Last updated on February 18th, 2025 at 11:38 pm
Did you know that 89% of global consumers check online reviews as part of their online journey?
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. You probably also check customer reviews online before buying stuff on Amazon, right?
But it’s easy to forget the importance of customer reviews when you are on the other side of the transaction selling a product that you are proud of.
Sure, you know that it’s amazing, but your potential customers don’t – to them, you are just another stranger on the Internet trying to sell them something.
And they expect you to sing praises of your product – after all, you stand to benefit if they decide to buy it.
So what your potential customers really want to know is what other people have to say about whatever it is that you sell.
That’s why it’s so important to be proactive about accumulating customer reviews. And the best way to go about it is to build a review funnel. Want to learn how?
Continue reading…
What is a Review Funnel?
A review funnel is a funnel designed to solicit reviews from your customers.
The funnel design varies depending on the company, the product, and the review platform.
But the main idea is to create a system that allows you to automatically reach out to customers, ask them to leave reviews, and then thank them afterward.
A well-designed review funnel can be a game-changer because it can drastically increase the number of customer reviews your product has.
And that is likely to positively affect your bottom line because typically the more reviews you have, the more people trust you, and the more inclined they are to buy from you.
How to Build an Effective Review Funnel
Here’s how you can create a review funnel in just three steps:
Step #1: Determine the Best Time to Send a Review Request
You want to give the customer enough time to try out your product before you send them a review request.
Obviously, the exact timeframe depends on the product itself:
- If it’s a physical product, you need to account for shipping time + the time it takes to experience the value of the product. You will need to use your common sense to determine the latter (e.g. an item of clothing can be reviewed a few days after receiving it but a book might take a while to read).
- If it’s an info product, you need to account for the time it takes to consume the content (e.g. a short ebook can be reviewed sooner than a comprehensive online course).
- If it’s a subscription, it’s best to ask for a review after the customer has renewed it since that indicates that they found it to be valuable.
As a general rule, it’s better to send the review request later rather than sooner, though of course, you shouldn’t wait too long either.
Step #2: Set Up an Automated Review Request Email
Here are some tips on how to create an effective review request email:
- Make leaving a review as easy as possible. Obviously, if you are asking customers to leave reviews on a third-party platform, then you don’t have any control over the process.
But if we are talking about reviews on your own website, you want to simplify it as much as possible. - Provide an estimate for the time it will take to leave a review. For example, you could mention that leaving a review takes less than 5 minutes.
- Have a clear call to action. You need to be crystal clear about what you want the recipient to do next – your email should end with a call-to-action button that says “Leave a Review”.
Step #3: Set Up an Automated “Thank You for Your Review” Email
It’s important to thank the customers that leave reviews.
Not only is it a nice thing to do but it might also encourage them to leave more reviews in the future.
You can set up a simple automated thank you email for this.
Also, if someone left a terrible review, you might want to reach out to them to learn more about their experience and ask them for feedback.
Obviously, if you decide to do this, don’t get defensive. Take ownership of whatever went wrong, apologize to the customer, and figure out how to avoid situations like that going forward.
How to Take Your Review Funnel to the Next Level
Here are some ideas that might help you optimize your review funnel:
- Identify the customers who love your product, then reach out to them for a review. Instead of asking everyone to leave a review, you might want to consider selecting happy customers. This is pretty straightforward to do for SaaS products because you can send an automated email when a specific condition has been met (e.g. the customer has hit a certain milestone).
- Send a rating request email first, then send a review request email to customers who gave your product at least 3 stars.
Rating a product on a scale from 1 to 5 takes less time than leaving a review. This means that getting ratings is likely to be easier.
You can send customers a rating request email that features a way to rate the product without leaving their inboxes (e.g. a clickable five-star image that allows them to choose the rating).
And then, if that rating is at least 3 stars, send them a review request email.
Meanwhile, if the rating is less than 3 stars, reach out to them personally to learn more about the reasons behind it. - Respond to customer reviews! When someone takes time to leave a product review, the least you can do is respond to it.
Your response doesn’t have to be elaborate – simply thanking happy customers and apologizing to disgruntled customers can go a long way.
This will not only show the customers in question that you care but also reassure people that might be reading those reviews in order to make a buying decision.
It might also help your brand image. Research has shown that 82% of UK consumers have a positive view of companies that respond to reviews. It’s probably safe to assume that customers from other European countries, North America, and Australia have a similar outlook.
Never EVER Censor Negative Customer Reviews!
It might be tempting to censor negative reviews to create the impression that everyone loves your product.
However, obvious ethical issues aside, that’s counterproductive to building trust via social proof.
According to Spiegel Research Center:
We found that purchase likelihood typically peaks at ratings in the 4.0 – 4.7 range, and then begins to decrease as ratings approach 5.0.
Put differently, products with an average star rating in the 4.7 – 5.0 range are less likely to be purchased than those in the 4.2 – 4.7 range.”
This suggests that shoppers see ratings at the far end of the spectrum as “too good to be true.”
This theory is supported by another study where over 50% of global consumers admitted that they believed less than perfect review scores to be more authentic.
This makes complete sense if you think about your own online shopping experiences. Would you trust a product that had a perfect 5-star rating on Amazon? Probably not.
That’s why the presence of negative reviews makes all customer reviews on your website seem more trustworthy. Censoring them would be a strategic mistake.
It’s also worth noting that in the same study 45% of global consumers said that they would prefer to buy a product or a service with a large number of reviews and an average overall rating, rather than to buy a product or a service with a small number of reviews and a high overall rating.
So it’s probably best to focus on accumulating as many customer reviews as possible even if they aren’t always stellar. It’s one of those rare instances where quantity matters more than quality!
Want to Learn How to Grow Your Online Business With Sales Funnels?
Our co-founder, Russell Brunson, has written a best-selling book series called “The Secrets Trilogy”.
The first book in this trilogy, “DotCom Secrets”, is all about growing your online business with sales funnels.
Want to know how to:
- Build a profitable sales funnel?
- Optimize an existing sales funnel?
- Maximize your revenue via cross sells, upsells, and downsells?
Russell discusses all that and more in “DotCom Secrets”- he shares the strategies and tactics that he used to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).
So if you want to learn from a proven entrepreneur who has built a 9-figure online business, you should definitely get yourself a copy of “DotCom Secrets”.
Or, better yet, let us send you one for free – all we ask is that you cover the shipping!