Amazon Product Inserts for Reviews – All Questions Answered
Bottom line: use an Amazon insert card to create a passive review-generating funnel for your products. A simple Amazon product insert, which delivers value and asks for a review, can have great results with very little effort.
LandingCube’s simple signup landing pages and order verification insert pages give you the tools you need to set up a simple, automated flow to capture emails and ask for reviews using product inserts.
Amazon Product Inserts are one of the best tools to help you get more reviews.
Reviews are difficult to attain today without breaking Terms of Service. And without reviews, your product’s not going to rank, and you’ll have a hard time converting buyers.
A TOS-compliant product insert strategy, however, is a low-cost, low-effort way to reach out to your customers and ask them to write a review for your product.
The average review rate on Amazon is around 1-2%. So you only need to convert a few people with your Amazon insert card to get ahead of other sellers who are doing nothing.
Read on and we’ll explain how you can use Amazon product inserts to get reviews for your products, before sharing some tips on creating an effective Amazon package insert.
What is a Product Insert?
A product insert or insert card is a small card placed inside your product packaging. When a customer receives the product and opens their package, they’ll see the card.
You can use this card to communicate directly with your customer, which is extremely hard to do with Amazon’s many filters between Amazon sellers and the end consumer.
Product inserts are used by all kinds of businesses, on and off Amazon, to promote an offer, advertise other products, give instructions and advice on how to use the product, or to simply say thank you.
Why Product Inserts Work Great for Reviews
It’s notoriously tough for Amazon FBA sellers to ask for product reviews.
Amazon doesn’t want sellers to have too much contact with customers after they make a purchase, so the options for you to reach out to people who bought your product and ask for a review are limited.
You can reach out through Amazon’s messaging system, but these messages are strictly monitored for TOS violations, and many customers have chosen to opt out of receiving messages from FBA sellers.
You can also make first contact with customers outside of Amazon (such as Facebook Ads or other social media), send them through to Amazon, then follow up with an email to ask for a review. While this is effective, it doesn’t help you reach out to the thousands of customers buying your product on Amazon.
Product inserts let you communicate with everyone that buys your product. They’ll be visible by every customer (as long as they open the product packaging). And better yet, they let you get in front of them right when the product arrives.
You avoid problems like asking for reviews too soon (when the product hasn’t even arrived) or too late (when the emotions of the unboxing experience and first impressions have faded).
Two Strategies to Get Reviews with An Amazon Insert Card
There are two ways we’re going to propose to ask for reviews with product inserts; a direct, and indirect approach.
One is not necessarily better than the other. You may want to experiment and split test one method against the other, to see which provides the best results.
PS: LandingCube’s link tracking tools and analytics dashboard will help you to track the number of reviews, or at least the number of clicks to the review page, resulting from each method.
Ask Directly
The first method is to simply ask directly for a review.
This has little friction involved, and manages to get a review request in front of every person who buys your product.
You want to first express your gratitude to the customer for buying the product. Don’t lead by asking for something from the customer right out of the gate.
Providing some kind of value, such as instructions or suggested uses of the product, helps too.
After that, you’re free to include a brief call-to-action for the customer to leave a review. Ask in a clear and simple way, with easy to follow instructions, that also plays on the customers’ nobler motives.
You might ask like this:
‘Could you please leave us a product review? It helps our small business immensely, and also helps other customers make more informed decisions. Thank you ?
Sign into Amazon.com
Hover over Account & Lists
Under Your Account, click Your Orders Orders
Find this order and click Write a Product Review
Be honest ?
You can reach us at anytime at XXX-XXX-XXXX or example@email.com’
To comply with Amazon’s stricter product review policies, you should make sure you’re asking for an honest review – not just a positive one.
Indirect Approach: Incentive – Email – Ask
The alternative is to take an indirect approach. With this strategy, your goal is to get the customer to give you their email address (or another kind of contact info). Once they do this, you follow up and ask them through email (or your chosen communication channel) for a review.
You’ll want to offer an incentive for people to enter their email. This could be an offer for a free product, entry to a giveaway, a warranty signup, or downloadable content (such as a PDF ebook). These are just a few ideas.
Personally I like this strategy the best, because:
Email makes it easier to send people to the review page, as they’re already on their phone/computer
You can time review requests more accurately, if you want to ask only when someone’s had a chance to use the product
Providing more value upfront increases the chance of customers leaving a positive review
You get even more value than just a boost in reviews, as you’re building a list too
However, As we said earlier, you’re probably best to test both strategies to see what’s best for you.
Here’s how the process plays out.
First, the customer opens the product packaging and sees the product insert with an offer for a free PDF download, for example. The insert card instructs the customer to go to a URL to get their offer.
The URL leads to a simple landing page, asking the customer to enter their email to get the offer.
Upon signing up, you deliver the freebie, and the ask, in the same manner above, if the customer will leave a review.
(You could also move the review request into a second email a little later, if you wish).
It’s very simple. Best of all, 99% of this can be automated, so it runs in the background without any day-to-day work necessary.
To-Do’s, and Not-to-Do’s with Amazon Product Inserts
There are some things you should be sure to do with these product insert review requests, and some things to avoid.
#1: Follow the rules
Product inserts are not policed that closely by Amazon, but you should still keep your strategy within TOS, so you don’t risk getting banned.
Offering an incentive in exchange for a review is strictly against Amazon’s rules. So if you’re using the second method, be careful about how you word this. Don’t link the incentive to the review.
If you were to say “we’ll give you a free product if you leave a review”, that’s 100% against TOS.
However, if you say, “enter your email to get a free product”, then later on ask for a review separately, this is ok.
Along with this, you can get in trouble if you use suggestive wording or practices to encourage only positive reviews.
You can’t say “if you’re happy, leave a review”, or ask a customer to leave a “positive” review.
The above example would be in violation of terms of service, as it only asks for a review from happy customers, while asking unhappy customers to contact the company directly.
Want more clarification? Here’s a reminder on product insert policies from the Amazon seller forums:
Asking for reviews is fine – but you can’t ask for positive reviews.
Frame your Amazon package insert like a “thank you” card, rather than a piece of marketing material.
Always lead with appreciation. This gets the customer in a positive frame of mind, and softens them up to where they’re more likely to say “yes” when you eventually ask for a review.
You should take this approach whenever you contact your customers – if you only ever talk to your customers to ask for something, they’re going to ignore you pretty quickly.
#3: Provide unexpected value
A great way to get more people to follow through and write positive reviews is by providing unexpected value.
Ranging from a free gift or discount, to a simple instruction manual or “how-to” guide, any value you offer your customer above what they expect will put them in a good frame of mind.
This positive feeling, as well as the subconcious law of reciprocity in action, will help you get more 5 star reviews.
Plus, the more value a customer gets out of your product, the happier they’ll be with it. It’s in your best interests to help them along the way.
If you can include installation instructions, suggested uses, or anything else that helps someone use your product, do it. You’ll also get fewer negative reviews if your customer has an easy time using or setting up the product.
Important: don’t connect your “unexpected value” to leaving a review. Don’t say “here’s a free guide if you write us a product review”. This is against Amazon’s policies, and could get you banned. Instead, just provide value up front, and a little later, ask the customer for an honest review separately.
#4: Show off your brand’s identity
Branding opportunities on Amazon are few and far between. So take any chance you can to communicate outside Amazon and build your brand.
Instead of a plain white thank you card with plain black text, add your brand’s logo, and try to inject a bit of personality. This will help build your brand as one the customer remembers, and hopefully they will start to develop brand loyalty towards you.
Product inserts are usually about the size of a business card, or a bit larger. You want to make your product cards easy to read. Don’t jam too much information on a small card.
Put your brand logo on the card. And infuse your brand voice into it (and all communications).
A simple design is usually best – it’s worth it to get something designed professionally, since this will be representing your brand with many many customers.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can use the product packaging itself as the insert – put your request for a review or URL to a landing page on the box, rather than an insert card.
Sample Insert Cards for Reviews
Here are some examples of packaging used to ask for reviews, which you can use for inspiration when creating your own.
This insert has a really clean design, and does a great job of thanking the customer and helping them use the product.
You can customize the text to fit the voice of your brand (and obviously make sure you don’t have any spelling mistakes!).
The coupon code is a great touch, as it helps you bring back repeat customers. It’s also a way to subtly influence a positive review, by providing additional value to the customer – just as long as you don’t link the discount to the review request, which would be clearly against TOS (e.g. “Here’s a discount code, now could you go and leave a review on Amazon?).
If you’re not too concerned about dipping a little grey-hat, you could link to a landing page where the customer has to opt-in via email to get the discount code (instead of displaying it right on the insert). This is a powerful way to build your email list.
This insert has a really nice design, but is a clear example of what’s against Terms of Service. It seems innocent enough, but asking happy customers to leave a review and unhappy customers to contact you is 100% not allowed. You’re at risk of suspension if Amazon checks, or someone reports you.
[Source : my own purchase]
This is a great way to build a huge email list. All the customer has to do is visit a landing page, enter their email and order ID (to confirm they actually made a purchase), and they get sent a free product.
The product insert does a great job communicating this, as well as making the customer feel good about buying. It also makes good use of a vanity URL for the landing page, making it easy for people to type in the URL and redeem their prize.
After collecting email signups this way, you can use the emails collected to ask for reviews – just as long as you don’t only make the free product contingent on leaving a review.
This doesn’t directly ask for a review (you may want to make it 2-sided and politely ask for a review on the other side), but it’s still an awesome idea for a packaging insert. This insert delivers helpful content for the buyer to get more value out of the product, and answers FAQs that may often result in confusion and/or negative reviews.
This insert would probably result in more positive reviews than ones that directly ask the customer for a review.
This is another awesome design that focuses on value and branding first, reviews second. It does have a small ask weaved in the middle, which is small enough to not feel like a blatant “please help us out”.
Focus on the customer first, like this insert does, and you’ll be doing better than 95% of sellers on Amazon.
This insert combines beautiful design with a great list building tactic – asking customers to register and receive a free warranty.
It also gives clear yet short instructions on leaving a review, without suggestive wording (like “leave a positive review”).
However, be aware that this insert is almost certainly against Terms of Service. It can be considered illegal for directing support queries to your own email, not to mention linking to the website/social media pages outside of Amazon.
Levoit is a big brand that can most likely get away with breaking terms on things like this. It may be a risk for a smaller store, but it’s definitely an effective strategy.
Again, this insert skirts the lines of the TOS. It’s likely against terms, but a small change in copy would fix that.
The best part about this is that the review request is very short. It has a whole side dedicated to clear instructions that will help customers get value out of the product.
Clear branding, a QR code to an email capture landing page and a call to action to share on social are more ways this product insert is going to keep delivering value with each purchase.
This has a clean design, and clear instructions to leave a product review. Yet the most prominent part is the “Thank You”, which delivers gratitude and a good feeling for the customer, before the ask comes in.
It’s also fully within terms, so serves as inspiration for anyone who wants to be 100% above board.
Finally, it’s a great example of an insert for marketplaces outside of the US, where you may have a muti-lingual customer base.
Super simple, but great branding and a feel-good touch for the customer.The only ask is a simple callout on social media, which the company (Sticker Mule) says results in hundreds of mentions each week.
Using Amazon product Inserts to Get Reviews: In Summary
We’ve discussed in this post all you need to know about Amazon packaging inserts, and how to use them effectively to get reviews.
If you’re ready to test out the methods in this post, you’ll want to create an account with LandingCube to create tracking links for your product inserts, QR codes, and signup landing pages to collect email options.
Adding an Amazon insert card to your product packaging is going to level up your game as an Amazon FBA seller, by generating more 5 star reviews on autopilot.
