Online Reputation Management News | Widewail Blog

Introducing Two New Review Generation Features: Campaigns and Incentives Engine

Written by Director of Marketing | March 9, 2022

Widewail is proud to release two new capabilities that will take automated review generation and video testimonial collection to the next level — Incentives Engine and Campaigns. An expansion of current capabilities, both will be added to platform offerings at no additional charge. 

Watch our CEO, Matt, give his take on this launch:

 

 

Incentives Engine

Generate more video testimonials with built-in giveaway programs

Offering incentives in exchange for written reviews hasn’t been possible, because most review sites prohibit this practice. However, video testimonials aren’t curtailed by the same regulations. With Invite Video, we are excited to be able to offer automated incentivization tools. Solidifying the value of our newest video review generation product, Incentives Engine will seamlessly integrate custom offers into the video collection process. Give away gift cards, discounts, vouchers - whatever makes the most sense for your business to help encourage more video testimonials. Prevent spam and abuse by configuring your incentive settings with specific frequencies and date ranges. Keep track of prize winners right in the Widewail platform. 

A common concern, understandably, is “will our customers actually submit videos”? Since the launch of Invite Video in December ‘21, we’ve proven that yes, to everyone’s delight, indeed they do. Young and old. For a whole variety of products: cars, gym memberships, apparel products. And every video generated thus far has not been incentivized. The customer simply had that good of an experience. And as business owners and marketers we reap the rewards. 

Now, with Incentives Engine, we can accelerate that content generation to new heights.  

Here’s how it works.

  1. Select your prize. Discounts on future purchases encourage repeat business. Gift cards provide the customer with something they can enjoy right away. Or run two campaigns and see which offer performs best.
  2. Set your prize limit and time frame. Limiting the scope of your incentive is the best way to prevent spam and abuse. To help with budgeting, set the max amount your business is on the hook for during a given timeframe. Once the incentive has been exhausted, future invites will be sent without an incentive for the remainder of the time period. For example, say you’d like to give away 25 coffee gift cards a month. Set your incentive limit to 25 and your timeframe to 30 days and Incentives Engine will remove the incentive when the quota is reached for the remainder of the time period.
  3. We will log each incentive winner in the app, notifying you each time an incentivized video has been submitted. 
  4. The business is free to manage the fulfillment process however it sees fit.
  5. Navigate to your constantly replenished customer video testimonial library. Utilize video social proof on your website, social, paid social, newsletter, landing pages and more. Get creative!

One thing to note: you can even set up multi-tiered incentive programs. So if you want to give out a certain amount of gift cards, you don’t need to end the incentive program as soon as those are depleted. Instead, you could set up a tier below that, such as a discount off one item, and that Invite would automatically switch to once your first tier is exhausted. Still, frequency settings will be used to reset or end the program as you wish. 

All in all, Incentives Engine makes it easier for you to motivate customers to leave video reviews and keep track of winners for your team to send prizes to.

Campaigns

Be more intentional about review generation to support specific marketing objectives


New functionality released in 2022, Campaigns empowers Invite and Invite Video clients with a uniquely powerful and customizable approach to collecting customer reviews and videos. This is the realization of Widewail’s vision to make automated review generation software that intelligently bolsters marketing strategies and accelerates business growth. 

Break your customers into groups, requesting video reviews from a customizable percentage and text reviews from the remaining, powered with automated workflows. Create limited-run video testimonial campaigns. For example, in the case of a hotel, asking guests what time of year is their favorite to visit. Trying to promote a new spa? Create a 60 day Campaign targeting spa guests with custom text message content, prompting them to leave a review specifically of their experience at the “newly renovated Oasis spa.”

Trust Marketing is all about leveraging the voice of your happy customers to share a message on the businesses behalf, and with Campaigns you can precisely align customer commentary with current marketing objectives.

Launch unlimited manual and automated feedback campaigns. Target different groups of customers with requests for unique types of content. Campaigns is an expansion of Invite and Invite Video, and will be added at no additional cost. 

Each campaign can have unique: 

  • delivery rules
  • sending delays
  • message copy
  • content types
  • audience selection
  • trigger states
  • expiration dates

Audiences can be built to enroll certain customers into campaigns such as customers of unique departments, specific percentages of your customers, or manually imported lists. By breaking out your review requests into campaigns, you can now not only make more targeted requests to different audiences but also view individual reporting within each campaign. This will enable you to monitor campaign effectiveness, test different configurations against each other, and make optimizations accordingly. 

In setting up campaigns, we will now offer three types to choose from. Use it for Invite to generate reviews, Invite Video to collect video testimonials, or combine the two in a Follow Up Campaign. Follow Up Campaigns will first request a review on Google, Facebook, or any other industry-specific sites, and then for those who left 5-star feedback Widewail will automatically send a request for a video testimonial. That way, you are only asking for video content from the customers you know are most willing to go that extra mile for you. On top of all this, all video campaigns are integrated with the Incentives Engine, facilitating giveaways to drive more video reviews. (Note: Incentives Engine is disabled for text reviews because incentivizing a review is against the review sites terms of service)

Review and video testimonial generation have never been one-size-fits-all. Now, Incentives Engine and Campaigns maximize efficiency for a wider variety of business needs and initiatives.