Common questions
Campaigns
Consider your budget and objectives when deciding which products to offer for sampling. You can include:
- High margin or strategically important products with low review volume.
- Strategically important products where timing is important (new or seasonal items).
- New items that can create excitement and provide members with a sense of exclusive group membership.
- New products that will be available soon and should have reviews ready at time of launch.
Tips:
- To direct reviews to a specific set of items such as new products, limit the offer to concentrate sample requests.
- To maximize the total number of reviews driven by a campaign, include as many products as possible, though you should be careful not to overwhelm members.
- In general, we recommend that you limit a campaign to 32 products or fewer.
You can view your product reviews in two places in the Bazaarvoice Portal 
:
- To view reviews for all sampled products, select Product Sampling > Sampling > Reviews. You can sort reviews by submission date or by star rating.
- To view reviews Bazaarvoice has collected for a single product through a specific sampling program, select Sampling > Products. Select your program from the Sampling program dropdown list. Select a product to open its product details page and view its reviews.
Yes. To view metrics for your products:
- Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal .
- From the navigation bar, select Product Sampling > Sampling > Products.
- Select your program from the Sampling Program drop-down list.
- Select the product to view its metrics.
- Units you’ve offered
- Units sampling community members have requested
- Units we’ve shipped to these members
- Reviews we’ve collected for the product
You may also be able to find products using these methods:
- Campaigns filter—Begin entering a campaign name or campaign ID. Select a campaign from the list of suggestions to add it to the filter criteria. Repeat this for each campaign you want to include. Select Apply and close to apply the filter.
- Search field—Search for products by their name or product ID. Enter a complete or partial product name or product ID.
Learn more about how to fulfill orders in Sampling in the Bazaarvoice Portal .
The fulfillment CSV file won't generate in the Fulfillment tab in Sampling until you end your campaign. To view the status of your campaign and close it:
- Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal .
- From the navigation bar, select Product Sampling > Sampling Administration > Campaigns.
- In the table, view the Status column to check your campaign status. If the status is Started, you can close the campaign.
Note: If the status is Draft or Ready, you haven’t made any orders for the campaign. If the status is Completed, you can search for the campaign in the Fulfillment tab.
- Use the Products row to view whether members have claimed all units from the campaign. If they have, and you’re happy to end the campaign, select End campaign.
Return to the Fulfillment tab in Sampling. Your campaign will appear and you can download the fulfillment CSV file.
Learn more about how to manage campaigns.
The most common reason for an error message is that the Shipped Date is not in the correct format. Ensure you enter the date in the Year-Month-Day format (for example, 2021-02-15), and check you haven’t deleted the Order ID column.
Nominate a product as unreleased and assign a temporary product ID to it. Once the product is live, edit your product ID in Sampling in the Bazaarvoice Portal and then migrate this product ID in Workbench to display its reviews in the product display page (PDP).
- Your reviews will not display in your PDPs.
- Your reviews will not match up with the correct product IDs in Workbench.
- Because your product IDs will not match up with any reviews in Workbench, Portal will not recognize your reviews.
- It is likely there will be a negative impact on your members’ review response rate.
Members
If a member no longer wants to be part of your sampling community, you can deactivate their account. This means they will no longer be able to use the Member app, participate in offers and post reviews. Deactivated members can be reactivated if necessary, using the Activate selected button in the Deactivated tab.
The Bazaarvoice Moderation team removes inappropriate content, so reviews with offensive content will never be published online. However, if a member is continually flagged as trying to post inappropriate content, or if they breach community rules in other ways, you can ban them by deactivating their account. This will remove their access to the Member app and they won't be able to participate in offers or leave reviews.
Advise members to enable third-party cookies for your program so they can leave reviews in the Sampling platform.
Email messages
You can only update review request email messages (formerly post-interaction emails or PIE) for Draft campaigns. You can't customize review request email messages for Ready or Started campaigns.
If you update review request email templates in Configuration, your changes will be implemented for review request email messages for all future campaigns. These changes will not go live until you deploy them in Configuration, and will only impact existing draft campaigns or campaigns created and launched after deployment.
You can't customize review request email messages for an individual campaign, or on a per-campaign basis.
Most campaign email messages, including reminder email messages, can be 'switched off' so they won't be sent to members during a campaign. To prevent the reminder being sent, toggle the Send option in the Emails screen to select Don't send. Learn more about configuring emails.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Timing - when's the perfect time for the member to get this email message? Consider the product being sampled, how long delivery times are likely to be, how long you want to allow them to evaluate the product.
- Tone - what's your brand voice? Is it friendly or stylish? Match the words to your brand's tone.
- Frequency - how often should you contact members? It can be tricky to get the balance right between a quick reminder and nagging. If you bombard members with too many email messages they'll feel overwhelmed and give up. Leave it too long and they'll forget about you.
- Necessary - do you need to send the email message at all? Check the purpose of the email message within the campaign. How many reminders do you really need to send?
- Content - you can change the content of your campaign invite template and of your other email messages in Configuration. You can also configure your campaign invitation email message for individual campaigns in Sampling Administration.
Do your words grab their attention and does every word have a purpose? Do the links work? Remember that about 75% of your members look at email messages on their phone, so make sure to test how everything looks first.
Note: Your changes will only appear after you deploy them to production.
To customize your email template, use an HTML editor such as HTMLG . Copy and paste the code from the HTML editor into the template.
To add images to your email template, use an HTML editor such as HTMLG . Copy and paste the code from the HTML editor where you want the image to display in the template.
Ensure you’ve entered details for all fields in the template, including the subject, heading, and subheading.
Admin Functions
To update text for your Sampling program, including FAQs, T&Cs, and Writing Guidelines, follow these steps:
- Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal .
- From the upper-right corner, select the settings icon
. - Select Configuration.
- Select an instance.
- Select Go to Configuration. The Site Manager appears, listing the available deployment zones and implementations.
- Under Implementations, enter Sampling2_site in the search field.
- Select Edit next to this selected implementation.
- From the left navigation menu, select Copy Editor under User Experience.
- Select Tools > Jump to a section > Sampling. The screen then displays the text and label strings for the Sampling section, including FAQs and T&Cs.
- To edit a string, hover over it and select Edit.
- After you’ve finished editing strings, deploy the Sampling2_site implementation to the production environment of a deployment zone.
. Copy and paste the code from the HTML editor into the string, and save your changes.To update your member survey for your Sampling program, follow these steps.
To request a new feature for the Sampling platform, contact Bazaarvoice Support with the following information:
- Idea for the new feature and at least one use case
- Benefits the new feature would provide
- Workarounds you currently use
To resolve an issue with the platform, contact Bazaarvoice Support with the following information:
- Brief description of the issue
- Area of the platform where the issue occurred (for example, in the PDP)
- Screenshots showing the issue </div> </div>
