Introduction to Kickstart

Kickstart is usually offered to customers starting their ratings & reviews adventure with Lipscore. Kickstart campaign means sending out review requests to customers who made purchases in the webshop within a given period prior to the Lipscore integration. The idea is to get a nice boost of reviews (and endorphins – it is really fun to see mostly positive review pouring into your Lipscore account and your webshop) from day one when a few dozens, hundreds or thousands customers receive invitations at the same time.

Disclaimer: The purpose of this article is not to scare you off! But we want to be honest and simply prepare you for the potential challenges you may encounter while working on the import file and help you tackle them. We love Kickstart and so do our customers – and their shoppers, since after all it is them who benefit from their peers’ authentic feedback in their purchasing experience.

Possible challenges

A very specific data file is required to make Kickstart possible.

• For Product or Product and service reviews Kickstart campaign we need a file with: Customer name, Customer email, Date of purchase, Product ID, Product name, Product URL and Language of the invitation.
• For Service reviews kickstart we need Customer name, Customer email, Date of purchase and Language.

You can find instructions and templates for Kickstart files in this article.

Preparing such file can be easy or difficult, depending on:

1. eCommerce platform your website is built with
2. Version of the used platform (e.g., Magento 1, Magento 2, Magento ECE)
3. The plan you are on (Standard, Premium, etc.) with your platform provider
4. Export functionalities available in your platform
5. Data available in the exported file
6. Your Excel skills / availability of people with Excel skills in your team

The possible challenges are, among others:

1. Your eCommerce platform / version / plan does not offer any Export function.

In such cases, sometimes it is possible to export data directly from the database – please note your developer would usually need to be involved.

2. Required data are missing in the exported file

Sometimes it is possible to export various order details but not the details Lipscore requires. The most typical challenge are product IDs. In the Lipscore integration we usually use / recommend other developers to use parent product IDs so that product variants automatically share and display each other’s reviews. However, some platforms allow exporting data with only variant IDs (e.g., SKUs) or without IDs at all.

In such cases, you will need to:

• export a file with data available in your platform backoffice and clean it from the irrelevant data by manually removing it from the file
• look for an external ID exporter app that allows exporting product IDs from your platform system
• map data from one file to the other with help of advanced Excel formulas (e.g., V-lookup), ask your developer for help or send both files to our Support with a request for a quote. Worst case scenario, you can do the matching manually.

3. You do not feel capable of reworking the exported file even if it contains the required data

In the perfect world, an export functionality also has filtering options where you can specify which data you want to export from your system – and this surely is the case with some platforms. However, in other, less perfect cases, an exported file may be “raw” and contains all the order data available in your system. This means that you may export a file with e.g., 28 columns, while Lipscore file only needs 7 of them and will need to clean it from those irrelevant ones. Also, you need to take GDPR into consideration and make sure that customers who should not receive any additional communication from you, are not there in the file. The raw file may contain data in wrong format (e.g., dates in dd/mm/yyyy format while we require yyyy-dd-mm) or special characters that are not rendered correctly, which will need a correction.

This step is a manual process of “separating the wheat from the chaff” and unless you are a big fan of tasks that require a lot of focus and orientation on details, you may not thrive in this task.

Conclusion

As you can see, arriving at an importable Kickstart campaign file can be tricky. And yet, we have been sending out at least a few Kickstart campaigns per week for years. This means it is not only doable but more often than not, worth the effort! Although Kickstart campaigns tend to produce lower response rates than ongoing orders (emotions and impressions are not as fresh when requesting a review after a few months), they still produce considerable volumes of stars and reviews that are immediately populating your product pages and homepage widgets. Need encouragement? The most recent Kickstart campaign which contained c. 1000 invitations resulted in 250+ ratings and 100+ reviews within 24 hours. We are just bragging, this case was unique and cannot set expectations, as the usual response rates for Kickstart campaign are around 3-10% and the response rates are also heavily dependent on your industry and type of product. But we do encourage you to try for yourself and see what comes back from your Kickstart campaign.

Please remember that sometimes the developer working on the integration or your platform developers can help you export a perfect file, taking this burden completely off your shoulders. It usually has a cost, but a skilled developer should not need more than 1-2 hours to provide the required file. Also, sending out a service reviews Kickstart campaign is always a great alternative, since preparing a file for such campaign is much easier should not be an issue in the majority of platforms and account types.