How Hubspot A/B tested the best way to gather reviews

One of the most powerful ways to get user feedback is through reviews from platforms like G2 or Capterra. They’re an easy way to get customer feedback, they’re free, they show up in search results, and they can significantly increase awareness of your product as it’s being considered amongst your competitors.

When it comes to getting customer reviews, many companies try to collect them by sending email requests. But, using email to collect reviews might not be the best way to ask for them. In fact, it may be a waste of time as they could be ignored.

The Experiment

Hubspot sent out an email and in-app notification each month to our top customer to ask them to review our software on Capterra.

How they set it up was notify our users in the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension. The in-app notification appears when a user opens the extension and it would take them to the Capterra page to leave the review.

Here, they decided to test it by soliciting reviews through their in-app notifications instead. and tested the two methods for collecting reviews, email versus in-app notifications to see what was more effective

The email they sent contained a Capterra review link in the email body.

The Results

The results were much different than what the originally expected, which was that in-app notifications would have a better response versus email.

The ultimately learned that email is the most effective way for collecting reviews, as In-app notifications are often overlooked or missed by users.

In the end, emails outperformed in-app notifications by 1.4x. 24.9% of those who opened the email left a review, compared to 10.3% of those who opened the in-app notification.