For reviews, are you sending emails out to customers with a link directly to G2, TrustRadius, etc.? or are you sending them to a single page where they can add their review and then populate one of the sites with the review?
Directly, and usually I focus on one at a time. So whichever one you want to build out say, this month, I'd focus there and can always switch it up. In my experience if you give them too many options then they don't do anything. Also the auto-populate where you’re pushing the review on their behalf can be messy and flag the review if it's all coming from one source, your 3rd party, in the eyes of the review platform. Or sometimes doesn't work well or have added steps and frustrate the user and they give up. So IMO, direct is best and gets more results. But that's just my experience and two cents!
Thanks! I'm about to start some client work, and this client unfortunately doesn't have great reviews overall. So a bit nervous about sending their customers to review sites where they can see the negative reviews!
Oh yes, I worked at a review generation company for 6 years and to some capacity ever since, and that's always going to be the case. But the review sites are very wary of filtering reviews so they are 5-star and they have no problem stripping down your reviews at any time with no explanation if they are even a little suspicious. For example, if you're caught asking the user for a simple NPS, and if it's 9 or 10, then triggering a review request only for high scores? Oooooh Google and Yelp especially get mad. So, it's a tricky conversation as their marketer because you can't say, “just always do good work!!” (Haha) but there are plenty of ways to handle bad reviews when they come in, they always will, and that's why volume is important. Respond directly to the bad review for the world watching online, then offer to resolve the issue directly. Hope any of that is helpful! The target is always moving to get online reviews so it’s good to keep asking these questions!
I had no clue about the NPS side too! Didn't feel sneaky at all to trigger a review request after a positive NPS (I have always had other teams running reviews, so haven't had to think as much about it!)
Charlotte Weiss Quick lifecycle marketing hack for ya (may not be relevant depending if you’re working on SaaS or not). Wait to ask for a review until a user just completed the most high-value activity on the platform. That “wow this is so good” moment. Then ask for a review right after they just experienced peak value.
I'm curious what you mean by sending reviewers to a single page to submit their reviews and then populating the sites with that review? I've never seen an option for reviews to be submitted outside of G2/Trustradius/GPI and then added by the business into the platform? So I think I'm misunderstanding.
Charlotte Weiss - I trigger real time asks after NPS 7-10 that typically yields 3.5-5 stars, but also allows an "aways on" slow drip. I currently do a 50-50 split for Capterra and G2. If your client has bad reviews, I'd do some research in LLMs to see which review site is harming them the most and start with that site. I agree with Jon Farah if you can identify high value activity to trigger the ask, you will most likely get a stronger response.
🌶️ take alert Charlotte Weiss... Just forgo email/CSM-based review campaigns all together. Instead concentrate your efforts solely at your marquee events as you have a captive audience of happy/engaged customers at those events that you can easily incentivize with some cool swag and get some more more bang for your buck than struggling over getting your CSMs to follow up on email accounts. And just so you don't think i'm just batshit crazy about this, I have the data to back it up... Old way (email/review campaigns) We used to do targeted review programs (pick our happiest 25-50 customers a quarter and email them directly with a 3 email program and have our CSMs follow up directly) along with sending autoreply emails to our NPS promotes asking them to give a review, and maybe (and that's a strong maybe), we'd get 1 or 2 reviews out of those. New way (event based) In the Q1 of this year (Feb - April), we hosted 6 events, including our flagship GrafanaCON event. At those events alone, we captured 241 GPI reviews, which equaled out to 92% of last year's total, and we still have 9 months and many more events left on the calendar. Even more, the 112 we got from the 2 days of GrafanaCON gave us 66 new 5 ⭐ reviews and an overall ranking of 4.6/5, which boosted our overall ranking up .2 points and because they were mostly our happy customers, the willigness to recommend % number jumped up a whole 5% over last year's final number. So, perhaps i'm just a crazy guy screaming on the mountain top, but i'd like to think i have the evidence that made me crazy 😉
Totally echo what Daniel Palay said... our single customer conference generated 10X reviews than CSM email campaigns (and I didn't have to run a CSM leaderboard and pester them each week!) And at a conference, we gave customers the option to leave a G2 review and/or a Gartner review, so we didn't risk sending two separate emails for different review sites. That said, if you don't have customer events that align well with Gartner and G2 report calendars (or at all) and review timing is important for inclusion in reports, we've done CSM competitions to get them to reach out to customers and request reviews. We've typically only had them focus on one review site with a direct link. If your client is targeting multiple review sites, it might make sense to segment their customer base and send review requests to certain buckets of customer contacts. i.e. I found that executives and larger Fortune 500 companies were much more familiar with Gartner, whereas mid-level managers or smaller customers were more familiar with G2, so if I was tasked with generating Gartner and G2 reviews simultaneously, I might try to segment my customer base to send requests based on persona or company-size.
Love what everyone else has said about multi-threading. That's the #1 way I've been successful in generating reviews. Capturing people in key lifecycle moments, industry events, customer conferences, internal leaderboards/SPIFF, themed customer campaigns (we've done one where we target teams and then give Doordash gift cards to fund a team lunch), etc.
Thank you all! I don't think the client runs many events, so it will likely have to be email based. This is all super helpful. My 1st company where I led global customer marketing was in the hardware space (3D printers), so review sites weren't really helpful for them compared to enterprise software companies. And then at SAP, we had a dedicated reviews team (bet we all wish we had something like that!). Appreciate all of the advice. It's one area I've just not really touched.
Daniel Palay are all of the events IRL? Or virtual too?
Hello all! I’m in the thick of this as well, really enjoying learning from this group and appreciate everyone sharing their experiences and ideas. Daniel Palay at the events, are you taking a more proactive approach to inviting customers to submit reviews, or more of a passive approach (for example, QR codes placed around the event or included in presentation slides/screens)? I'm excited to try this! I’d also be interested in hearing how others approach quarterly targeted email campaigns when CSMs aren’t directly involved in the process and the outreach is coming from Customer Advocacy or a platform such as HubSpot. Reviews are incentivized, but have not had much success. (or is that wishful thinking).
I would love to learn more about how teams are getting more responses across G2 as well! Mary Green do we have an open Friday meeting, where we could discuss this more? Other questions:
How do you handle negative reviews?
When do you respond to customers on the G2 platform in the comments?
When do you reach out to customers off-platform to resolve their "what don't you like about X company" comments? Sometimes they give five stars, but still leave comments on software weaknesses. Do you still reach out?
