People are busy and may love a product but get dozens of requests for reviews. After a year we had crawled to 8 reviews on Capterra. Then Capterra offered to give $20 gift vouchers to every reviewer and we gained 61 more in 2 months. Below, see the process and email template we used.
Related: Why Using a Stage Trained Actor for our SaaS Explainer Video Worked
For SaaS founder types: Why Serial Entrepreneurs work on their Go-to-Market Strategy First.
Why it's difficult to get reviews even if they love you
People are busy.
They get a dozen review requests from a dozen different softwares. Every app on my phone seems to ask for a review. Take, take, take!
Most companies have product advocates who will be the first to leave a review without even being prompted. Then there's a silent over-emailed majority who may love the product but need an extra nudge.
Capterra know this, they want to capture the market and so they offer some companies gift vouchers to pass to their users.
Capterra's offer
This is the email Capterra sent us.
There was some back and forth with their team member and in short you get 100 gift vouchers for 100 reviews to use over 3 months.
Please note, I don't know if they offer this to everyone but they can't have known how many customers we had or our revenue figures the time. Maybe if you get the first few reviews, that's a good signal to their team.
Why it's better to use Capterra than offer it yourself
This is my theory.
I don't want to take $20 from a company I like.
If you're a company I like, I want to leave a review but not because you're offering me $20. It feels like I betrayed that relationship slightly.
If Capterra is paying and not you, that makes it easy.
The other benefit is optional anonymity. If I'm not a fan of your product and bit of a coward I can say it straight without giving my name. If I am a fan or simply a feedback monster, it can be under my name.
What email did we send to our users? Capterra's email
Capterra have probably a/b tested this to death so we used their email template rather than make our own.
We did add our own subject header that said "$20 for your opinion?" (at least I think this was ours. @joe? I should be able to @joe from a blog post and it notifies him. Is this the next billion dollar idea or Fyre festival?)
Benefits of getting more reviews
- Getting more reviews means you rank higher on Capterra. Top reviewed sites are shown as alternatives or simply the top products.
- Oddly enough, we don't have traffic coming from Capterra but we've had larger companies contact us since we've had more reviews. I suspect that checking reviews is part of a buyer teams process.
- There might also be some SEO benefits due to the backlinks and association of our keywords like 'co-browsing'.
- It's a useful marketing tactic. We've added a link to Capterra as a source of "Independent reviews" on our testimonials page.
- You get great honest feedback. We can use the reviews to analyse what people really think and want. Internal surveys are useful but if half the 61 reviews all mention the one missing feature they want, it does not require much analysis.
SaaS founder type? Read why serial entrepreneurs work on their go to market strategy first.
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