Product reviews such as Capterra and G2 reviews have grown in popularity to become part of the regular B2B purchase journey. But getting customers to leave you raving reviews is not always as easy as customers are busy with their own lives. Read on to learn how to get your best fans to leave you a 5-star review.
This article covers why product reviews are important and why you should go through a bit of trouble trying to get some. The article also lists some of the most common product review questions and best review platforms so you can prepare better when crafting your inbound and outbound messages that get customers to leave reviews.
Reading product reviews has become a part of the B2B purchase journey especially for mid-sized and enterprise businesses. Businesses want to get reviews because the reviews show that customers trust your product. When other customers see your reviews, it creates social proof that someone else is using your product and you should too.
Companies need product reviews because customers are more likely to buy products other people are using and have reviewed to be great.
Reviews give good insight about products, especially in the case of complex B2B products before customers try the products out themselves. It's also easy to discover new products by going to the review platforms and searching your tool category.
Reviews on platforms like G2 and Capterra include a 1 to 5 star rating of your product and a detailed description of how people liked your product. Review Platforms ask customers multiple questions that cover topics such as "how well product x serves your need". It usually takes customers 10-15 minutes to write which makes them higher quality than your average Yelp review.
Your customers are being asked several questions that make up the full review. Most of them are open-ended but they also include the typical NPS score question: "How likely are you to recommend product X to a friend or a colleague?"
Most common questions are:
Reviews also ask for background information, usually firmographic factors such as the size and industry of the company where they used your product.
Sometimes customers are required to provide proof that they are users of your product by providing a screenshot of their account inside your platform. This increases the credibility of the review and reviewer because the product review platforms do simple background checks to make sure no one is leaving fake reviews.
G2 is the most popular product view platform at the moment. It has established itself as a category leader by providing high-quality customer reviews that are validated by its actual validation team.
G2 also publishes coveted trust badges that companies proudly present on their website if they are able to get them. Trust badges create social proof that other people trust your product as well. According to G2, 92% of consumers won't make a purchase without a trust badge or logo on a website.
Capterra is another trusted leader in the product review category. Buyers can find all sorts of guides and research material Capterra provides about different tools for different industries.
While G2 and Capterra are more B2B focused, Trustpilot has a consumer side as well. This makes the number of reviews on Trustpilot potentially much greater in number.
While not strictly a product review platform, the Hubspot App Marketplace is a great review platform for anyone looking for product integrations with Hubspot. Simultaneously, it's important for businesses to be listed on the marketplace to create transparency and awareness. There are millions of potential customers browsing around the Hubspot Marketplace so it's important for every business that integrates with Hubspot to be listed there.
Similar to the Hubspot marketplace, it's important for businesses integrating with Salesforce to be listed on the AppExchange which is Salesforce's own marketplace. Millions of businesses try to find how to add value to their current technology stack with integrations directly from the Salesforce marketplace.
For all strategies here, first you need a CRM export of your customers. You shouldn't try to fake customer reviews because it can erode customer trust in your business. So if you don't have enough customers yet, go get some more before coming back to these strategies.
Use your website to show your customers that you need their help and to leave you a review on any of the common platforms. It pays to be specific about what platform you want them to leave a review and if you provide a time estimate the customer is more likely to take action. The great thing about using your website to ask for reviews is that customers visit it multiple times during the customer lifecycle.
You should personalize your website so that only existing customers see your call-to-action for the reviews. You can easily show them a popup window or a sticky bar where you do your ask. You can also embed the personalization anywhere where it makes contextually sense if you believe customers ignore most popups.
You can use website personalization to ask product reviews only from your most raving existing customers without causing a bad customer experience to rest of your customers.
If you want to get only your best customers to leave you a review, personalize your website so that only customers who have previously given you an NPS score over 8 see your product review call-to-action. It pays to start collecting NPS data from customers as soon as you launch your product and to do so on a continuous basis.
You can utilize your chatbots to make a popup notification immediately after a customer has taken some certain action. Good actions would be that they just gave you a 10 on your NPS survey or that logged into your product for the 10th time within a week signaling they're a heavy user of your product. You can pop up your chatbot inside your product or on your website. The challenge with this approach is that customers have learned to ignore chatbots similarly to banner blindness.
You can reach out to your customer base via email if they have given it to you when they signed up for your product. Sending an email is a bit out of the context of your product and you never know when the customer actually is reading your email, could be the middle of the night. If you pick out a good email tool, then the job becomes much easier.
While being interruptive marketing, doing email outreach is a good way to ask customers to leave a review, but it's recommended to do so only from your best customers. Customers who are already not very big fans of your product but still use it might report you as spam.
Linkedin outreach is an effective way to ask for product reviews as it's a more informal way of communicating and the business context is already set by the platform. Instead of starting with your pitch directly, start a conversation with the customer. Ask if they like your product, how they have found using it, and if they would be open to leaving a review.
Getting product reviews is important for any B2B and B2C business because buyers are looking for trust signals when considering your product. Getting good reviews should be one of the marketing goals of any any business.
Getting your best customers leaving you glowing reviews is essential for achieving high overall review score. There's multiple different strategies you can employ to get those reviews using inbound and outbound tactics. Combining both types of startegies will lead to the best outcome.