FloQast’s Guide to Multi-Channel Review Campaigns
FloQast has accomplished what so many companies strive to: quickly populating authentic customer reviews on G2.
In partnership with The Captivate Collective, their cohesive review generation strategy resulted in a 312% increase in reviews compared to the year prior.
FloQast is a close management solution made for accountants, by accountants, that automates, streamlines, and gives visibility into the various action items that accountants have to go through every month. The Captivate Collective is an advocate marketing consulting agency that works with clients like FloQast to build their advocacy strategy from scratch.
Together they built a review generation strategy that generated more reviews than FloQast ever has before.
We sat down with Victoria LaPlante, FloQast’s Head of Customer Marketing and Community, and Kiely Monteiro, The Captivate Collective’s Senior Consultant, to learn more.
Building their review collection strategy
LaPlante and Monteiro shared their playbook for building the campaign that drove hundreds of new reviews, and how they utilized those reviews after collecting them. Their review collection strategy includes four critical steps, highlighted below.
1. Targeting segments
When FloQast first started working with The Captivate Collective, they explored ways to expand outreach and looked at targeting customers for review asks when they were most engaged (and therefore most likely to leave a review).
To start, they looked at admins and managers from companies that had renewed in the past six months, as well as anyone deemed a product champion by their customer success managers. They knew these users had enough experience with the platform to give a comprehensive review, and that they were actively leveraging FloQast at their organization.
Next, they targeted customers who had shared feedback with them in various other channels and hypothesized that if they were willing to share feedback in one channel, they would be likely to share it on G2 as well. They sent review requests out to their NPS respondents, as well as anyone who had submitted a support ticket and left feedback through the follow-up.
By expanding their target audience, FloQast was able to capture a broad range of authentic reviews from their most engaged users.
But they didn’t stop there.
2. Soliciting reviews through more than one avenue
In order to drive as many reviews as possible, FloQast also implemented a multi-channel approach to engage their full customer base. They explored every customer touchpoint and worked to incorporate review requests throughout their customer experience.
This included making review requests through:
- In-app notifications
- Product banners
- FloQast’s application sign-in page
- Social posts
- Customer community pages
- Email newsletters
- In-person events
LaPlante shared, “Showcasing it within the application itself, which thousands of users are seeing every single day, it underscores the value that we are placing on customer feedback.”
3. Engaging customers
One simple method the team used to attract and engage potential reviewers was theming their monthly review requests. While a small touch, it captured the attention of their customers and kept the asks fresh.
Some example opening lines included “you are audit I need” in February and “April showers bring May flowers (and G2 reviews)” in May.
Each email would open with an accounting pun or holiday theme, and then would incentivize reviewers to leave feedback in exchange for an Amazon gift card. Believe it or not, accountants are funny people!
4. Driving internal alignment
Finally, to accomplish cross-functional alignment and visibility across the organization for their campaigns, an internal playbook was created.
LaPlante says, “Making sure our team understood that their involvement in the success of the campaign was critical, and having that general understanding of what we were trying to accomplish, was important and part of the success.”
Victoria LaPlante
Head of Customer Marketing and Community at FloQast
Monteiro and the FloQast marketing leadership team met weekly to brainstorm the initial plan, and after getting alignment, worked together to communicate that plan to FloQast’s heads of support and customer success.
Once they were bought in, the campaign kicked off with 1:1 outreach from the CSMs to their customers. Monteiro and LaPlante also wanted to ensure that teams stayed motivated to continue their outreach. They started by displaying a ticker to visually show how close they were to their goal.
LaPlante met with internal stakeholders on a weekly basis to align all various touch points and conversations that were happening across the organization. She also created and leveraged an internal Slack channel dedicated to continuous campaign updates, ideas, and results.
From collection to utilization
LaPlante shares, “If you have a prospect who sees your badges and then becomes a customer, a year later when you ask them for a review, they’ll remember how reviews helped them feel validated in their purchase decision and be more likely to leave a review themselves. It’s a continuous loop that benefits all parties involved.”
Victoria LaPlante
Head of Customer Marketing and Community at FloQast
Internally, LaPlante and her team take those reviews and make sure to respond to and come up with key themes that they are seeing across reviews. When reviews are collected, FloQast groups them into thematic buckets and important variables for their business, such as business size, industry, and geography.
They are then packaged into quotebooks to be leveraged as marketing materials by the sales development teams.
Embracing all feedback
As a Director of Customer Marketing, LaPlante recognizes that outreach to all customers can cause some anxiety, especially at the leadership level, but notes, “you need to stand behind your product. If you are resolute that you have a product that makes a difference, and you know that customers are successful using it, you can be confident that they’ll give you that kind of feedback that you’re looking for on G2.”
LaPlante encourages companies not to be afraid of customer reviews, even if it is unclear where their favor falls. When FloQast receives a negative review, which is rare, they make sure to respond to the customer, and share the feedback with the internal team with the aligning area of opportunity.
Kiely Monteiro
Senior Consultant at The Captivate Collective
This attention to the customer is reflected in FloQast’s most recent recognition as the #1 vendor in the Relationship Index for Financial Close in G2’s Fall 2022 reports. When potential customers are reading reviews and responses, they can feel comfortable knowing that if a worst-case scenario happens, they will be in good hands.
LaPlante reflects, “One of the core themes that we were able to pull away was how our customers are identifying the fact that we are listening and they feel like we really are taking their feedback to heart and to the product. It was one of the areas they gave us a lot of high remarks on.”
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