How To Do Review Marketing: Ecommerce Examples and Tips

When a customer shops online, they can’t touch, test, or try a product before buying. This is where reviews can bridge the gap and serve as an influential form of social proof. 

According to a 2025 consumer trends report from Attentive, “99% of consumers find non-promotional campaigns helpful for their shopping experience.” That includes customer reviews, which 40% of those surveyed identified as the most helpful content they can receive from a brand via text or email. Review marketing strategies provide that kind of relevant content and reassurance for potential customers.

This guide explains what review marketing is, best practices for collecting reviews, and how to turn them into reusable content for email, social, and product pages. 

What is review marketing?

Review marketing is the practice of collecting, managing, and promoting customer reviews to influence purchasing decisions. The goal of review marketing isn’t simply to accumulate reviews; instead, it’s designed to help future customers understand what it’s like to buy and use your products based on other customers’ perspectives. 

By intentionally collecting, responding to, and repurposing reviews, you can use the social proof offered by previous customers to help convert potential ones. While reviews on your own product pages help shoppers evaluate specific items, don’t overlook third-party platforms where customers may discover your business first. Depending on how you sell, that could include Google, Amazon, Trustpilot, or industry-specific review sites and marketplaces. 

A review marketing strategy typically includes collecting reviews after purchase, displaying them on product pages, responding to them, and repurposing reviews across marketing channels such as email, social media, landing pages, and paid advertising.

How to do review marketing

1. Make leaving reviews as easy as possible
2. Incentivize detailed reviews
3. Use automation to scale review collection
4. Respond to positive and negative feedback
5. Turn reviews into reusable marketing assets

Use these steps as a guide to start your review marketing strategy:

1. Make leaving reviews as easy as possible

In its 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, the SEO company BrightLocal found that 78% of consumers had been asked to leave a review in the past year—and 83% of those asked went on to write one. Instead of waiting for reviews to appear, ask for them. An automated request sent shortly after delivery creates a steady stream of new reviews without constant manual outreach. 

Encourage customers to leave feedback wherever it’s most relevant, then monitor those platforms regularly so you can respond to reviews and address concerns.

On Shopify, you can simplify review collection through Shop Product Reviews, a feature that automatically prompts customers to leave verified reviews after an order arrives. Reviews submitted through Shop carry a rating from 1 to 5 stars and appear on Shop product pages. 

If you’re looking for more advanced functionality, product review apps such as Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox, Okendo, and Stamped.io offer automated review requests, photo and video reviews, Q&A features, and user-generated content collection tools that can help you scale your review marketing efforts.

2. Incentivize detailed reviews

Offering a small incentive can encourage more customers to leave thoughtful, detailed reviews. That incentive could be a discount for a future purchase, loyalty points, entry into a giveaway, or early access to new products. It should reward the effort of writing a review, not the sentiment. Ask for an honest review, not a positive one, and say so in the request.

To encourage higher-quality feedback, be specific about what you’re asking for. Instead of simply requesting a star rating, prompt customers to describe how they used the product or what surprised them most. You can also invite shoppers to upload photos or videos, which often make reviews more helpful to future customers by allowing them to see products in action. Michelle Razavi, founder of Elavi, says the brand offers a credit through its review app and frames the request as a favor, saying, “Hey, help a small business out and leave us a review and we’ll give you $5 off your next order.” Michelle adds that once customers see their reviews reposted, more of them want to be featured. 

3. Use automation to scale review collection

Sending each request by hand stops scaling the moment you’re shipping more than a handful of orders a day. Most review apps let you send requests automatically after an order is delivered, customize the timing, and follow up with customers who haven’t responded. 

With Shop product reviews, you set that window yourself, anywhere from one to 180 days after delivery. You can then use Shopify Flow to automate what happens once a review exists. Its Shop Review Published trigger fires whenever a Shop review goes live and passes along the rating and review text, so you can route low ratings to your support inbox or notify a staff member automatically. 

4. Respond to positive and negative feedback

Collecting reviews is only half of review management; the other half is responding to them. A reply to a positive review reinforces the relationship. Responding thoughtfully to negative reviews is just as important, as it shows future buyers how you handle problems.

When addressing negative reviews, respond promptly, acknowledge the customer’s concern, avoid defensive language, and offer a path toward resolution. Negative reviews are part of how shoppers judge credibility, so a professional, helpful reply can offset the impact of a bad one.

Attempting to delete negative reviews can backfire, particularly if the reviewer notices and leaves another comment saying you tried to censor them. Unless a review violates platform guidelines or is clearly fraudulent, leaving it up and responding is usually a better way to build trust.

5. Turn reviews into reusable marketing assets

One review can do several jobs. Written testimonials can become email copy, video reviews can become paid ads, customer photos can become social media creative, and before-and-after images can strengthen product pages. By repurposing reviews, you can build a growing library of authentic customer content that supports future marketing campaigns without constantly creating new assets from scratch.

Beauty brand Tower 28 built a library of before-and-after photos this way, and it started with customers posting on their own. Early in the pandemic, founder Amy Liu sent the brand’s facial spray to essential workers who were dealing with mask-related skin irritation. Some of them posted their own before-and-after photos, unprompted. Amy then wrote to those customers individually to ask whether she could use the images and sent another bottle as a thank you.

“We would take their before and after [pictures] because they gave us permission to use them and we would put them on our Shopify site,” Amy says on Shopify Masters. “And so then we had before-and-afters that came from the community and then it just kind of perpetuated.”

A written review left on your own site is one thing; a customer’s face in a paid ad is another. Photos, videos, and testimonials typically need an explicit “yes” before you use them for advertising. When in doubt, check with a lawyer. 

Where to incorporate customer reviews

• Product pages
• Social media content
• Email campaigns

Once you’ve collected a substantial number of reviews, consider spotlighting them on these surfaces: 

Product pages

The most direct place to put reviews to work is the product page. Publish star ratings, written reviews, customer-submitted photos, and video testimonials alongside the product description. By publishing reviews in the place where shoppers are considering a purchase, you can help shoppers validate their decisions and answer common questions before they buy.

By integrating reviews and customer-generated content directly into product pages, brands can build trust while helping shoppers visualize their own experience with a product.

Social media content

By turning customer feedback into content for social media posts, you can extend the value of every review you collect. This strategy can be especially helpful in the first stages of building an audience.
That’s what nutrition brand Elavi did before it had reviews anywhere else to point to.

Michelle credits posting screenshots of customer feedback across Elavi’s social platforms as the single thing that did the most for the brand early on. “For our first six months of launch, I would say what moved the needle the most is sharing screenshots of reviews,” Michelle says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “Anytime we’d gift products to friends and family, or they would just buy out of the kindness of their hearts … we would screenshot the reviews and post it on our Instagram stories.”

According to Michelle, these simple screenshots of reviews, text messages from happy customers, and short customer videos performed well for Elavi, since they felt authentic and trustworthy.

Email campaigns

Instead of relying exclusively on text-based promotional messaging, brands can weave video testimonials into welcome sequences, abandoned cart emails, product launches, and post-purchase campaigns. Video adds a human face to the process, making word-of-mouth advertising literal as users hear straight from someone like them about what makes a product worthwhile.

Thomas Hal Robson-Kanu, founder of the wellness brand The Turmeric Co., says video reviews became valuable assets across the company’s marketing efforts, as well as throughout other marketing channels. After customers would leave written reviews, Thomas and his team would reach out to certain customers and ask if they’d like to leave video testimonials as well. “Those video testimonials became assets to us,” Thomas says on Shopify Masters. “We would request permission to then use them within our marketing.” The company incorporated customer videos into email funnels and other campaigns, targeting both existing customers and prospective buyers.