When you’re walking on the street and you hear someone screaming your name, you’re more inclined to turn back and look at the person. This is because it tells you the person knows you on a personal level.
That is exactly how customers feel when you send them review request emails that address them directly using personal details like name, company’s name, industry, or topic of interest in the subject line or email body. Such one-on-one marketing is what is termed as email personalization.
Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Given the high engagement, personalized emails enjoy, your review request emails should be personalized to excite your customers and make them feel special. Let me show you how personalizing your emails can help you get more reviews from your customers:
When customers receive emails that mention their name, they’ll be curious to know the sender and content of the email. This is because the customer will assume the sender knows them on a personal level. It is unlikely for your customers to open let alone read your email if they don’t feel a personal connection to it. That’s why personalized email campaigns receive 29% higher email open rates which mean if your customers see their first name in the subject line, they’re more likely to open it.
In addition to this, customers feel special when they realize you carefully crafted a personalized email to them requesting for a review when you could have left out the details. This will lead to the customer clicking to your review landing page and leaving positive reviews for you. In fact, personalized emails receive 41% higher click-through rates than ordinary emails.
As your customers continue to receive personalized emails each time they buy from your shop, they’ll develop some affinity towards your brand. This is especially so if you take an extra leap by sending a personalized email on their birthdays and global holidays such as Christmas and Easter. Special emails for shop discounts, sales and new arrivals of products will also make them feel special.
When this happens, your customers will begin to picture how much you care about them. They will also express gratitude by looking forward to your email always and leaving positive reviews on your store.
Receiving one-sided emails all the time can be very boring and sometimes annoying but enriching your email content and providing value to your customers will excite your customers whenever they receive your email.
In the era of artificial intelligence where bots can impersonate humans, it’s difficult to tell if an email is coming from a real person if it’s not personalized. Therefore, when asking customers for reviews, you won’t want to skimp on authenticity.
While automation is pretty simple and saves time, solely relying on bots and automation tools to send your reviews email requests very often takes away the human touch. This is not to reduce the importance of automation tools but always add a unique brand touch to these emails. When your customers begin to suspect that they’re interacting with a machine and not a real human being, it will wane their interest and they’re most likely to ignore such emails. Show the human side of your business by personalizing your emails and making your customers feel they’re communicating to real humans.
As an eCommerce merchant, your ultimate expectation is to make more sales leading to more profits. We live in a customer-centric era where the customer is the king. Aside from other marketing strategies to pamper and retain your existing customers, sending personalized emails that make customers feel important can lead to repeat purchases. In fact, it’s suggested that personalized emails increase sales return 6 times more than regular bulk email campaigns.
For instance, if you constantly send your customers personalized emails on their birthdays, special seasons or send special reminders when you have new stock, you’ll be the first brand they’ll remember when they want to make a purchase. And the more they buy from your store, the more you’ll get reviews from them.
So while your competitors continue to send emails with generic salutations, send your customers tailored emails that evoke positive customer experience and encourage repeat purchases and increase reviews.
Apart from wanting your customers to purchase your products, you may want them to complete other conversion goals such as downloading your ebook, signing up for a webinar, subscribe to your blog, filling out a form, etc.
With personalized emails, you can easily get your customers to complete these desired goals since personalized emails enjoy high open and click-through rates. So as your customers complete your conversion goals, they’ll happily leave reviews at your store helping you to get more reviews. Your customers will be eager to complete these desired goals especially if your desired goals offer value to them.
In sum, getting reviews from your customers should be easy if you personalize your review request emails while knowing things to avoid in your review request emails. Essentially, you should ensure your review request email is well written and have your customer’s name in the subject line to attract him/her to give you more reviews. Use a tool like the Kudobuzz Review app to help you collect reviews from channels like Facebook, Google, Yelp, Amazon, Etsy, etc, and display them on websites using beautiful widgets to attract new buyers.
Abdul-Karim Awaf writes for the Kudobuzz blog. Kudobuzz is a provider of easy to use tools that help online merchants increase site traffic and sales. Kudobuzz owns the Kudobuzz Reviews, the Kudobuzz SEO and the Kudobuzz Multichannel Apps.
