Reviews and Review Generation
Product reviews are an extremely powerful tool for getting exposure on SourceForge as well as for acquiring new customers. When your product gets reviews on SourceForge, it helps rank your product higher in categories and search results. If you are on a paid marketing plan, customers reviews can improve your campaigns performance by 35% to over 150%.
SourceForge review generation services are available to all SourceForge customers on the SourceForge Plus plan or above.
SourceForge offers a service whereby you can provide your customers with a special review link, and then SourceForge pays for and sends electronic gift cards to your customers if they write and publish a review for your product.
This is how it works:
- We will give you a special link that you can email your customers
- We will also give you content to include in that email that explains the guidelines
- When customers who write a review for your product get their review published by SourceForge, we will email them a digital gift card (paid for by SourceForge!)
- Eligibility Note: this program is only available for users in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
You can grab the special incentivized review link on the "Reviews" tab within your SourceForge product admin section.
Inside your Reviews section, you can find your active campaign. This should show you how many cards you have left and what the value of each card is. It will also contain the special incentivized link that you will need to use so your customers actually receive the gift card after they leave a review.
There are several ways you can reach out to customers to generate reviews:
- Sequence/cadence Emails
- Marketing emails
- Personal outreach from customer service / sales
These emails are designed for customer outreach using tools like HubSpot, Outreach.io, Salesloft, Salesforce, Mailchimp, etc. You will have the most success running campaigns directly through these tools as they provide a personalized feel to customers. This will be easiest on your team if you set up all the touch points ahead of time to be sent out automatically over time.
Email 1: Day 1
Subject: fyi - product feedback for {{software name}}
{{first_name}},
Nice to meet you, I hope you're having a nice {{today}}!
I’m the customer success lead here at {{software name}} and I wanted to reach out personally because you're one of our most valued users. We’ve partnered with SourceForge, a B2B software review website and we’re gathering reviews for our software profile. Would you help us all out by writing a review about your experience so far
SourceForge is sending a $20 gift card to the first {{X}} users of {{software name}} who leave us a review using the link below.* A review takes less than 5 minutes, and we'd love to hear your feedback! If your experience hasn’t been great, please let me know and I will do whatever I can to help you improve it.
Write a review using this link {{hyperlink using the special review link}}
*Terms: Gift cards are worth $20 USD or equivalent. Only residents of the following countries are eligible: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Best,
{{sender_name}}
Email 2: Day 8
Subject: Review {{Product}}, get a $20 Amazon/Visa gift card
Hi {{first_name}},
Checking in again about the product feedback!
I’m the customer success lead here at {{software name}} and I wanted to reach out personally because you're one of our most valued users. We’ve partnered with SourceForge, a B2B software review website and we’re gathering reviews for our software profile. Would you help us all out by writing a review about your experience so far
SourceForge is sending a $20 gift card to the first {{X}} users of {{software name}} who leave us a review using the link below.* A review takes less than 5 minutes, and we'd love to hear your feedback! If your experience hasn’t been great, please let me know and I will do whatever I can to help you improve it.
Write a review using this link {{hyperlink using the special review link}}
*Terms: Gift cards are worth $20 USD or equivalent. Only residents of the following countries are eligible: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Best,
{{sender_name}} Email 3: Day 21
Subject: Last chance to review {{Product}} for a $20 gift card
Hi {{first_name}},
We don’t have many credits left, so if you’d like to receive the gift card please leave a review soon. We’ve partnered with SourceForge, a B2B software review website and we’re gathering reviews for our software profile. Would you help us all out by writing a review about your experience so far?
SourceForge is sending a $20 gift card to the first {{X}} users of {{software name}} who leave us a review using the link below.* A review takes less than 5 minutes, and we'd love to hear your feedback! If your experience hasn’t been great, please let me know and I will do whatever I can to help you improve it.
Write a review using this link {{hyperlink using the special review link}}
*Terms: Gift cards are worth $20 USD or equivalent. Only residents of the following countries are eligible: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Best,
{{sender_name}}
Let SourceForge help you generate reviews from your customers and users. With our Managed Review Gen program, we can run a review generation campaign, where we do all the work. All you have to do is upload a list of your users and we will take care of email template creation and email sending. You can get started with this on the "Managed Reviews Campaign" tab within your SourceForge product admin section.
Once you upload your customer list, we will email them asking them to write a review for your product in exchange for an electronic gift card. Here is an example of the email we will send your customers.
- Contact List Specification: Please upload the list of your users that you want us to email in the form of a .csv file. We require the users' first name, email address, and two-letter country code. Here's a CSV template you can download.
- We require a minimum of 100 contacts, but suggest providing at least 20 contacts for each review you'd like to generate for the most effective results.
- The following countries are allowed. Customers located in other countries will not be used. Argentina (AR), Australia (AU), Brazil (BR), Finland (FI), France (FR), India (IN), Ireland (IE), Japan (JP), Mexico (MX), Philippines (PH), Portugal (PT), Saudi Arabia (SA), Singapore (SG), Sweden (SE), Switzerland (CH), Turkey (TR), United Arab Emirates (AE), United Kingdom (GB), United States (US).
- To receive 50 reviews as quickly as possible we suggest you provide at least 1000 contacts. If you do not have that many, we can still run a campaign, but more is better.
Showcase your SourceForge customer reviews on your company website with the SourceForge Review Widget. The SourceForge Review Widget enables you to display your great customer reviews on your website in a beautiful review carousel widget, which you can see an example of below.
The SourceForge Review Widget only displays 4 star and 5 star customer reviews, and only shows the “Pros” and “Overall” sections of each user review. Reviews lower than 4 stars, and the “Cons” section of reviews will not be shown, enabling you to showcase the best parts of your product on your company website.
The SourceForge Review Widget is responsive, so it will work on any website or mobile browser, or you can change the height and width to fit the space you want.
Example: