As a business owner, you would love customers to share their experience with friends and family that they know they’d love and benefit from but why limit them to the people they know when you can help them to share their experience further. to help expand the net when fishing for new customers and this is achieved with an incredible follow-up email.
Now, what makes a great follow-up email? well, a follow-up request needs some personalisation to connect with the customer in order for them to take the time to write a review.
key items to consider when crafting the perfect post-sale email campaign:
- Message value, purpose, length and clarity
- Personality style, branding and voice
- Campaign timing, frequency, urgency and deliverability
- Conversation analysis, optimisation and testing
Find Your Purpose
the message you send to your customers needs to have a clear purpose, specific directions to achieve that purpose, an appropriate length, and value in order to achieve an online review, however, the email doesn’t need to be complicated or difficult to write, the last thing you want to do is shoot yourself in the foot. You want your customers to open the email, read the messages and move directly on to completing a positive review for your company.
The point of this email is to gain a review, not to promote social media channels, recent blog posts or the newest promotions. Think about what you want the customer to review, is it a product? or a person who helped them?
The Art of the Prompt
By including specific prompts can help gain reviews that focus on points that will help guide the customer through the review. An example of this is “how was your experience with the person who helped you? let us know who it was so we can let them know” Requesting specific detail will help to add further value to the review. It is also important to add exact links to follow, the last thing you want to do is discourage the customer from sharing a review if they get lost or confused, making the process easy.
Personality style, Branding and Voice
Remember that the length of the email is important, making an email too long will cause the recipient to miss the call to action, try to keep the email concise. It’s good to let your personality shine through, and find various ways to appear human in tone, but don’t distract from the goal of the email.
Tips for adding personality to your email:
- Create a “thank you” video.
- it doesn’t need to be any longer than a minute, pick someone from the business that comes across well on video and epitomises your company culture.
- tell a short mini-story.
- Did a recent review help another customer? in 2-3 sentences, share how that previous customer’s review helped other people decide that your company was the right fit for them.
- include a ‘pro-tip’ to have an even better experience next time. do they have a special trivia night on Thursdays?
One nice aspect of automated email campaigns is that timing will be predetermined. You want to send the first review request whilst the experience is fresh in the customer’s mind, especially if you want to increase the chance of them including specific details in the review.
Tips for the Campaign Trial
A three-email campaign can be used over the course of a week which seems to be the sweet spot between being pushy and needing to remind a customer. You want to increase the urgency of the message with each email, however, don’t make the customer feel as if they are running out of time to review but a prompt to review whilst the experience is fresh.
Once you have the review funnel set up, you can begin to see how successful your email campaign is, we recommend a month to pass to secure reviews to show an accurate benchmark. This then can be followed up will trials to improve the campaign to see what works effectively one change at a time.
Variables to test over the course of the campaign could include:
- Subject lines
- Greeting
- The first sentence of the email
- Main value sentence
- Call to action (button vs link, button colour, messaging)
- Other variables such as graphics or videos
-
Make sure to keep a note of these changes to track how effective they are.
Final Thoughts
Collecting reviews is an ongoing process. Every single review has its value. Even negative reviews help to reveal insights into what might not be working with your product or service. use the information to your advantage to improve the happiness of your customers and your future reviews. Optimising that review-generating email campaign will give you the best chance to nurture a dynamic review stream to set you apart from competitors.
Remember that even though you are providing a tip, this isn’t the time to divert attention away from the key purpose.
If you want to find out more on this topic and get into the nitty-gritty details, then take a look here.
