#reviews

Hi Maura - I tried a bunch of things like you are listing while at Splunk. The very best approach for me was to do email campaigns to customers who renewed contracts for products in the previous quarter. I used the incentives that were tied to the platforms, so for Gartner, I used the Gartner incentives. It worked really well.

Hey Maura, have you tried donations to a charity? With a significant amount? If incentives aren't working, it's very usually bc they're too low, or not directed at the right person

The other way I got great/numerous reviews was on site at our user conference. PeerSpot came on site and interviewed people as they walked the show floor. We got lots of great reviews and reusable content that way.

As @Axel Lavergne says, we included the option to donate to a charity so customers who couldn’t accept incentives had a meaningful incentive option.

Have you looked at the user level/persona you are targeting with your campaigns? I've found a lot of organizations are not aligning the incentive with the persona. Lower level users are going to be much more motivated for a smaller gift card than more senior personas.

Thank you all! This is great feedback. What have you found works well for those who aren’t super motivated for a gift card or swag?

The messaging you use can be key. So some customers really like the idea of having a say in how products or services are developed in future. So we would use language asking for their input, etc. We would always ask for their honest reviews. Generally since we were cherry-picking the happy customers, there wasn’t a risk of them leaving bad reviews. Sometimes we’d get feedback that was useful to our product management team.

I don’t know enough about your customers to know if that applies, but hopefully it is helpful.

Agree with Laurie! I've had great success with the "industry thought leader" angle.

Thank you! I feel so burnt out on what I’ve tried so fresh perspective is very helpful! 🙂

I would try looking at your customer base. Who are your current advocates that are eager to participate in other activities. What is it about those activities that is appealing to them? Is there an opportunity to leverage a different level of persona with the review asks? Are you sending too many asks which is causing fatigue? Is your messaging repetitive across asks throughout the year? I also find a lot of inspiration for new creative ways to engage reviewers on G2s blog (@Katlin Hess fan girl here, but they do a great job of highlighting creative ways their customers are gathering reviews).

Also, I feel like the dream for every program is an automated lifecycle touchpoint (after CSM interactions, after purchasing, after renewing, after graduating from customer ed courses, etc, etc.). These just take a lot of time and effort to stand up, but they might be the secret for your company/customers!

We've done a spiff program with our CSMs. Whoever gets the most reviews from their customers in a certain time period will get a small payout. That's helped us keep a steady influx of reviews!

We only solicit for GPI reviews but have found the best success (like Laurie added) is to set up a table with some swag for a review at our user conferences. We market to developers/engineers and they seem to be fairly willing to take 5-10 min do the review and grab some swag.

I've put requests as a pop-up in product (using Pendo or Appcues) with a good amount of success.

@Lauren Turner Do you add an incentive?

Oh. I did that. We got a bunch of reviews, but many weren’t good. 🙀

Yes, incentivized--usually with some sort of theme.

incentivizing with an additional offer like socks on top of the gift card has worked extremely well for me

We just hosted a G2 reviews booth at our customer conference and captured 48 enterprise reviews in one day - all 9s and 10s. It was $5,500 and they send a person to staff the booth and they bring incentives and we offered a $30 gift card, Motive hat and G2 bumps it up with a $10 non-profit donation. Super successful. One thing we learned: be sure to think strategically about the booth placement on the floorplan!