Review request emails

A review request sequence is up to four emails: one initial request and up to three follow-ups. You build it under Emails → Templates.

What triggers a request

An order reaching a qualifying status. “Shipped” is the default; you can change which statuses qualify per store under Settings → Store.

Two things follow from that:

• The delay is counted from the status change, not from when the order was created. An order that sits unshipped for a month starts its clock the day it ships.
• Changing the qualifying status changes eligibility going forward, not retroactively.

Building the sequence

Each step has:

Field	Notes
Delay	Days after the qualifying status change. The initial step is position 0; follow-ups are 1–3.
Subject and body	Templated, with the customer’s name, the order, and the products.
Request photos / videos	Photos are asked for by default, video is not. Both change what the hosted review form offers.
Product images	Included by default, at small, medium or large. Turning them off makes the email lighter and more plain-text-like.
Template style	STANDARD for the branded HTML layout, MINIMAL for something close to plain text.

A common shape is a request at 7–14 days and one reminder 5–7 days later.

Standard or minimal?

Minimal templates consistently do better at reaching Gmail’s Primary tab, because they look like mail a person sent. Standard templates look better when they arrive. If your open rates are poor and your domain is authenticated, switching to minimal is the cheapest thing to try.

Who does not get one

Evident skips a customer when:

• They have already reviewed the product.
• Their address is suppressed — unsubscribed, bounced, marked spam, or suppressed by hand. Suppressions are stored as a hash of the address, not the address itself, and live under Emails → Suppressions.
• The order is more than 30 days old at the time it enters the system. This protects you when backfilling history: a year of imported orders will not email a year of customers.

Branding

Emails → Templates carries per-store branding: logo, button colours, footer text, from-name, from-address and reply-to. Set a reply-to you actually monitor — review request emails get replies, and they are usually customer service issues worth seeing.

Sending one by hand

From an order in Orders, you can send a review request immediately, ignoring the schedule. Useful for a customer who asks, or for testing your template against a real order.

There is also a test send on the sequence itself, which uses sample data and does not touch a real customer.

If you use Klaviyo, Omnisend or Mailchimp

Connect one of them and Evident stops sending review request emails entirely. Instead it fires an event into your platform at the moment the email would have gone out, carrying the order, the products and the review links, and your flow does the sending.

This is usually what you want if you already run lifecycle email: one set of templates, one suppression list, one set of send-time rules.

The timing still lives in Evident. The event fires after your configured delay has elapsed, so do not add another delay in your flow — it stacks. Send immediately on trigger.

See Klaviyo, Omnisend or Mailchimp.

The hosted review form

Every request links to a hosted form on a single-use token, so the customer does not sign in and cannot be phished into reviewing someone else’s order. The form knows which products the order contained and asks about each.

Photos and video upload from the same form when the step requests them.

Measuring it

Emails → Templates shows sends, opens and clicks per step, and reviews attributed to the sequence. If a follow-up is producing almost nothing, delete it rather than leaving it — every extra email costs you a little deliverability.