How to Boost SaaS Sales With Review Sites
Do’s and don’ts of getting social proof for your software
Customers go through three main stages when trying to subscribe to a software service: finding companies that offer the service, choosing a company from the pool, and eventually paying for a subscription. Although influenced by many factors, online reviews are a great determinant of whether a customer subscribes to a particular company's service or not.
According to research conducted by Podium, 93% of customers say that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions. This is not a surprising statistic because as a matter of fact, a customer will most likely not purchase a product if other customers say bad things about it and vice versa.
Therefore, to stand a better chance of acquiring more customers for your SaaS company, you need to get more online reviews. But how do you get online reviews? This and more will be covered in the rest of the article.
Getting Listed on Review Sites
The first step towards getting online reviews is getting listed on the most popular review sites. You need to conduct research on the review sites most of your target market go to learn more about your company and product.
After identifying the most important review sites for your niche, you need to create a company profile on these sites. Below are some of the most popular review sites for SaaS products.
After registering on these sites, make sure you add the necessary information about your software, upload screenshots, and other things that can help improve your conversion rate.
Getting Customer Reviews
Now that you’ve been listed on review sites, it’s time to get customer reviews. As much as you can’t completely avoid negative reviews, your main target should be getting positive reviews.
Build a great product
The most important thing you need to do is to make sure most of your customers find your product satisfactory enough to want to leave you a positive review. As a business owner, your goal should be satisfying your customers, and that is why you need to build a product that people love.
Ask for reviews
If you want your customers to give you reviews, you need to ask them. The fact is that most customers won’t take their time to search for review sites where you are listed just to give you reviews.
This is more reason why you should ask them if you need a review. You will be surprised how many of your customers will be willing to leave you a review when asked.
When asking for customer reviews, make sure you:
- Target satisfied customers: In order to avoid negative reviews, you need to target selected customers who use your product often and those who have received a satisfactory resolution from customer support in the past.
- Watch your language/tone: Make sure your email is engaging, sincere, and personalized. This is just to highlight the fact that you need their help.
- Explain how easy it is to leave a review: This will encourage them to leave a review when they hesitate to, due to time, e.g. “It’ll only take a few seconds to leave a review on our product.”
How to Ask
There are three main ways you can ask customers for reviews, customer support, direct email, and in-app notification.
1. Customer Support
Your customer support team can send a message to customers immediately after solving support cases. This is a great time to request a review because, at this point, they are happy you helped them. Use this sample template:
Hi <<First Name>>,
Thank you for using <<Company Name>> to <<describe use case>>. I’m glad that I was able to help with <<describe problem solved>>.
Reviews help our business build an online presence and help others learn about us. Could you please take a few minutes to share your experience with other people? We value your opinion and will be glad if you took a few minutes to leave us a review.
Kindly click this link <<URL to review service>> to leave us a review.
Thank you so much for using <<Company Name>> and taking some time out of your day.
2. Direct Email
Send direct emails to customers asking them for a review. You need to make sure this email is personalized and only sent to selected customers. By sending this email to satisfied customers, you are ensuring that you only get positive reviews.
I use this template for my clients
Email Subject: <<Company Name>> needs your help
Hi <<First Name>>,
Thank you for <<describe client relationship — loyal, new, etc.>>. It has been a pleasure helping you <<describe use case>>
Reviews help our business build an online presence and help others learn about us. Could you please take a few minutes to share your experience with other people? We value your opinion and will be glad if you took a few minutes to leave us a review.
Kindly click this link <<URL to review service>> to leave us a review.
Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day and for using <<Company Name>>.
3. In-app notification
To increase your chances of getting reviews, you can send an in-app notification to customers. However, you need to make sure that this notification does not disrupt customers’ activities in order not to annoy them.
It should come up in a place that is easily noticeable but not disruptive.
Following Up
Respond to reviews
For each review dropped on your product, you need to respond with a thank you message. For the negative reviews, you also need to do some damage control by responding to the revies.
Send appreciation emails
Send an appreciation email to users two to three weeks after your first email. An appreciation email will be sent to all users whether they left a review or not.
The idea behind sending an appreciation mail to all users regardless is to create a reminder (some may find a reminder email annoying or overreaching, I would), thank them for their support, and create a sting of guilt in them (I would feel bad if someone thanked me for something I didn’t do). Hopefully, this guilt will push them to drop a review through the CTA (Yet to leave a review? Click here).
Run paid ads
Now that you’ve gotten enough reviews on your profile, you need to run paid ads on the review sites. This way, when customers come to the review site looking for a product you offer, they will see your ad. And when they search for your product to see what people are saying about it, you have enough positive reviews to back you up.
What You Shouldn’t Do
Buy fake reviews
Due to the power of reviews in making purchase decisions, the internet has now become full of fake reviews. As a company, who is interested in acquiring more customers, you might be tempted to acquire fake reviews.
However, this is something you shouldn’t do as it will negatively impact your company. Some of the negative effects of fake reviews include.
- Bad product: When you don’t receive honest feedback about your product from customers, your product will remain mediocre. There will be a lack of improvement in product and customer service
- Low conversion rate: You may have fooled people into signing up on your platform, but you can’t fool them into paying for a subscription after the free trial ends. With a bad product, most of your leads will end up canceling their membership after the free trial ends.
- Generic reviews: Paid reviews are usually generic and not as convincing as real reviews. They mostly do not embody real customer experience and can easily be detected as fake by experienced customers.
- Bad reviews: Although customers barely give reviews unless asked to, the case is mostly different for angry customers. Angry/dissatisfied customers go the extra mile to share their experience just so that others don’t go through the same.
- Tainted brand image: It ruins your integrity as a company and gives a negative general perception of your brand.
