Writing a thank you email to encourage online reviews [Examples]
21 Comments
I recently re-wrote a thank-you e-mail that one of my clients was using to ask for online reviews from satisfied guests.
If you’re not doing this yet, it’s a great practice. Anytime someone says something positive about your hotel or you get an e-mail with some positive feedback, you should have some sort of a system for asking these people to share their experiences with others online.
Below you can see the message they were using, and how we re-wrote it.
Before:
Dear NAME
Thank you for choosing HOTEL for your recent stay in CITY. We have read your comments about the hotel and we greatly appreciate that you took the time to write them, as our guests’ satisfaction is our main priority.
We invite you, please, to share your opinion on the TripAdvisor website (website for travelers’ opinions) using the following link:
[Tripadvisor link]
It is very important for us that our guests’ experiences are shared.
It was a pleasure to have you as our guest. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your collaboration and we hope to see you again soon at HOTEL.
Management
HOTEL, CITY
After:
Hello NAME,
Thank you for choosing HOTEL for your recent stay in CITY. I was delighted to hear you had an enjoyable time at our hotel.
At your convenience, would you please take a moment to share your experience online with your friends and others on your favorite travel review website?
Is was a pleasure to have you as our guest. We hope to see you again soon.
- STAFF NAME
HOTELDirect phone:
Personal email:See what others have said about our hotel on TripAdvisor:
[TripAdvisor hotel link]
This re-write accomplishes several things
It comes from an individual person instead of the entire hotel. Response rates typically increase when e-mail comes from one person.
It’s less about the hotel and more focused on the guest. A guest may not care what is important to the hotel, so we need to position this request as a way for them to share an experience with friends.
It’s a bit shorter, so that the message intent is very clear.
It is less TripAdvisor-specific. It’s more of an invitation for people to talk about us in a manner that suits them best online – whether that’s TripAdvisor, Twitter, or another site.
It’s good to encourage reviews anywhere the guest prefers.
What does your thank you email look like?
You should enter your email below to receive new tips like this each Monday morning:
+1 347 422 6784
If the property distributes their rates using a channel manager, which most do these days – it would also be a good idea to tailor the email to promote reviews on the OTA they booked through first (if they accept reviews) as the guest is already familiar with that site & will already have an account – where as they quite likely do not have an account for TripAdvisor. If they didn’t come through an OTA, the OTA doesn’t support reviews or they booked direct then promote TripAdvisor reviews.
While I haven’t tested it yet, now that Google are breaking out the source of where the reviews are coming from in the search results, having a good spread of reviews across all of the top travel portals that Google aggregates reviews from will increase trust in the consumers eyes and will inevitably have an impact about how Google perceives the property online.
Interesting suggestion, Alistair. Do you think a specific recommendation is better than letting the guest choose where to share their review?
It’s a good point Alistair. What I experience with my clients (small tourism businesses) is that most of their customers are reluctant to create an account on Tripadvisor and post a review there.
However, since most of them here in Australia book through the major OTA websites (e.g. Total Travel) which also allow reviews, they would feel more keen to go back there to post their review. And certainly this helps in the new Place Search battlefield as well
Cheers!
I find this true in many situations as well, Sara. I’m hesitant to ask them to register a new TripAdvisor account if they don’t already have one. It could be perceived as an inconvenience for them (what do they gain?), and besides, some people might suspect the reviews are fake if all come from accounts that only have one review.
A few of my clients have had a lot of success encouraging OTA reviews. I try to encourage direct bookings, but I suppose a review on an OTA is better than no review at all.
I agree with your new e-mail copy Josiah, in particular with the importance of showing clients their benefits, not the hotel’s ones (the benefit for the client is sharing something cool with their friends or relatives). It’s really nice!
We have suggested to some of our clients to put in the e-mail the links to their hotel pages on different web sites where they’d like to improve their brand reputation, such as TripAdvisor, Trivago and Zoover, so every user can choose the preferred one.
I quite agree with Alistair too, even if I think the OTAs like Booking and Expedia send every client an e-mail encouraging them to write on their website after the stay .
But OTAs’ reviews are very important. According to some surveys, people trust OTAs’ reviews even more than TripAdvisor’s ones, cause they are considered more trustworthy (take a look at this http://www.breakingtravelnews.com/focus/article/are-otas-taking-over-online-hotel-reviews/).
Very interesting research there – I appreciate you sharing the link.
Also a good idea to link to other review sites if you’re trying to build a presence there.
Hi Josiah, You are my internet marketing rabbi, but I have to say, I hold a somewhat different opinion on this subject. First, I think you are underestimating the power of asking for assistance and support from people you have a relationship with who care about your well being. These honored guests just checked out of your hotel, so you should have established a relationship with them and done so many lovely things to please them that , if you did your job well, they should be happy to have the opportunity to do something nice in return for you. People like to do nice things for people who have made them happy. Also, while we appreciate all reviews, we like to pick the one site that is most important to us and focus on it, because it seems to us that it is better to be #1 in the best place than #20 everywhere. Just our opinion. Also, this sounds like an email that has gone to someone who already taken the time to fill out a comment card. Isnt asking for both an online comment and an offline comment imposing a bit? We recommend just asking for one comment in the place where it means the most to you.
You have a strong argument here, Adele. Plus, I consider you a TripAdvisor all-star because you’ve demonstrated your ability to get to the top of one of the world’s most competitive hotel markets!
What about this: instead of sending this in response to comment cards, send it to people who give you a verbal indication that they loved their stay? Presumably you would already have their email address on file?
“…While we appreciate all reviews, we like to pick the one site that is most important to us and focus on it, because it seems to us that it is better to be #1 in the best place than #20 everywhere.”
Very good to remember! I think this ties in with the other comments about not sending people exclusively to TripAdvisor.
Josiah,
I think a specific recommendation is better for a couple of reasons:
1) Not everyone knows they can leave a review
Asking customers to simply ‘tell their friends’ doesn’t necessarily build long term value. For instance, telling their friends might mean a status update on Facebook. While nice to have, will be forgotten as quickly as it arrived. A consumer (not part of your customers social graph) cannot benefit from their status update, since its more than likely private. By suggesting a review site, it builds long term value as it won’t be ‘out of sight’ within 30 minutes of being posted, its available for everyone to read & the people that are reading it are much further down their purchase cycle – so the influence it has is also higher.
2) Not everyone knows where they can leave a review
While people that work in hospitality & tourism sector are acutely aware of sites like TripAdvisor and the like, you’d be surprised by just how many people have absolutely no idea about them – which means those users are dramatically less likely to leave a review on a site like that.
3) Lowers the barrier of entry
Sara reiterated my initial point of people being reluctant of creating another account for a site they haven’t used. By suggesting that they leave a review on a site they already have an account on, the barrier of entry has been lowered – which should increase the likelihood of gaining an additional review.
4) Improves visibility
While I appreciate what Adele was saying regarding being #1 in one place instead of #20 everywhere, it is a little more complicated than that. As an example, a lot of the OTA’s use a combination of factors from rates, commission, room stock, profile completeness, images, video and more in determining where a given hotel shows up within their search results. It seems a very reasonable thing for them to include the number of reviews & the ratings recieved as another factor in the rankings. As such, by progressively gaining reviews across all of the major OTA’s, a hotel would theoretically be increasing their hotel exposure as they hopefully move further up the rankings.
Like everything, it requires teseting to work out what works best for that particular hotel. It might turn out that pushing TripAdvisor exclusively is the way to go or that rotating between the various OTA’s is a better long term strategy.
Al.
I like the testing idea. It’s the best way to solve anything.
Just to clarify: Would you like to see more emphasis on the link to TripAdvisor?
No, not just TripAdvisor – I think it should be balanced against how the property is sold online.
If you’re hotel isn’t channel managed and you don’t have rates on the top OTA’s in your region, then getting reviews on a site that you don’t have your property listed on or don’t actively manage is largely futile & you should focus on TripAdvisor.
On the other hand, if you do channel manage the property & actively manage it on the top OTA’s – then I think spreading the reviews around across those sites will make a difference in the long term.
Imagine the scenario where you have your property listed on an OTA but you have no reviews. If a consumer goes to that site & doesn’t see any reviews – that might be the reason the consumer books the next property that meets their criteria.
Hi agree that we should choose the most important site for us but we must keep in mind that in Tripavisor the guest can sign up with his facebook account which makes it much easier and fast.
Agreed. And since it is not just occupancy that is important but also profitability, you want to think not only about where your bookings are coming from now, but also where you want your business to be coming from in the future. If your goal is to free your property from dependance on the OTAs, then it would be smart to your marketing efforts support those future goals.
Josiah,
Quite a nice email which will appeal to customers and will encourage them to write reviews in Trip Advisor.
We initially used to encourage our guests to submit reviews on Trip Advisor but most of them were hesistant
What we have found (small tourism business and homestay ) is that sharing the pictures in facebook of the hotel and the tourist place gives us a lot of referral traffic from the friends of the guest who has already visited us. My insight is that reviews on trip advisor are from strangers which I may or may not trust but reviews and media from facebook is from my social graph whichI will trust for sure because as friends we may have common interests. We have also found out that the traffic from search for our brand name have increased by 278% after trying out this strategy.
“It’s less about the hotel and more focused on the guest. A guest may not care what is important to the hotel, so we need to position this request as a way for them to share an experience with friends.”
Its always good to look at things from the guests point of view !
But what your After email does not include is a good reason why guests should take the time to write their review on Trip Advisor.
Can you think of any reasons J ?
Cheers
M
I can tell you why! At HKHotels, our four NYC hotels each get around 30 comments a month when the average hotel in NYC only gets about 6 a month. And we do that with small hotels from 44 rooms to 100 rooms. Take my advice or leave it but it sure works for us and we have 4 of the top TA hotels in NYC, the Casablanca, the Library, Hotel Giraffe and Hotel Elysee. If you meet all your guests needs and expectations, very few people will bother to write a review. Who has the time. You need to WOW them. You need to give them something to talk about. You need to shower your guest with so many magical moments that they they leave the hotel excited and inspired to take the time to want to share their experience with the world. People like to do nice things for nice people. If you staff is always going out their way to make people happy, you will find an endless supply of travelers who will want to return the favor. They also are grateful for the thousands of travelers before them who have given them great advice, and they want to return the courtesy to their fellow TA members.
“You need to WOW them. You need to give them something to talk about. You need to shower your guest with so many magical moments that they they leave the hotel excited and inspired to take the time to want to share their experience with the world. People like to do nice things for nice people.”
I love this, Adele. It’s this mentality that led your hotels to the top of the New York market….
thank you for sharing
Here in Mafia we use QRCodes in the ‘Thanks for your stay¨email. In the code we send a discount for a next visit (or share with friends) . Also in this link we provide a Link to TA for a review.
We track the codes , follow up all the discounts with a simple excel file.
I can send you and example and you let me know what do you think. So far is working for us.
Great posts… like always.
Just be careful! We give out special codes and offers to our database of past guests too, but unrelated to our request for reviews. It is very important that the special offers or coupons you give out are not in any way tied to giving reviews, because offering incentives for reviews is strictly against the rules of TripAdvisor.
So true; thank you for the reminder, Adele!