How to Automate Product Review Generation for Software Products

Ever wondered why your competitors have a plethora of reviews or why they seem to be better at generating them? It’s not because their customers love them more or are unusually vocal about their positive experiences. The truth is that these software creators are putting in the effort and probably investing in automated product review generation tools.

Reviews play an integral part in the decision-making process. Customers rely on them to guide their choices — from which series to stream and where to eat to which sneakers and sports watches to buy. As a software creator, your success largely depends on existing users sharing their positive experiences with your products for the rest of the world to see.

In this article by Freemius, we touched on three reasons why reviews (and testimonials) are super valuable for software creators specifically:

1. Including reviews in the right places — for example, during the checkout process or on your homepage — can increase conversion rates by convincing new customers that they’re making a good choice.
2. Public feedback breeds trust thanks to social proof and validates your product and its features in the eyes of potential customers.
3. Spaces like WordPress have gotten a bad rap because some product makers will simply vanish and stop providing customer support. Fresh, positive product reviews can imprint the impression that your 🫵 honest face 😇 (and product) can be trusted.

Product reviews are also an excellent way to collect and analyze customer feedback, allowing you to incrementally improve your product and business, which will (hopefully) result in more praiseful product reviews in turn.

Superb! you say. I see loads of product reviews online every day — how hard can it be to get my customers to rate my offerings?

The truth:

Getting Product Reviews is Hard

Research has found that only 12% of users are likely to leave a review when asked.

This leaves product makers with two choices. They can:

1. do the heavy lifting themselves by chasing people across different networks and platforms to manually request reviews.
2. use automated tools with smart functionalities to generate product reviews on ‘autopilot’.

The latter is the logical, practical course of action. Automated review generation tools are operated by people who specialize in getting customer feedback for you and free you up to focus on other areas of your business. However, choosing the right one can be confusing.

Which Automated Product Review Generation Tool is Right for You?

There is no shortage of tools to help you get more customer reviews, and most of them offer the same set of all-in-one solution suites. However, there are minor nuances, and the one you choose will likely come down to your business’s unique needs and preferences, requiring some investigation from your end. The following popular options are a good starting point:

Birdeye

Birdeye is an AI-powered, all-in-one reputation management platform used by over 100,000 businesses. It helps these businesses rank higher on search results by featuring them on online directories and converting leads with messaging.

• Pros: Offers several solutions, easily integrates with CRM tools, and will notify you about negative feedback and promote positive reviews on your social media, emails, and website.
• Cons: Some Birdeye customers have complained about limited integration functionality and the quality of support. What’s more, Birdeye is on the pricey side with the standard plan starting at a whopping $299/month 🤯

Rannko

Rannko is focused on customer experiences and prides itself on offering simple and effective reputation and review features that help businesses listen to, connect, and share information with customers.

Revetize

Revetize offers a cloud-based marketing solution that helps businesses streamline processes and campaigns to increase lead generation and customer interaction. Pricing is determined on a case-by-case basis but Revetize typically takes less than 10% of their clients’ marketing budgets and claims to supply 60% of their new revenue.

Trustpilot

Trustpilot is not an automated review generation tool but a centralized platform where businesses can collect and manage customer reviews and feedback. Also worth noting is that the platform is not exclusively for businesses: customers can post reviews for free, making Trustpilot a review repository of sorts.

• Pros: Makes it easy to send review generation messages in bulk and offers insights via an analytics tool.
• Cons: While Trustpilot is a very popular, centralized platform for product reviews, it doesn’t monitor or manage reviews on other platforms like other automation tools do.

These tools can also be on the pricey side, which makes one wonder if outsourcing all review generation and/or management to a dedicated service provider is worth the investment (especially if you’re a solopreneur or small software business owner).

Luckily for software creators, some services offer cost-effective solutions if you’d prefer to keep costs low and product review generation relatively in-house…

How Freemius Helps with Product Review Generation

As a payments platform that empowers our partner network by helping them monetize their software products globally, many of our partners consider Freemius to be an integral of their business operation (as stated by Alan Fuller in his recent Success Story) and not just an external service provider.

We offer several features to help our partners boost their sales via social proof. The first is an automated post-purchase review request feature. This is super valuable for software product makers and has proven to increase review conversion rates by more than 100% for our partners.

Here’s how it’s done:

We automatically send an email with an in-line review form to customers after they’ve purchased a partner’s product, provided they’ve activated their license and are still using the product. This approach avoids awkward situations of accidentally asking customers to review before they’ve had the chance to try the product or may have already uninstalled it and asked for a refund.

The secret sauce of this automation is embedding the review form right in the email, allowing customers to submit an entire review without leaving their mailbox:

If they only submit a partial email review, the submit button will open an online review form for them to finalize the submission:

Additionally, we deploy personalized automated emails to verified reviewers who’ve left five-star reviews. The purpose is to encourage them to copy their review and re-post it on WordPress.org, which will have a meaningful impact on search ranking.

With all of your glowing reviews collected, it’s time to put them on display for the world to see 🤩 The best of the best can be featured on a testimonials carousel on our partners’ in-dashboard pricing pages:

But even with all of the above in place, there’s still room for improvement, which is why we’ve made accommodations for tweaks. Our partners can automate their review collection strategies with different triggers based on how customers interact with their products and ask for reviews right within the WP Admin dashboard with friendly, non-invasive notices.

Freemius founder and CEO Vova Feldman shares how he increased reviews by 700% by using this technique and others here.

And the best part about all of this? These features come free and out-of-the-box with Freemius, whereas you’d be looking at fees that run into hundreds of dollars with other services!

(You can find out more about how Freemius helps our partners with product review generation and management )

The Bottom Line on Product Reviews

Whether you’re incorporating an automated product review generation tool or not, you can’t sit back and expect reviews to roll on in — getting them will require some effort either way.

The key to racking up positive reviews is being pragmatic and actively seeking them out. Encourage your users to share their feedback by making the process interactive and as streamlined as possible. It’s a straightforward yet powerful strategy: ask, display, and thrive.

If you’d like to discuss the above more in-depth or have any software monetization questions you’d like to swing our way, get in touch with us here.

Originally published on the Freemius blog on February 14, 2024.