head before starting the review, making the decision to move forward even easier.

Want more subject line assistance? Head over to our piece on 10 Subject Line Tips and Best Practices to get more insight into subject lines for review invitations.