How to ask customers for reviews (without breaking the rules)

Most review requests fail for boring reasons: sent too late, addressed to nobody in particular, asking for a favour rather than a few minutes.

A few fail for a more serious reason, which is that they only go to customers expected to say something nice. More on that below, because the rules have changed.

Ask everyone

Not the happy ones. Everyone.

This is the single most important rule, and it is increasingly a legal one rather than a matter of taste. Filtering who gets asked produces a rating that describes your customer-selection process rather than your service. Readers eventually work this out, and regulators have caught up.

It also costs you less than you think. Businesses that ask everyone typically find the average dips slightly and conversion improves, because a page of unbroken five stars reads as fake and a 4.4 with substance reads as real.

Ask at the right moment

The window is narrower than most people assume:

• Product delivered: two to four days after arrival. Long enough to use it, short enough to remember.
• A service visit: same day or next morning.
• Something ongoing (an agency, a maintenance contract): after a milestone, not on a monthly schedule.
• Hospitality: the day after.

Asking at the point of sale gets you a review of your sales process. Asking three months later gets you nothing.

Write it like a person

Bad: "Your opinion matters to us! Please take a moment to leave a review of your recent experience."

Better: "Hello Sarah — you had your brakes done with us on Tuesday. Would you write a few lines about how it went? Good or bad, both are useful."

The difference is specificity and the explicit invitation to be critical. "Good or bad" measurably increases responses from people who had an average experience, which are the most useful reviews you will get.

Ask once

One request. One reminder at most, a week later, and only to people who did not respond.

Anyone who has ignored two requests is not going to write one, and a third makes you the business that will not stop emailing. We cap invitations at one per customer per month per business for that reason, and it is not adjustable.

Practices to avoid

Incentives. Offering a discount, a prize draw entry or a free month in exchange for a review buys you reviews from people motivated by the reward. Beyond the obvious problem, undisclosed incentivised reviews are a consumer-protection issue in most jurisdictions.

Review gating. Asking "how did we do?" first, then routing happy customers to the review page and unhappy ones to a private complaints form. This is the practice regulators have moved against most directly. See our post on where the law now sits.

Writing them yourself. Including "helping" a customer by drafting one. In the UK this now sits squarely in banned-practice territory.

Buying them. Reliably detectable, because bought reviews arrive in clusters from accounts with no history, and every serious platform looks for exactly that shape.

Two templates

After a purchase

Subject: How were the brake pads, Sarah? Hello Sarah, You had front pads and discs fitted with us on Tuesday. Would you write a few lines about how it went? Whether it was good or bad, it helps the next person deciding. It takes about two minutes: [link] Tom, Harbourlight Motors

After a service visit

Subject: Yesterday's visit Hello James, Dan was out to you yesterday about the boiler. Would you write up how it went? We ask everyone, and we would rather hear it if something was not right. [link]

Short, specific, names a person, invites criticism openly.

What to measure

Not the number of reviews. Track the proportion of invitations that become reviews — a healthy figure sits somewhere between 5% and 15% for email, and if you are far below that the timing or the wording is wrong, not the customers.

We show invitations sent alongside reviews received on every profile, so the ratio is visible to readers too. A business with two thousand invitations and eleven reviews is telling you something.