9 Best SaaS Email Social Proof (Review & Testimonial) Promotion Strategies (2025)

💬 I'm a big believer in incorporating social proof across most marketing initiatives (campaigns, ads, content, etc), including your emails, as it can help improve trust-building with users/prospects along different stages of the CX journey.

Various low-cost and easy social proof email tests to run across different sequences and promotions

💬 I have down below various experiments and ideas for social proof within emails to help with different objectives you want to achieve, such as tailored offers, reminding users of features to help with upgrading/upselling, and more.

I always suggest to clients and companies I advice to incorporate elements of social proof across their emails where they can, and one of the easier elements to include are reviews/testimonials from key users/customers. 

And whilst that can be included as part of various automated campaigns, I also suggest running dedicated review-based email promotions as part of a sales campaign. 

For instance, just like this example from Skillshare.

‍

• Love this offer email combined with reviews
• Clear CTA offer button under the reviews, and good insertion of secondary CTA above the reviews when talking about offer
• Final quick observation - I like the copy with the 'unsubscribe' - light and clever.

‍

‍

• I'm a fan of the layout Sling TV has done here with the reviews - 'breaks' the pattern to help people not skim
• Clear offer buttons and plans

Recommendation: I’d be creating and dividing up various email templates, where you have a similar style, but input ICP-focused reviews/testimonials, and then send them to segmented ICP audiences - goal is better context, which hopefully will lead to more desirable results.

Telling/highlighting customer stories is a great way to highlight how people/companies have received value from the product. 

It’s a great tactic to promote to MOF/BOF audiences, or those who are on a freemium or free-trial period. 

• Calm have done a good yearly offer email
• Good layout sections with clear heading explaining offer, then supported with elements such as "new lessons daily" (showcasing new content being added often/updated), and the '"Calm Stories" section with John - this is great to include to help with the decision-making process of audiences yet to convert

Depending on a few variables such as your ICP attributes, behaviours you’re tracking (events) and what your core features are, a good experiment to test is doing promotions of features using a tailored review based on that specific feature. 

This can be good to do as part of nurture/free-trial period sequences, or even for “winback” campaigns for inactive/churned segments. 

This example from AllTrails is a really good reference from top to bottom (and what you should get inspiration from to do an experiment like this for your SaaS: 

• Great heading with "feature insight", backed with a relevant review on the feature
• CTA about 'navigator', with a 'how it works' 3 step process

‍

In conjunction with a couple of checklist points I’ve talked about, test emails focused on curating top reviews and ‘stories’ as part of re-engaging churned (paid subscriber downgrades to freemium/free-trial) and/or inactive segments.

• Like this from Italki, using reviews from students - good to include as part of an activation/onboarding sequence

‍

It’s worth showcasing some personality (if your brand allows it) when it comes to sharing reviews. 

Additionally, it’s also good to curate reviews and what users/customers have said across different sources.

And this example from Picmonkey is a great reference. 

• Big fan of the personality and 'fun' here from Picmonkey
• Like the layout of the USPs combined with the relevant testimonial

‍

A key social proof element, which you most likely use across your website and even marketing assets/campaigns, are case studies/stories and ‘top customer’ logos. 

They’re great elements to help accelerate the trust-building process, as typically most of your users, audience and key ICP segments will know some of these companies that are your customers. 

And I love this example from Iterable, which does a great balance of showing both element types in this email, whilst highlighting a key event that’s happened (i.e. confirmation of a demo request) - this can then in turn help improve show rates of demos. 

• This is one of my fave 'demo request' emails I've seen in terms of elements, layout and design
• Good mix of using top customer logos, as well as highlighting 2 case studies/customer stories, and accolade

‍

Embedding the likes of 3rd-party review widgets helps reinforce credibility to subscribers/users of where you are getting your reviews from. 

Also, most audiences would know of the 3rd-party platform you’re referring too, which also helps as a further trust signal.

• See at the bottom the use of Trustpilot embed

‍

I’ve done a dedicated checklist resource on optimising event-based emails for key conversion events, as well as some other experiments/types to consider testing, which you can check out below. 

Definitely include pros/benefits, alongside social proof, to the likes of freemium audience groups to encourage them to upgrade.

• Grammarly has done a great job with their event-based usage summary emails over the time I've been a user - including the likes of different CTAs, case studies, events for users to register, relevant stories/content resources, and more.

‍

A quick reminder - make sure to celebrate important milestones/anniversaries. They’re great to share for morale and support, and serves as a great reminder to all audience types of the amount of satisfaction and amount of users seeing value from the product. 

I’ve also created a checklist on milestone-based email tactics worth checking out. 

Test to potentially run: as you can see in this example from Trello, you can use these types of announcements to provide an offer.