Asking customers for a review works. Asking them at the right moment, in the right words, and once more if they missed it, works considerably better. This is a full tour of the Repuso invite system: how requests get created, when they go out, what they say, and how to take yourself out of the loop entirely.
Four ways to create a request
One at a time. Add a name and an email address in the dashboard. Fine for a handful, tedious past that.
Upload a list. Upload a CSV of past customers and the whole batch is queued at once. This is the quickest way to get value on day one, because most businesses are sitting on a year of customers who were happy and were never asked.
BCC an address you already email. Every setup gets its own private intake address. BCC it on the email you were sending the customer anyway - the job confirmation, the invoice, the thank-you - and we read the recipient off that email and queue a review request for them. No integration, no upload, no extra step in your day.
It handles several recipients on one email, and it picks up the customer’s name when your email client includes it. You can also override the timing per message: add
+14before the@and that particular request waits fourteen days instead of using your default delay. Useful when one job needs longer than the rest.For a lot of businesses this is the whole answer. If someone in your team already emails every customer, BCC costs nothing to adopt and needs no developer.
From your own system, automatically. For higher volumes, or when nobody emails customers by hand. When a job is completed, an order ships or a guest checks out, your system tells Repuso the customer’s name and contact details, and everything after that happens on its own. One integration, and you never think about review requests again.
It is a single call to
POST /invite/requests/addwith a name and an email address or phone number - everything below about timing, templates and follow-ups then applies automatically. There are endpoints for adding a batch in one go, checking what happened to a request, and stopping a sequence early. All of them are in the API documentation, and a developer familiar with your system should have it working in well under an hour.
Requests can go out by email or SMS. Email costs one credit per send, SMS costs two, and you can use whichever suits the customer - a tradesperson usually has a phone number, an online store usually has an email address.
When requests go out
Four settings control timing, and they apply to every request no matter how it was created.
Delay
How long to wait after a customer is added before the first message goes out. The default is three days, set in hours, days or months.
The point is to land after the work is finished and the customer has lived with the result, but while it is still fresh. A restaurant might want a few hours. A builder might want two weeks. A dentist might want a month, after the treatment has settled.
Send window
Only send during chosen hours, for example 9am to 6pm in your timezone. Without it a request created at 2am gets sent at 2am, which is a bad first impression and a worse open rate. Anything scheduled outside the window is moved to the next opening.
Cooldown
Don’t contact someone who has already had a request in the last X days. Useful when your own system might submit the same customer twice, or when a regular customer comes in every week. Set it to zero to turn it off.
Follow-up sequence
Most review requests are not refused, they are missed. The sequence sends up to two automatic reminders if nothing happens, by default three days and seven days after the first message. Each step can use a different template, so the reminder does not have to repeat the original word for word.
It stops immediately and permanently as soon as the customer clicks the link, leaves a review, or unsubscribes - nobody gets nagged after they have acted. That single rule is what makes reminders acceptable rather than annoying, and it is why the sequence is usually the biggest single improvement to a review programme.
What the message says
You can start from our ready-made templates or build your own. Every template can carry placeholders that fill themselves in per recipient:
{{name}}- the customer’s name{{accountName}}- your business name{{collectUrl}}- the link to your review page{{logo}}- your logo
There are variants of the review link for different behaviours - one that goes straight to a review form, one that shows the customer a choice of platforms such as Google or Facebook, and a short-link version that matters for SMS where every character counts.
Every message has to contain a review link. It is the only hard rule, and it exists because a request without one is simply a marketing email.
The SMS template is separate and shorter, because it has to be. The default is a single sentence: How was your experience with ? Rate us here .
Running more than one setup
You can keep several complete configurations, each with its own templates, delay and sequence. Two common reasons:
- Multiple locations or brands, each sending in its own name with its own review links
- Different services, where the natural timing genuinely differs - a same-day repair and a three-month project should not be asked at the same interval
Each request is tied to the setup it was created under, so a sequence started last week keeps using the settings it began with.
Knowing what happened
Every request carries a status as it moves: queued, sent, delivered, opened, clicked, reviewed - or failed and unsubscribed. These are real delivery events rather than guesses, so you can see whether a campaign underperformed because the emails did not arrive, because nobody opened them, or because the message itself was not persuasive. Those are three different problems with three different fixes.
A sensible starting point
If you are setting this up for the first time:
- Upload your existing customer list to get an immediate baseline
- Set the delay to match when your customers are actually happiest
- Turn on the follow-up sequence and leave the defaults alone
- Turn on the send window so nothing goes out overnight
- Start BCCing the intake address, or connect your own system
Steps one to four take about ten minutes. Step five is the one that makes it permanent - and BCC gets you there without writing any code.
Need a hand with any of it, or want to know what connecting your system would involve? Get in touch and we will walk through it with you - and if you are handing this to a developer, point them at the API documentation.