According to the G2 and Heinz Marketing report, 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review. Business decisions for acquiring and updating the tech stack is a tough decision. G2 Crowd is a platform that is designed to help organizations discover and compare products easily and make buying decisions powered by reviews from verified users. There are more than 250,000 authenticated user reviews that serve as the voice of the customer. The platform brings in more than 1 million visitors with high intent of buying.‍

G2 and Capterra are great platforms to:

1. Get discovered by your target audience
2. Build trust with your customers in the middle or later stages of the buying funnel

Once we had a critical base of users on Wingman, we wanted to make sure that new users could hear about Wingman from them and not just from us. So we launched our campaign to get customer reviews for Wingman on G2 and Capterra, and it immediately put us on the ‘grid’ in our category of Conversation Intelligence and AI Sales-Assistant.

What you will learn

1. How to run a campaign to get great product reviews?
2. Different tools and platforms used to streamline the review process.
3. Creating the best experience for customers reviewing your product.
4. Best Email template for the review-campaign and follow ups.

As an early stage B2B startup, getting reviews on G2Crowd and other review platforms seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. With more and more customers doing a lot of their research on these platforms before making buying decisions, SaaS companies need to acquire lots of users before enough of them will write reviews and the product has a presence on these platforms. And to have a lot of reviews you need more customers buying your product.

Wingman is a fairly early stage SaaS product that has received some great reviews on G2Crowd and Capterra.

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This post explains how we achieved getting more reviews and the tools we used!

Ask for reviews

A LSA survey states that 68% of consumers left businesses reviews when they were requested to. Asking for reviews definitely won’t hurt. So instead of being hesitant we decided to ask our customers. Since G2 Crowd reviews aren’t as easy to submit we decided to see what we can do to encourage more customers to write for us.  

Who should review?

We invited our users to write reviews on these platforms for an incentive (more about that later). We set up a campaign on Intercom to send emails requesting these reviews automatically.

We use this campaign to send the emails to all users who first logged in to the platform over 30 days ago and have been active in the last 30 days. We selected users who:

• Had become familiar with the product
• Had seen some value through repeat usage

Depending on your product and audience, you could consider different conditions for which users to send these campaigns for. For example, if you were building say, Notion, you could send this campaign to users who have created at least 10 blocks or created 3 new pages.

How to contact them?

We use Intercom on our product and so this was the most logical place for us to set up the campaign. The next decision was how many times we should write to them. We wanted to make sure they got the message but didn’t want it to be spammy.

Follow Up with the best customer experience possible

We went with a 2-email campaign the first one to make them aware and the second one as a reminder if they were busy when they saw the initial message, since the reviews will need 10-15 mins of their time.

Thanks to the follow up email, we got a 150% higher total response rate. A ‘response’ is users telling us that they had written a review. On receiving a email from a user we sent them Amazon gift cards. We did not wait for the review to post on G2Crowd or to add additional friction for verification and just trusted our users on this. This trust paid off - the number of gift cards we’ve sent out closely matches the total number of reviews we have on G2Crowd and Capterra combined.

Make it easier for customers 

The drop off rate is significantly higher with each additional step in a process that the user doesn’t particularly want to participate in. We had to take necessary steps to make sure that we did everything we can educate the customer on “how to write a G2 crowd review. 

We created a step by step instruction word document to guide our customers to writing a review on both G2 Crow and Capterra. This helped us get more customers to leave reviews for us on these platforms

What to say?

Here are the templates for the actual emails themselves.

Email number 1:

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The second followup email was sent 5 days after the first email. This was the template we created for this:

What experiments to run?

Here are a few suggestions for things you can experiment with:

• Target audience: you can tweak the parameters to determine an ‘engaged’ audience
• Sender: CEO vs CPO vs CSM could be some options
• Cadence & timing: time of the day, day of the week and how many touchpoints
• Incentives: Product credits, coffee shop gift cards or other thematic giveaways.

                                            Go ahead and earn that badge on G2Crowd