Read the full report, or check out our interactive benchmark for more data.
Update: Since we originally published this article, a new channel to request reviews has emerged: SMS marketing! Click here to see how you can collect reviews and visual UGC via text message.
Transcript
Hi. I’m Talia and this is Data Labs by Yotpo.
Today, we crunched the numbers from 200,000 stores and 163 million orders, to bring you the latest data on the ROI of UGC.
Everything you are about to see backed by cold, hard data and designed to help you sell more.
Today, we’re going to talk about using data science to optimize the subject lines of review request emails.
A review request email is the email that you send to a customer asking for a review.
A lot of people use a really standard subject line like, “Please rate your recent purchase.”
And we wanted to see the effect this was having on the volume of reviews they are collecting… so we looked into the data.
So we looked at the most common subject line variations and the effect they had on the number of customer reviews a store got.
What’s really interesting is how different kinds of subject lines affect different kinds of industries differently.
Let’s take a look.
First, we looked at subject lines that have an exclamation point in them.
We found adding exclamation points had a really great effect for stores in the health and beauty and food and tobacco industries.
Food & Tobacco stores saw 83.5% more reviews with the exclamation points, but sports and electronics stores actually saw a decrease.
Electronics stores that used an exclamation point in the subject line saw a 30% decrease.
Next, we’re going to look at question marks in the subject lines, so that’s when the subject line is a question like, “How did you enjoy your recent purchase?”
For electronics, this was actually really good. We saw 21.7% more reviews. Also for apparel we saw 23% more reviews with the question subject line but for health and beauty, we saw reviews drop a little bit by 6.7%.
Next, store name. So that’s when you include the store name in the subject line like, “How did you like your recent purchase from store name?”
For health and beauty and sports and electronics, this was good.
We saw 13% to 15% more reviews with the store name in the subject line, but for food and tobacco we saw a huge drop — 74% less reviews.
So if you’re a food and tobacco store, don’t put your store name in your review request subject line.
Next, upper case. So that’s when you have one or more uppercase letters in your review subject line, like “Please rate YOUR recent purchase.”
For electronics, this was good. We saw a 26.7% increase in the amount of reviews but for health and beauty and sports this was bad. For health and beauty, it actually reduced reviews by 39%.
Finally, incentives. So that’s when you have an incentive word like coupon, or discount, or sale in your subject line.
This was actually the only thing that was good across the board for health and beauty, electronics, and apparel.
We saw increases in customer reviews with these subject lines and for food and tobacco, these stores got 106% more reviews when they had an incentive word in the subject line.
So there you have it — the subject line secrets to getting more reviews!
Play with your subject lines, see what works and let us know.
Thanks for watching and be sure to check out our other videos for more data-backed goodness.
