In the review invitations that your customers will receive after ordering from you, they will be asked to rate quality of products or services that they have purchased and the overall experience of the purchase from your store. If they decide to give their feedback, after clicking on a button in the email, the plugin will direct them to an aggregated review form that they need to fill.
One thing of prime importance is that your review form should be customized to ensure that customers are encouraged to fill it in. In addition, your form should ask the adequate questions so that you obtain the necessary information from it. Our plugin was designed to make review form customization as easy as possible and in this article, we will cover how you should go about doing it.
Basic Review Form Templates
With the Free version of the plugin, you will need to customize the template of review forms in your WordPress Dashboard. To do so, select Reviews from the left panel and click on Settings. Next, go to the Review Forms tab. Using these options, you can personalize Review Forms.
Form Header and Body
The Form Header is the text that will appear at the top of the Review Form while the Form Body is the text that will appear just below the header, as depicted in the screenshot of the review form below:
Just like in Email Templates, there are several variables that you can use in both the Form Header and Form Body to personalize the form so that it does not sound too “robotic”:
- site_title: The title of your WordPress website
- customer_first_name: The first name of the customer who purchased from your store
- customer_name: The full name of the customer who purchased from your store
- order_id: The order number for the purchase
- order_date: The date that the order was made
- list_products: A name and price list of the products purchased
Any of these variables need to be enclosed between curly brackets (e.g., {site_title}) for them to work properly. Before the plugin sends an email with a review invitation, these variables will be changed to the values that they represent. For instance, if your customer’s name is Jane Doe, putting Hi {customer_first_name}, in the body will appear as
Hi Jane,
when the email is sent.
Shop Rating
The next option is Shop Rating, which when enabled will give customers the option to rate how their overall experience of shopping on your website was. In an actual email, it will appear as follows for a store with a fictitious name of Sky Shop:
Comment Required
Enabling the Comment Required option will make adding comments for a product or your shop mandatory for customers before they can submit their review.
Attach Media
The Attach Media feature can be very useful as it lets your customers upload videos and pictures of the items bought from your shop. If you are offering quality products, this will let potential buyers know that other people have bought a particular product from your shop and are so satisfied with it that they even took time to upload pictures or videos of the product.
Rating Bar
The free version of Customer Reviews plugin uses a default icon to represent ratings - smiley faces. With the Pro version, you can change this to Stars.
Smiley Faces | Stars |
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Changing Colors
The Free version of Customer Reviews lets you change three colors in your form, namely Form Color 1, Form Color 2 and Form Color 3.
All these correspond to particular sections in your form, as shown below.
Saving and Testing
When you are done, hit Save Changes at the bottom of the page. Then, navigate to the Emails tab on the Settings page and click on the Review Reminder email template. On the next page, scroll down until you see the Send Test option. Input your email address in the box and click Send Test. This will send a test email to the address and in it, you can click the Review button to see how your review form looks like.
You should see a form like this.
Important Note about Testing Review Forms
The test review form will include dummy products with predefined descriptions, prices, and images. It is not possible to change the dummy products because tests are not associated with any actual products from your store.
If you send a review reminder for one of the actual orders from your store, the plugin will read the real product descriptions, populate correct prices, and use the actual images of the products from the order.
Footer
Note that a default footer will be included in the form. It will contain text like this:
This form was generated by Customer Reviews plugin on behalf of Sky Shop.
This text can be modified with an advanced form editor available in the Pro version.
Advanced Review Form Templates
With the Pro version of CusRev plugin, you can change every section of your form so that it matches your brand image. Also, you can create and add custom questions to the review form. To do so, first, you will need a Pro license for our plugin. So, head to cusrev.com and create an account. Next, make sure that License Keys is selected in the left side bar and click Pro License Key. Follow the next steps and as soon as you get a Pro license key, copy it to your clipboard.
Head to your WordPress Dashboard, select Review and choose the License Key tab. Paste your Pro License Key and click Save Changes. The License Status should change to Active: Professional Version.
Advanced Editor for Local Review Forms
If you are using local (self-hosted) aggregated review forms, then you also need to download and install a Pro add-on for our plugin. You can find the download link in the Downloads section of your dashboard on the CusRev website or on the License Key tab of the plugin's settings.
Customizing Forms Using the Visual Editor
There are two flavors of the advanced review form editor:
- Advanced editor for review forms hosted on CusRev.com
- Advanced editor for review forms hosted locally on your own web server
They offer the same editing functionality and the main difference is that one works for review forms hosted on CusRev.com while the other one is for forms that are 'self-hosted' on your web server. The screenshots below will be for the editor of forms hosted on CusRev.com but they the same as for the locally hosted forms.
How to Access the Visual Editor for Review Forms Hosted on CusRev.com
To start customizing your review forms, go back to CusRev.com and in the left panel, select Form Editor. Under Advanced Form Templates, toggle the Review Form to Active. Note that doing this will overwrite all the changes that you made to Review Form Templates in your WordPress Dashboard. To start using the Advanced Visual Editor, click on the form template under Review Form.
How to Access the Visual Editor for Review Forms Hosted Locally
The editor for locally hosted review forms can be found on the Review Reminder tab of the plugin's settings in your WordPress Dashboard.
here, you should scroll down until you the Advanced Form Template section as shown on the screenshot below. Click on the Customize button to open the visual editor for local review forms. Please note that you will not see the Advanced Form Template section unless you install and activate a Pro add-on for our plugin. You can download it from the Downloads section in your account at CusRev website.
Logo, Header, Body & Footer
In the visual editor, you’ll see how your form will look like when presented to your customer. You can add an image on top of the form by clicking on the Upload button. You will most likely want to put your store’s logo here. You can also change the contents of the header and the body by clicking on the respective section and typing what you want. You can change the form’s footer the same way.
Add New Question
The Pro version of CusRev also provides several ways of customizing questions presented to customers using the ADD NEW QUESTION button.
There are 4 options to choose from:
- Rating
- Comment
- Single Choice Question
- Multiple Choice Question
The Rating and Comment options are already included by default for all reviews. However, you may choose to add more of them if you want customers to rate or comment on specific aspects of the purchase. For instance, one rating might be for the Quality of the product and another for Delivery Speed.
Note that you can change the description text that corresponds to any of the questions by clicking on the default text and typing what you want. For instance, “Rating” in the screenshot below can be changed to “Delivery Speed”.
Also note that for all the options in this feature, you can make the question mandatory by toggling the REQUIRED option to ON. Also, if you need to remove any option that you’ve added, simply click the REMOVE button.
Single Choice Questions allow customers to choose only one option from a list of options while Multiple Choice Questions allow them to choose multiple options from the list. You can create a list by clicking on ADD OPTION as many times as required and editing the newly added options as you would for other sections.
This last option in the ADD NEW QUESTION feature is the Add Media option. Enabling this option will allow customers to add videos and images of the items that they have bought. This can be a very powerful marketing tool as it shows to potential buyers that other people have bought a product and are even posting pictures/videos of their purchase.
Language and Form Type
Other features can be changed on the right sidebar. You can modify the language used in the form by choosing one in the dropdown menu. If your store uses WPML or Polylang plugins for multilingual functionality, you should create a version of the review form template for each language of your website.
Another feature is the Form Type, which allows you to decide whether the customer will be asked to review products, your store or both.
Rating Icon
You can also change the rating icon used by changing the Rating Bar. The default icon is Stars but you can change this to Smiley Faces.
Geolocation
The Geolocation option will automatically detect the location of your customer and let them include this in their review. Customers can choose to show their region and/or country they are from and can also opt to not include this information at all.
Colors
The last options in the right panel are to change the colors of the different sections of the review form. The exact section corresponding to each color option is indicated in the screenshots below.
Preview the Review Form
To preview your changes, click on the Preview button at the top of the page. The site will generate a preview, then click on the Open Preview button once it appears. This will open a new window in your browser that will show you the entire form.
You should see something like this:
If you want to be absolutely sure that the review form will look like you expect, you can send a test email to your email account. To do so, go to your WordPress Dashboard, navigate to Reviews, Settings, ensure that the Emails tab is selected, click on Review Reminder template there, scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see the Send Test option. Enter your email address in the box provided and hit Send Test. A simulated email will be sent to you using dummy data (like Jane Doe as name and Item 1 Test as the product name).
Final Words
Taking the time to set up Review Form Templates and customize your forms will benefit you in the long run as it will encourage your customers to provide feedback. This will help you to pinpoint areas that need improvement, as well as encourage potential buyers to do business with you.
After reading this tutorial, you should not have any problems with setting up Review Form Templates but if you do, please post your issues on our support forum. Users who have a Pro license are welcome to create a ticket on this portal to receive personal assistance from our technical staff.