Use Email Marketing to Get Reviews!

I received an email this week from CB2, a Crate and Barrel brand. It was interesting to me because they used an entire email marketing campaign to compel their recipients to give their products a review. If you give a review you'll be entered to win $1000 shop card at CB2. I think this is a great use of an email campaign.

I went to their site and I found that they have an area on most of the product pages where you can post a review for each product. The only potentially negative issue is that CB2 seems to have control over these reviews so the reviewers may question if they are "filtering" them. For some reason I doubt that they are, but we just don't know.

All in all, a great idea of how to use email marketing to get people talking about you.  Hey CB2, get bold! I found you on Yelp, a review site, where you get some pretty good reviews. Next time why not include other ways in your email campaigns for people to review you? At VerticalResponse we asked users to post reviews to Yelp and our Facebook Fan Page as well as Twitter. If there's a problem, we know it pretty quick and can work to fix it. Transparency is good!

Do you have any experience with using email marketing to get reviews? Chime in!

Comments

[Andrew Slade]

We've really struggled to get people to post reviews of our books on Amazon. We offer to send people one of our books free. If they think the book deserves a 4- or 5-star review on Amazon, we encourage them to do so. If they don't think it deserves it, we encourage them to, well, keep their mouths shut.

But maybe a VR campaign along these lines would get us over the top.

[Nan]

Thanks for posting the example. Real life, tangible examples are always really helpful. Note: it's against Yelp policy to encourage people to review you! We learned this recently. You CAN say "Read our reviews on Yelp..."

[Traci Metzger]

We are working right now on leveraging Vertical Response to engage subscribers to rate business partners. The Cortera Credit Exchange is traditional business credit meets "Yelp". VR allows us to segment our audience so people can learn more about how credit and community will transform small business purchase decisions. Thanks Vertical Response!