G2 review campaign

Jay Nathan

We are looking to boost our presence for one of our products on G2. Looking for best practices on running a campaign around getting customers to participate. 

who should own the overall process, what works in a campaign, what role should the CS teams play?

any thoughts or tips would be helpful thanks in advance. 

jay

Jordan Silverman

@Jay Nathan we have done this a few times pretty successfully. It has been owned by both marketing and sales at different times. More recent and successful was marketing owning this.

What we did:

1) Exported promoters from our NPS
2) Sent an email campaign out to them asking them to review

We have done this with G2 as a partner where G2 also offers a benefit for the reviews which is great for our customers!

Jay Nathan

Thanks Jordan, great feedback here!

Sean MacPherson

Hey @Jay Nathan - How we do it over here is our Marketing team (Customer Marketer) is responsible for maintaining our status of being top in our categories in the G2 segment we participate in but Customer Success is the engine for it.  With the comes the knowns of, how do we have a consistent review pipeline, how do we target the right people, how do we close the loop on every review we can, etc.

What our engine looks like:

• Our CSM Team keeps their sentiment pulse on both account (Are we multi-threaded, would they speak highly of us, are they seeing results, etc.) and contacts themselves (for example, would they openly advocate for us). This creates the lists for targets (Accounts / Contacts):
  • The Marketer is then able to use that information in a more targeted campaign if we are looking to increase Champion/Buyer reviews
  • End-User reviews we'll target account by account (we can have several hundred at each account for perspective - we don't monitor CSM status per end-user though) - if the account is super healthy we ask them to leave feedback proactively (generally via email)
• NPS, CSAT, and social channels
  • We also monitor both social and NPS - if someone is speaking positively about us we proactively ask them to review.  A good tactic here is having the email come from yourself versus a Marketing Manager (if you have the bandwidth).  There are areas to automate this as well.

We also do use our product a bit as well to thank our amazing reviewers/advocates - it's a nice way to thank them for their time and add a personal touch.  For example, someone recently loved getting a Nike Running Vest as they are starting to enter the cooler season of the year where they are - they have also provided great product feedback in addition as this helps us continue the feedback loop on the frontline.

Having a true owner of the success of G2 is super important versus putting reviews on CSMs (having in Marketing works amazing for us).  But you need an engine to help that person pull the right data from and that's where we try to embed it in the CSMs day to day - it also can be used for several other things (Case Studies, Health Scorecards, Conference Speakers, etc.).

Cheers,
-Sean

Todd Eby

Jay, are you looking to increase your number of reviews, review ratings, or placement in the category standings? Or all three?

There's an obvious overlap with all of the goals. However, I will say that category standing is the hardest to impact and is a constant battle if you care, as it is pretty much a "black box" measure (due to the number of variables) and offers a lot of gaming opportunity (which it shouldn't).

On this front, I've had G2 explain how they derive the rankings, but the explanation of their algorithm for scoring was "interesting," to say the least; their response when I started to break it down was, "just get more positive reviews and it will all work out...". You can read more about their scoring methodologies here: https://research.g2.com/g2-scoring-methodologies

Suffice it to say that what I have found is that if you have a competitor that has standing in multiple categories, they seem to perform better in the rankings. The root of this seems to be categorization. In our category, they don't seem to categorize reviews accurately in a lot of cases; I do an ongoing sampling for this, and they appear to miscategorize in about 24% of the reviews (based on my most recent sampling of competitor reviews), and this is just gross miscategorization (i.e., the reviewer mentions a totally different kind of training in their review, but it is categorized as Customer Success. Other factors play in (rating as you might expect). Still, they haven't adequately explained the weighting of the other variables, so I think it's safe to say that they don't handle that case well...might be better in categories that have a grid as they utilize many more variables. Still, I don't have experience with that yet. It might not impact you at all...

If you're looking to increase your review count and potentially your ratings, you have a couple of levers that you control that can impact your success based on my experience. 

1.) Identification of candidates - We use NPS and achievement of value as our key triggers (i.e., has the student earned their certification and did they score us >8 on their NPS survey) for inclusion in a campaign. You should still be prepared to get some "noise" in your ratings, as even happy customers will give you a 7 or an 8 sometimes despite giving you a 9 or a 10 on NPS.

2.) Means of outreach and timing - Like NPS, timing is a factor…when you ask, can dictate response rate and rating. We have a two-fold strategy for this: 1.) Immediate: We ask the student automatically out of AskNicely for a review if they rate us a 9 or 10 and include a comment on their post certification NPS survey (we use an email follow up to their NPS, which is delivered after they complete their program via Intercom - the comment is an indicator of interest in sharing feedback; it's easy to pick a number, but sharing a comment is a signal that they are likely to put in the time to fill out G2s rather lengthy survey. 2.) Timed: We run a quarterly sweep campaign to collect the bulk of our reviews. We utilize the same NPS (i.e., targeting certified students who are promoters), but the timing is not immediate. These campaigns typically net us an 8-12% response rate which is slightly above average for G2 (according to them). I will say that we are still experimenting with timing and will try running a monthly cadence for the next several months to see if it produces different response rates.

3.) Incentive: G2 reviews take a lot of effort to complete; incent completion if you want to have a higher response rate. We offer $50 gift cards to drive higher levels of response (we tested various amounts, and this was the sweet spot for us, YMMV). While you can do a variety of other things to incent reviewers, we stuck with the mechanism available through G2 rather than offering swag, etc. as it reduces the resource load and pretty much just works…there are some challenges that we have faced with international customers (having students in 60+ countries is fun as Amazon is not everywhere just yet) so be sure to note in your campaign where the bulk of your potential reviewers reside and be prepared to work through getting a card or two out to folks that are in some international locations - G2 helps with this process.

Other things to ponder...

1.) Sending "priming" emails for campaigns: Depending on the number of emails you send to your customers, you might not want to send a pre-review email. If they already feel like they get enough email from you, this "priming" email may not produce the results you want - it's worth experimenting with.

2.) Responding to low ratings: This is worth experimenting with. You will probably see a credibility increase if you respond - it probably won't affect your rankings but shows that you're listening to your customers.

3.) Review flow: G2 seems to incent a steady flow of reviews, so experiment with the campaign cadence; they value more recent reviews higher, so this allows you to push older, lower ratings down in the pile and presents an opportunity to increase your overall rating.

4.) NPS: There seem to be signs that delivering NPS out of G2 may factor into an increased ranking/rating...the package that features this costs more, so it's not something that I have experimented with yet. Still, it makes sense in some regards but feels a bit like an advantage that you can buy if it does factor into the ratings as their methodology seems to indicate.

We are looking to boost our presence for one of our products on G2. Looking for best practices on running a campaign around getting customers to participate. 

who should own the overall process, what works in a campaign, what role should the CS teams play?

any thoughts or tips would be helpful thanks in advance. 

jay

Andrea Brisker

We've had a similar approach to Jordan which was owned by Marketing (Customer Marketing specifically) 

Recently in our NPS follow up emails, we include the link to G2 to the promotors and ask if they could write a review. We've been able to get a lot of reviews added from that outreach, and it hasn't added any additional work to the CSMs since they are already sending out the NPS follow up emails.

Lisa Pratt

We take a similar approach to Jordan.  The advocacy team will source the candidate for a review and we work with CS to follow up.  We have also done email campaigns and have done programs through G2.  We have also been successful having a G2 booth at our user conference so we can catch customers in the glow of  that positive event feeling.