How to Ask for a Review: Best Practices, Methods & Templates

46% of people trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family. And 60% of consumers believe the number of reviews a business has is crucial when deciding whether to use its services.

In other words, having plenty of reviews is essential if you want your customers to trust you.

But many businesses don’t want to come off as pushy in their requests. Others simply don’t know how to ask customers for reviews.The result? Countless missed opportunities for collecting raving reviews that could have become amazing marketing assets.

This guide is all about helping you avoid that. If you’re wondering:

• How to ask for a review from customers?
• How to ask for a Google review?
• How to create an email template asking for reviews?

Read on and discover everything you need to know about how to ask for a review, including templates you can use in various situations.

Why You Should Ask for Reviews

Deciding that you want to be proactive in asking for more reviews requires a big shift in how you do things. It means you’ll need to make a commitment and dedicate time, resources, and money to getting more customers to share their opinion about your business.

But while getting started can seem complicated, it’s definitely worth it. Here’s what having a systemized process for collecting reviews can offer:

• Improve Your Marketing. Reviews are hard to beat when it comes to marketing performance. You can use them on your website, on social media, on search engines, on ads, basically anywhere you want to inject trust and showcase what your brand can offer, in the words of your happiest customers.
• Get Feedback. Reviews may not always be positive, but they always offer positives for your business. Every negative review can be a learning opportunity, allowing you to address the issues your customers face and prevent it from happening again.
• Strengthen Relationships. Asking for reviews doesn’t just help your business in the future. Getting someone to take the time to leave a review can make them appreciate what you offer even more. As they articulate why they like working with you, they’re likely to become more loyal customers in the process.
• Increase Brand Trust. 70% of customers will buy more from brands they trust. By showcasing reviews in your marketing, you can break through skepticism and make your claims much easier to believe for people who don’t know you yet.
• Boost SEO Performance. As a bonus, having many reviews and using them to enhance your website copy will provide a significant boost to SEO. By consistently adding new user-generated content to your site’s pages, you can gain an edge over competing sites and start ranking higher for relevant keywords.

Asking for Reviews: Best Practices

There are many ways to ask for reviews. But whether you ask over the phone, in person, or on social media, you need to know how to ask for a review from customers to increase the likelihood of them saying yes.

To help you, here are a few best practices you should consider.

1. Choose the Right Time

Timing plays a key role in whether your customer will take the time to leave a review. It also determines how specific, comprehensive, and useful the review is.

For best results, you want to ask for a review immediately after they have a positive experience with your product or service. This could be a few days after they make a purchase, after you help them achieve a great result, or even after a positive interaction.

When you ask for a review quickly, the positive experience will be fresh on their mind, which increases the likelihood of them leaving a raving review. What’s more, they won’t have time to forget important details, making the review more specific and useful.

2. Personalize It

Many businesses try to automate the review collection process, and that can help get more reviews. But while you can automate some of it, it’s important to avoid sounding impersonal.

Personalize the request as much as possible, trying to sound genuine and highlighting how valuable their input is for your business. You can also emphasize how their experience helps you improve and provide a better service.

3. Make It Easy

Your customers are busy people. Most won’t bother with leaving a review if the process is unclear, complicated, or takes a lot of time. That’s why it’s your job to make leaving a review as easy and fast as possible.

One way to do that is to include clear step-by-step instructions on what they should do. Whether you want your customers to leave instructions on a third-party site like TrustPilot or record a short video, make sure to give them clear steps that don’t take more than a few minutes to complete.

To make the job easier, you can provide frameworks and templates they can use to cover the most important points.

4. Follow Up

If you want to get more reviews from customers, you will need to be persistent. And sometimes, that will mean having to ask them multiple times.

While you don’t want to come off as pushy, following up on your request doesn’t have to be something that your customers will automatically hate. They may have wanted to leave a review after your first request but forgotten, which is why the follow-up message can actually be helpful.

You can set up processes for requesting reviews on multiple platforms, targeting the same people multiple ways and increasing the likelihood of them leaving a review.

How to Ask Customers for Reviews: 4 Essential Methods

From getting on the phone to sending an email, there are countless ways to ask for reviews. But while you may not need to use all of them, it’s a good idea to at least understand how the process could look to evaluate which approaches make more sense in your situation.

Below, we’ll look at the most popular and impactful methods you should consider when discovering how to ask for a review from your customers.

1. Email

99% of email users check their email every day, which makes it an excellent tool for reaching your customers. And since so many conversations with clients go through email, it works great when asking for a review as well.

But since email is such an important communication tool, you also need to make it feel natural and not different from the regular conversations you’re having with the client.

When sending an email asking for reviews, maintain a consistent tone and personalize it to show that it isn’t a generic automated message. A good place to start is to include the customer’s name and mention the product or service you’d like them to review.

You should also get straight to the point and avoid long paragraphs. You want the customer to instantly understand what you want, how to get it done, and why it’s important.

Finally, make the call to action clearly visible so the reader knows exactly where to click. The link should lead to a page where they can either type or record the review. It also helps to provide them with instructions on what to include in the review on the landing page.

Email Review Request Template

“Hi [Name],

Thank you for trusting [Company Name]. We hope you had a great experience with [Product or Service]!

Would you mind leaving a review and sharing your thoughts? It will only take a few minutes.

Here’s a link that will take you to the review page:

[Insert Link]

Your review will help others understand how our solution works. Plus, we are always looking for ways to improve and would love to hear about your experience.

Thank you for your time and for being a valued customer!

Best Regards,

[Name] [Company]”

How to Automate

Automating the process of asking for a review over email is relatively straightforward. In fact, you have a variety of options that you can choose from based on the software you’re using and the way you want the process to work.

Here are a few options to consider:

• Zapier. Zapier is great for all types of automations, and review requests are no exception. You can connect your customer data sources (such as your CRM or eCommerce platform) to Zapier and set up a trigger event, such as a purchase. Then, you can create a Zap that will automatically send out the email template asking for reviews.
• Review Software. Review management platforms like TrueReview make it easy to integrate your CRM and send automated review request emails based on customer actions.
• Email Marketing Platform. If you use an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or Klaviyo, you can also set up automated workflows that send personalized review requests to customers based on specific events, like a purchase.

2. Phone Call

If your business makes sales and offers support over the phone, it can be a great opportunity to ask for reviews. Phone conversations help create rapport and a personal connection, which usually means that a simple request like a review is much harder to say no to.

If you’re discussing a recent project with a client, that’s the perfect time to ask them if they’d be willing to share their experiences in a review. That positive outcome you provided is still fresh in their minds, which will not only encourage them to say yes but will also result in a more informative review.

One thing to prioritize when asking for reviews over the phone is simplicity. You need to be as specific as possible in what they’ll need to do. Ideally, get them to agree to the review over the phone, and then immediately share step-by-step instructions of what they should do.

Make sure to emphasize how much you value their time and feedback and that it won’t take much effort for them to go through the process.

Bonus Tip: Communications over the phone don’t have to be limited to calls. You can also send targeted SMS messages asking for a review, which can work well if you time it right and make the process simple. With SMS messages, it’s also crucial to keep it as short and concise as possible if you want to have a good chance of the customer following through on your request.

Phone Review Request Template

This template works great during a call where a customer is sharing their positive experiences with your product or service:

“It’s great to hear that you’re satisfied, your feedback is extremely valuable. It helps us understand what we can do better in the future. Would you be willing to take a few minutes to leave a review on [review platform/website]? I can share a link you can use right now.”

If the client says yes:

“Thank you so much for your time. Our team greatly values your feedback.”

If the client hesitates:

“I understand you may be hesitant about leaving a review. But they are an extremely important part of improving our services and helping others see the benefits of working with us. Would you be willing to reconsider? It will only take a few minutes to complete.”

Here’s a short SMS template you can use in your request for a review:

“Hi [Customer Name], hope you love your new [Product Name]! Leave us a review on [Platform] to help us improve. Here’s the link: [Link]. Thanks in advance!”

How to Automate

Phone requests will need to be handled by people from your team. Conversations over the phone are all about connection, so having a real person make the call and listen to the customer is the only way to make it work.

The good news is that you can set up reminders that prompt your team to make the request. That will ensure that it comes at the right time, increasing the likelihood of the customer agreeing and leaving a valuable review.

For example, if you connect your CRM with a review platform, you can set up automated triggers that inform people on your team that it’s time to ask for the review, either during the next chat on the phone or in a separate request call.

3. Social Media

Social media offers countless opportunities for collecting and showcasing reviews and other types of user-generated content. But while a lot of that can happen organically, companies that learn how to ask for a review on social media can get more and better reviews from their best customers.

One of the easiest ways to collect reviews on social media is to simply ask your audience in a post. You can urge people to leave a comment sharing their experience or direct them to a third-party platform or your website.

If you want to be more targeted, you can reach out to customers directly, especially if you can identify which of your followers have recently made a purchase. Social media offers a less formal and more approachable way to get in touch, which can help you get more positive responses.

A more enticing way to get reviews through social media is to create a contest. And you don’t even need to ask for traditional reviews, as UGC contests can be just as effective in showcasing your product’s value and getting it in front of more people.

Decide on the type of review you want, establish the rules, create a hashtag for the campaign, offer an incentive, and promote the contest across your channels.

Social Media Review Request Templates

Here’s how you could ask for a review in a social media post:

“Loved our products? We’d love to hear about it! Leave us a review by following this link:

[Insert Link]”

Here’s how you could ask for a review in a direct message:

“We’re very grateful for showing trust in our brand and purchasing our [Product or Service]. Your feedback is invaluable to us, as it helps us understand how we can continue to improve our experience and tailor it to your needs.

Would you be willing to take a few minutes to share your thoughts on [Review Site or Business Website]? Your story helps us get better and allows more people to discover what we do.

Click here to leave a review! [Insert Link]

Thank you for your time!”

How to Automate

Social media automation tools and management solutions are abundant. Because of that, you have multiple options for automating the review request process and timing it for maximum impact:

• Tools like Hootsuite offer comprehensive social listening features, which can help you discover people mentioning your brand and reach out asking them to leave a review.
• Social media management tools can also be used to schedule posts that encourage people to leave reviews and show how they are using your products. You can also set up contests urging followers to create user-generated content around your brand and products.

4. Website

Your website is the central hub of your business. It’s where you want your customers to end up and where most of your sales happen, which is why it’s the perfect place for setting up ways to capture reviews.

You can create custom forms, set up pop-ups, embed banners, or integrate various third-party sites like Google Reviews, TrustPilot, or Facebook. You can also have a designated review page on your website, which includes the form and tips for your customers leaving a review.

Because you can customize your website experience however you want, it can be the most effective way to get people to leave great reviews. While you may not be able to reach as many people as on social media, you can trigger review requests at various moments, including right after the purchase, making them much more relevant and useful.

Website Review Request Template

Here’s how the copy could look on a review widget:

“Share Your Experience

Your feedback is important to us!

Tell us about your experience with our product. It only takes a few minutes.

CTA – Leave a review now”

And here’s a website review request you can use as a page on your website. You can include it as part of your navigation and as a place to direct traffic:

“Help us improve your experience!

We’re always looking for ways to improve and provide our customers with the best possible experience. Your feedback is invaluable and can show us what you like, as well as what we should work on.

Would you please leave us a review? The form below takes just a few minutes to complete. We’ll use your feedback to ensure that you and other customers receive the best possible service in the future.

Leave your review below!

[Insert Review Form]”

How to Automate

Your website offers the most flexibility when figuring out how to ask for a review automatically.

• You can use testimonial management tools like Famewall to create custom landing pages that collect testimonials. These types of tools even allow you to customize the form fields and even add a video message to make the request more personal and give short instructions the customer can follow.
• Video testimonial tools are also becoming increasingly popular, with a variety of solutions that can help collect and showcase video testimonials from customers right on the website. Tools like StoryPrompt even integrate AI to create customizable scripts for your customers, ensuring they cover all the points you want mentioned.

Bottom Line

Testimonials and customer stories should be at the center of every successful marketing campaign. And while you can collect testimonials on third-party platforms without doing anything, taking a proactive approach will help you get better and more diverse testimonials from your best customers.

The key to succeeding in getting more reviews is to utilize every opportunity and have a scalable process. Whether it’s on your website, in an email, on social media, or on the phone, you should not hesitate to ask for that review, as it can become your most valuable marketing asset.