TrustRadius Review Growth Kit

Are you ready to get your customers on the record? We've put together this free resource that will help you start driving reviews and getting in touch with the voice of your customers.

Partner with TrustRadius

If you need help sourcing reviews and providing incentives to your customers, schedule an appointment to explore a partnership with TrustRadius. We can take your review strategy to the next level and have our experts manage your review generation campaigns.

Email Templates
Social Media
Email Signatures
Embedded Invitations
TrustRadius Ratings Badge

Email Templates

Access Email Templates

Organizing email campaigns is the most successful single method that our customers have used to gather reviews.

Follow these steps to plan a successful email campaign:

1. Prepare your customer list.

We suggest that you use as wide a sample as possible. You’ll need at least a name and an email address for each contact. Make sure you have permission to contact everyone on your list, remove any duplicates, and apply any standard exclusions. If you are able to segment your customer list, try to include everyone who meets the following criteria:

  • Active: they have used your product within the last year
  • Established: they have been using your product for at least 3, but preferably 6+ months
  • Familiar: they log in or use your product regularly

If you plan to drive reviews for more than one product, please request a TrustRadius multi-product landing page. It’s free and identical in function to the single-product landing page, but you’ll be able to include a single link in your review invitation and avoid segmenting your customer list by which product(s) they use.

2. Create your emails.

The TrustRadius Review Toolkit includes two email templates, with optional language that will allow you to include an incentive for your customers. You can incorporate this text into a new message using your company’s branded email template or send a plain text email, either via your email marketing tool or a personal inbox.

Feel free to change the copy to fit your brand! You are the expert in what type of messaging resonates best with your customers, but we use the following best practices to craft high-performing review invitations:

  • Personalize your message: Address your customers by name, and tailor your message to your audience wherever possible. (More details on that in the next section.)
  • Set reasonable expectations: Let your customers know how long the review process should take (usually 10-15 minutes), why it’s important to you, and/or what to expect in return.
  • Include a clickable button or link: You want your reader to see at a glance where they need to click to get started on their review.
  • Stay short and to the point: Don’t sacrifice necessary specifics for brevity, but short and sweet is the way to go!
  • Create a sense of urgency: Consider setting a deadline for submissions or creating a fun contest, like “the first ten reviewers get a piece of company swag”.

3. Schedule your invitations.

Timing is everything when it comes to asking for reviews. If you have a regular schedule of customer interactions, be sure to fit your review program into it in advance. Here are some other ways that our customers have scheduled their email campaigns:

  • Standalone invitation: Either on a one-off basis or on a regular schedule, send a review invitation to all active customers. This allows you to get a broad overview of customers at all stages.
  • “Established customer” invitation: When a customer has reached a certain milestone, your email marketing tool sends them a review invitation. For instance, you could schedule a review invitation email for between 3 and 6 months after they complete onboarding. This type of ongoing campaign gives you insight into the experience of your newer customers and helps keep your review content fresh.
  • Pre-renewal invitation: You send a review invitation to customers at a specified interval prior to their renewal date. This type of program helps you get the feedback of more experienced users and can improve retention by highlighting any pain points that can be addressed prior to renewal.

4. Follow up.

We also strongly recommend building follow-up emails into your outreach schedule. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but a simple follow-up sent 2-7 days after the first will often generate almost the same number of reviews as the first touch.

5. Assess your success.

A few days after your initial and follow-up emails are sent, take some time to evaluate your open rates, click-through rates, and reviews generated to judge the overall success of your campaign. Growing your review growth muscles is a learning process! If you’d like feedback from the TrustRadius team on how your email campaign went, feel free to reach out.

Social Media

Download Social Images

Do your customers follow you on social media? Give them the option to write a review as they scroll through their feed.

Just post one of the images including in the kit download above (or one of your own) and ask them for their feedback!

You can include some of the sample copy below or write your own post, but don’t forget to include your custom review link.

Here’s how to plan a social media review campaign:

1. Choose your platform.

Will you post on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or some combination of the three? All files included in the toolkit download will be labeled according to the appropriate sizing per the platform, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

2. Choose your image.

Decide whether you’d like to use your own image or one of ours in your social media post. We suggest that you personalize whichever image you choose based on your brand and your audience.

The images contained in the kit are simply templates to build on. The toolkit contains files with text left and right or an image overlay option. You are welcome to add your branding, logo, and text to these images.

If your brand/logo needs to be against a white backdrop, we suggest adding a white circle, then including your image inside the circle to best showcase it appropriately.

3. Choose your copy.

Include a simple one- or two-sentence request for current customers to write reviews, and share your custom review link.

Below are a few examples of copy that you could include in your social media post. Feel free to use any one of these or write your own:

  • {your company name} values our customers, and we’d love to hear how we’re doing! If you’re a current customer, simply follow this link to leave us a review: {custom review link}
  • Do you have feedback about your experience with {company or product}? Let us know! Click here to write a review on TrustRadius: {custom review link}
  • We want to hear from you! If you’re a current customer with {product} expertise, we’d love to get your feedback: {custom review link}

4. Choose when to post.

Try to time your post to when you think your customers will be online and ready to write a review.

Examples of when you might choose to post:

–After a big company announcement

–Before, during, and after your company’s digital event

–At times of day when you usually get the most engagement

Email Signatures

Download Email Signature

Adding a review invitation to the email signature of any client-facing teams (like Customer Success) gives your customers an opportunity to weigh in at every interaction.

To add a review invitation to an email signature, insert the file called “Email Signature Button” or “Email Footer” wherever your email provider lets you customize your signature, and hyperlink to your custom review link.

Specific instructions for some popular providers are below:

In Gmail:

  • Navigate to “Settings” (the gear icon) > “General” and scroll down to “Signature”.
  • From the editor, select “Insert image” (the mountain icon) and choose the image file included in the toolkit called “Email Signature Button”. (You may need to resize the image.)
  • Highlight the image and click “Link” (the chain-link icon). Insert your custom review link. (Instructions on where to get it are at the top of this doc.)
  • Select “Save changes” at the bottom of the Settings menu.

In Outlook:

  • Open a new email message.
  • On the “Message” menu, select “Signature” > “Signatures”.
  • In the “Select signature to edit” box, choose the signature you want to edit. (You can also create a new signature if you don’t have one already.)
  • Select “Image” (the mountain + monitor icon), choose the image file included in the toolkit called “Email Signature Button”, and click “Insert”. (You may need to resize the image.)
  • Highlight the image and click “Link” (the globe + infinity icon). Insert your custom review link and click “OK”. (Instructions on where to get it are at the top of this doc.)

Embedded Invitations

Download Embeddable Images

TrustRadius customers who see the most successful sourcing reviews differentiate their review growth approach.

By incorporating a review invitation into your regular communications with customers or parts of your site/product that your customers habitually interact with, you can gather reviews continually with a little bit of upfront effort.

Here are some tried-and-true methods you can try:

  • Add a “leave a review” button on your home page, contact page, blog pages, or elsewhere on your website.
  • If you offer online support, end the conversation with a request for a review.
  • Incorporate a short review ask into your customer digest/newsletter. We’ve included an image in the download above, but you can also say something like:
    “Help others learn about {product}: If you have a few minutes, please consider writing a review of {product} on TrustRadius. Your feedback will provide guidance on how we can improve, and help people like you learn about and evaluate {product}.”
  • Include a request for a review on your log-in screen.
  • Use an existing partnership with a third-party tool like Pendo or Influitive to create and serve a review invitation in your product.

TrustRadius Ratings Badge

Download Ratings Badge

Once your product has at least one review, you can also add the free downloadable TrustRadius Ratings Badge to the email signatures of any other external-facing teams, like Sales.

The TrustRadius Ratings Badge is a dynamic widget that displays the real-time rating for your product on TrustRadius and invites users to read your reviews. Download your custom product Ratings Badge here.

Step 1: Get your review invitation link.

We recommend you use your product’s custom TrustRadius landing page in conjunction with the assets included in this toolkit.

This URL takes potential reviewers to the beginning of the review flow for your product. We can also provide you with a multi-product landing page to source reviews for several products at once.

If you have already claimed your vendor profile on TrustRadius, you can get your link by logging in and navigating to Reviews > Acquire reviews from your vendor dashboard. Log in or click here to claim your profile.

Otherwise, you can fill out request your link(s) by clicking below.

Step 2: Download the assets above.

Click on the tabs above to navigate asset downloads. We’ve compiled everything you’ll need to fuel your review generation campaigns, including:

  • Templates for review generation email campaigns, with optional language for offering a review incentive to your customers
  • High-resolution images formatted to post on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook
  • Review invitation banners for use in client-facing email signatures
  • Images and text to include in your next newsletter, customer digest, or right on your website

Step 3: Choose your strategy.

Now comes the fun part! Using the instructions above, start planning how you’ll reach out to your customers to ask for their review of your product or products.

Step 4: Track your success.

If you have already claimed your vendor profile on TrustRadius, log in to track your review growth over time.

From the vendor portal, you can also update your product and vendor profiles, see who’s visited your product page, and find the answers to some of your more in-depth questions. Click here to read more and claim your profile if you haven’t already.

You can also check out your product page on TrustRadius to read incoming reviews.

FAQs

Why do I need to source reviews?

100% of the buyer’s journey is now digital.

Your potential customers are visiting review sites like TrustRadius to evaluate you and your competition. With in-person events canceled, peer networking and digital interactions are more important than ever.

Reviews are buyers’ #1 resource.

Research shows that reviews are the #1 resource buyers use to evaluate products entirely independent of vendors. A significant number of today’s buyers aren’t even willing to speak to a salesperson. They want self-service, authentic, credible information – and they’re looking to reviews to get it.

Buyers care about balance.

77% of buyers want to understand the cons (as well as the pros) before they buy. Balanced feedback helps buyers get the full picture on your product as they weigh all their options. When they don’t find what they’re looking for, many buyers will move on to something else.

Your advocates say it best.

Current customers are your most effective marketers. Buyers trust the voice of their peers over your marketing messages, and reviews tell them why your product is important in words they can relate to.

How do reviews on TrustRadius benefit me?

Market influence

Each month, over 1 million tech professionals visit TrustRadius and use our reviews to make buying decisions. The more reviews you have, the more real estate you can claim for your products on the fastest-growing B2B tech review platform on the market.

Higher placement

Products on TrustRadius are grouped into relevant categories, and are often displayed in order of review count. By driving more reviews, you can show up as one of the first results in your category. We’ve observed that only 1 out of every 3 users scrolls down to the bottom of a product list on our site– so by driving more reviews, you ensure your product has prime visibility.

SEO improvement

Many tech companies choose to drive reviews on TrustRadius because our content ranks well for their highest-priority search terms. More reviews translate into SEO wins for you. Once you’ve sourced about 5 reviews, you’ll begin to see significant SEO gains, including getting mentioned in featured snippets, product comparisons, and category searches.

Award achievements

Once your product receives 10 reviews, you’ll be in the running to win a Top Rated award in your category and show up on TrustMaps. Products included on a TrustMap get, on average, 15x more traffic within their category than products that are not included.

Should I offer incentives?

Incentives like a gift card or piece of swag go a long way toward motivating customers to contribute, but you’ll need to think ahead about the logistics of getting them to your reviewers.

Here are some questions you’ll want to answer before you send your invitations:

  • What do I plan to offer? Gift cards, swag, reward points (if you have them), donations to a charitable organization, or sweepstakes to win a grand prize have all been proven successful.
  • How will I monitor earned incentives? We’ve found that asking your reviewers to forward the email they receive notifying them that their review has been published is a great way to keep track of who’s completed a review. Just make sure that you include those instructions in your review invitation.
  • When will I fulfill incentives? TrustRadius fulfills our incentives once a week for reviewers whom we invite. If you set the expectation that all rewards will be sent on a certain day or date, reviewers are generally happy to wait until then to receive their reward.

What can I expect?

Here are some things to expect when you launch your campaign:

  • You will not get reviews from everyone. Between 2% and 30% of customers will write a review, in our experience. That’s quite a range, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see reviews rolling in initially!
  • Review processing can take up to 7 days. You will then be able to see new published reviews live on your TrustRadius product profile.
  • TrustRadius checks for authenticity and quality. We sometimes return very short or vague reviews to their authors to add more detail, and vet the authors by verifying their identity via LinkedIn or their work email.
  • Your customers can choose to publish reviews anonymously. We can still see their identity, and will vet them like any other reviewer.
  • Some customers/reviewers may have questions. Feel free to reach out to research-team@trustradius.com if you need help answering them.

Learn More

For more information on building a review program and the importance of getting your customers on the record, check out these handy guides:

 

Definitive Guide to B2B Reviews

Driving Demand with Reviews

ROI of Reviews

Supercharge Marketing with Social Proof

The Importance of Reviews to Enterprise Technology Buyers

 

Everything included in the TrustRadius Review Toolkit is free to use. If you have any questions about getting started, please reach out to research-team@trustradius.com.

 

If you’re looking to take your review strategy to the next level and have the experts manage your review generation campaigns, schedule an appointment here to explore a partnership with TrustRadius.