How To Build A Review Funnel: A Step By Step Tutorial

You might have heard of a sales funnel (if you haven’t, check out our video about Funnels and Flywheels), but a review funnel is a wonder only a select few are familiar with.

Here is how to make a funnel. A review funnel, to be specific. It's really cool and saves you a lot of time.

What’s a Review Funnel?

A review funnel is basically a really smart survey. It does most of the work for you. It can identify happy customers as well as unhappy customers and put them in different buckets.

Once in these buckets, you can send people to different places. Happy customers can get a nudge to leave a review somewhere public, like Trustpilot, Amazon or G2, whatever floats your boat.

Unhappy customers get the same chance to leave a public review, and their feedback also reaches you and your team directly. You see where things went wrong, can reach out before the problem grows and use that information to improve your business.

Review funnels are also called feedback funnels or review generation funnels. Whatever the name, they work the same way: one short survey goes to every customer and asks every respondent for a public review, while low scores and problems also reach you straight away, so you can follow up.

Sounds genius, now how do we set this thing up? Start in involve.me's funnel builder.

Let’s build the whole thing from start to finish in less than 10 minutes.

Step 1: Grab a Free Survey Template

Did we mention this is free? Because it is. Go to involve.me and pick one from the template gallery.

Prefer to start from a description? Describe the review funnel in the box below, for example "A review funnel for a restaurant that asks guests to rate their visit from 0 to 10, shows every guest the link to our Google review page and sends low scores to our team as well", then add your website on the next screen if you want your branding applied.

Step 2: Customize the Design

You can make this template match your brand completely: add your logo, change the background, button roundness and font, or even upload your own font.

Step 3: Customize the Functionality

Once you’re happy with the design, move on to setting up where everything goes. This template asks two questions.

Fun fact: the shorter the survey, the more people finish it. In a European Social Survey experiment, the version with 92 more questions had a response rate 4.2 percentage points lower. So if you want replies, ask fewer questions.

Back to the questions. This is an open-ended question, which means people can type in anything they want to. You cannot automate it, because everyone will write something different.

This question, however, has selectable answers, and people can only select one of them. Which means you can connect each of these answers to a different outcome.

All you have to do is click the question and map each answer to an outcome page. To check the whole setup at once, open the Outcome Settings from the page navigation: they show which answer leads to which outcome.

Answers 0 to 6 are connected to the Detractor page. These are people who don't have anything to write home about. They still see the same review button as everyone else, but you also want to hear about their experience directly. That’s what the open question is for. You capture the feedback, but on your own, internal platform where only you and your team can see it.

Answers 7 and 8 are connected to the Passive page. These people had a good time, but are not super enthusiastic about you. They would give you a 4 star review, not a 5 star one. And a genuine 4 star review still helps. Anyways, 7 to 8 are happy peeps: ask them for a review too, and keep sending them your newsletter.

Answers 9 and 10 are connected to the Promoter page. These are your biggest fans! These are the nerds waiting for new products with their credit cards. They will promote your business for you. They will turn your funnel into a flywheel (seriously, watch our funnel vs flywheel video). These are the people who will give you 5 star reviews.

Once you’ve connected each answer to the right outcome, let’s look at the outcomes. Passives get a quick thank you note, and the Detractor page adds an offer to talk to your team directly. Promoters get a button that asks them to leave a review on a platform of your choice. This button is here for you to link to Trustpilot, G2, Amazon… whatever platform you’re focusing on.

Then add the same review button to the Passive and Detractor pages, so every customer gets the same request. Google’s Maps content policy does not allow businesses to discourage negative reviews or to selectively ask for positive ones, and the US Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides name this exact setup (review invitations only for very happy customers, a thank-you for everyone else) as a practice that may be unfair or deceptive. Low scores still reach your team right away through the workflow in Step 5.

Step 4: Preview & Test

To make sure your funnel is working, fill it in yourself a couple of times. If something’s not connected right, you want to know about it before your customers do.

Click the eye icon in the editor to open the preview. It shows your design on desktop and mobile, and lets you take the survey the same way your customers will see it. Need help with the questions? Here is how to make an online survey.

Step 5: Automate the Follow-up

A low score is only useful if someone acts on it, so set up the follow-up before you publish. Click Email Automation in the main menu (not on every plan), create a workflow and pick Completed Submission as the trigger with your review funnel. A draft funnel works too: the workflow switches on as soon as you publish the funnel.

Then build the automation workflow step by step:

• Send Email thanks every respondent right away.

• Conditional Logic splits the workflow by outcome.

• On the Detractor path, Send Internal Email tells your team about the low score, with the answer to the open question in the email, and Change Assignee hands the contact to the person who follows up.

• After a one-day Wait Time, a second Send Email asks the customer what would have made the experience better.

If customers book or pay through an involve.me funnel, a second workflow on Payment Completed can wait a few days and send them this review funnel with Invite to Funnel, so every customer gets asked without anyone having to remember.

Step 6: Publish

Once you’ve tested your survey, you’re ready to hit the “publish” button. You’ll land on the Configure page, where you review and confirm your funnel settings before publishing.

Don’t worry, you can come back to this page later and change the settings even after your survey is live.

Step 7: Share It with the World

Hitting “publish” one last time will put your survey live. Yay! You will get a link, a short link, a QR code to use it in print and an embed code to use it on your website.

If you’ve never embedded anything in your website, this is the perfect thing to start with. Here is the embed code and here is where you can edit how the embed behaves. See how these are 2 separate places? That’s so you can’t mess up the code.

You can make the embed narrow or make it cover the whole screen.

That’s up to you.

And that’s it!

How Different Businesses Use Review Funnels

The same funnel works wherever reviews bring in new customers:

• Restaurants and cafés: a QR code on the receipt or the table opens a two-question survey. Every guest gets a link to your Google profile, and low scores also reach the owner directly with what to improve in the menu, the service or the atmosphere.

• Online shops: a survey goes out by email after delivery. Every customer is invited to review the product, and low scores also show the shop what to fix in the product range, the website or shipping.

• Software companies: a Net Promoter Score survey runs after onboarding or after a support ticket closes. Every respondent gets a link to G2 or Capterra, and detractors' answers also reach the product team directly as bug reports and feature requests.

Why Use a Review Funnel?

• Hear about problems first. A low score reaches you the moment it is submitted, so you can fix the issue and follow up with the customer while the experience is fresh.

• Learn what to improve. The open answers show what customers like and dislike. Analyze that customer feedback regularly and it becomes a list of fixes for your product or service.

• Ask at the right moment. Send the survey right after a purchase, a delivery or a support conversation, while the experience is fresh, and the funnel collects and sorts every answer on its own.

• Show customers their opinion counts. Asking for feedback and replying to it builds the relationship that leads to more positive reviews.

How to Respond to Reviews

Reply to every public review, whether it is positive, neutral or negative, and keep the tone friendly and helpful:

• Positive reviews: thank the customer and mention the specific thing they liked, so the reply reads personal. Share the best reviews on your social media channels.

• Neutral reviews: a three-star rating with few details still deserves an answer. Acknowledge the experience and any points they raised, and offer help with whatever fell short.

• Negative reviews: apologize for the experience, explain briefly what happened and offer a solution or compensation. Then follow up privately to settle any remaining concerns. Handled well, a negative review shows future customers how you treat people when something goes wrong.