Sending review request emails
This feature of the Vitals Product Reviews app allows it to send review requests automatically to customers that placed an order in your store.
To set it up, once logged in to your Vitals Dashboard, you can navigate to the Request Reviews section in your Product Reviews app.
Enabling this feature is done with only one click, by ticking the Send automatic emails for reviews requests box. However, before doing that, it is best to set everything up, so here are a few steps you need to take:
1. Email timing is the amount of time to wait after which the email will be sent, depending on the order status.
For example, if you choose 7 days here and also selected "After Fulfillment" in the "Send after order is" option that follows, the review request email will be sent to customers who placed an order seven days after the order has been marked as fulfilled.
💡 When the email timing setting is changed, it doesn't retroactively affect requests that are already due to be sent out. The request reviews that are already scheduled to be sent based on the old timing (let's say the default 7-day) setting will not be automatically adjusted. Of course, any new eligible orders that result from the new timing calculation will be added to the request review emails to be sent out.
3. Send only to customers who accept marketing email is where you choose to send emails only to customers who have agreed to receive marketing emails. If left unchecked, all customers will receive emails.
4. Email Preview - This is where you customize how the email will look and its contents using an easy-to-use Email Template editor.
To start using the Template Editor, simply click the Show full preview link to see the full appearance of the current template, and then click Customize Template.
With the Email template editor, you can drag and drop different elements to your email template like text, images, and clickable buttons to customize the review request email. The main product that is meant for the review request (the product the customer bought and would be reviewed) is already placed in the middle, represented as the {{ products|cta: Review Product }} element.
Besides customization of the email content itself, you can also modify email-specific changes like the Email Subject, the Sender Name, and the Reply-to Address (The email address your customers will reply to.)
5. The last option, inside this section is the Review Preview email option. It lets you send the email to yourself to see precisely what the customer will see and decide if it needs any additional fine-tuning.
💡 Please note that this preview email will only have a sample product on your store and does not have a working review link inside, as it is only intended for testing.
Once you're satisfied with all of the changes, don't forget to scroll to the top to enable this feature, if you haven't enabled it yet.
💡 Once enabled, please keep in mind that the oldest order that would be taken into account can be computed like this: The moment the feature was enabled minus 30 days.
The limit is added, so you don't send emails to customers that purchased a product a long time ago, but for whom we've only recently received a fulfillment notification from Shopify.
Emails will not be sent to customers whose last purchase was more than 30 days ago.
For example, if you set the email timing to 14 days after purchase, customers who bought a product 10 days before the feature was enabled will receive the email in 4 days.
Different analytical data about this feature can also be seen and evaluated to determine its value. For more information and how to understand these data, you may refer here: Understanding the Product Reviews Analytics Section
Discount for reviews
There is also another feature found just below this feature, which allows you to send a discount code to those customers who received the review request email and submitted a review:
For more information about this great feature, we placed it in a separate article for better understanding. You can access it here: Provide a discount code after a customer submits a review
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
I want to enable and use this feature as this will help my store get more verified reviews. However, will it also send review requests to old orders?
This feature will only send review request emails for recent orders. To be specific, the following criteria will be checked and followed:
- Orders older than 90 days will be disregarded, and no email requesting a review will be sent.
- Orders that took longer than 90 days to be fulfilled from the time of placement will be discarded, and no review request email will be sent. (For example, the order was placed in June 2023, but it was only tagged as "Fulfilled" on Dec 2023. Since the gap between the order placement date and fulfillment date is more than 90 days, the email address associated with that order will not receive the review request email.
- Orders that cease to exist at the precise time of email scheduling will be discarded, and no email will be sent to them.