Review Request Email for Course Creators That Captures Real Outcomes

The timing is the whole game. A review fired the moment a student clicks the final lesson gets you "great course!" five stars and nothing you can put on a sales page. Wait for the outcome window instead. For a self-paced course like Sourdough Foundations (six weeks, $189), that is 10 to 14 days after the last module. By then a student has fed their starter, pulled a loaf, and knows whether the crust cracked the way you promised. That student writes a testimonial with a concrete result in it, and concrete results sell the course on a landing page.

Trigger from your LMS completion event. Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, and LearnDash all push a Course Completed tag into Klaviyo or Mailchimp. Delay the send 10 days from that event. Filter first: segment on "completed AND opened module 1" so you never ask a dropout who never watched the lessons for a review.

Lead with the specific outcome, not the brand. "How did your first loaf turn out?" outperforms "We'd love your feedback" by a wide margin in subject-line tests. In the body, name the deliverable: the loaf, the first freelance client, the watercolor that sold. Personalize with first name and course name. One rating button links to your review page (your own Typeform, Trustpilot, or Google). One CTA only. Two links split clicks in half and tank both.

On incentives. You can offer a bonus module or entry to a featured student gallery as a thank-you, but give it regardless of star rating and disclose the connection. The FTC endorsement guides require disclosure, and cash-for-five-stars corrupts the social proof you are trying to build. Course review-request emails to active students open at 35 to 45 percent, roughly double a generic broadcast, because the student already has a relationship with you. Spend it on one ask.

Every layout is nested HTML tables. table, tr, td. Not divs, not flex, not grid. Tables are the one primitive every email client parses the same way, including Outlook's Word engine, which ignores CSS layout entirely.

CSS is inline on every element. Gmail clips the head style block past 16KB and Apple Mail strips classes on forward and reply. Inline styles survive both. The Mailwright export inlines them at build time.

The rating button is a bulletproof VML button. Outlook renders mail in Microsoft Word, not a browser. Word ignores border-radius and anchor padding, so a normal button collapses into a tiny underlined link. A VML button draws a real rounded rectangle in Vector Markup Language with full padding and your brand color. The export generates the VML for you, and Outlook 2013 through the new Outlook for Windows all show a proper button.

Everything important is live text. Course name, student first name, the CTA. Live text lets merge tags populate, lets screen readers read it, and lets dark-mode inversion recolor it. Image-only emails trip spam filters and arrive blank when the client blocks images by default.

Dark mode uses a color-scheme meta tag. The export injects meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark" and meta name="supported-color-schemes" content="light dark" into the head. Apple Mail dark and Outlook dark then respect your cream background instead of flipping it to black and hiding your dark body text.

Responsive code is one media query. A single max-width:480px block bumps the headline and body font sizes and loosens padding on phones. Nothing else in the email needs responsive rules.

Web fonts load with a fallback stack. The template requests Lora from Google Fonts and falls back to Georgia, then Times New Roman, then serif. Outlook and Gmail web never load the web font and silently use Georgia. No missing-glyph squares, no broken layout.

Step 1. Copy the exported HTML for the Loam Academy template above.

Step 2. In Klaviyo, create a new email. Either drag an HTML block into a Drag and Drop email, or choose Plain HTML Email and paste the full document. In Mailchimp, create an email, choose Code your own, then Paste in code, and paste the full HTML.

Step 3. Swap the brand. Replace "Loam Academy" with your school name. Swap the three palette hex codes: #f4ede2 background cream, #b8552a button brick, #2b2118 body text. Drop in your logo URL and your review-page link (replace https://loamacademy.com/review).

Step 4. Wire the merge tags. In Klaviyo, {{ first_name|default:'baker' }} pulls the student first name with "baker" as the fallback. In Mailchimp, *|FNAME|* does the same; use *|FNAME:baker|* for the fallback. Unsubscribe link: Klaviyo uses {{ unsubscribe_url }}, Mailchimp uses *|UNSUB|*. A physical mailing address in the footer is required by CAN-SPAM; Mailchimp injects your address block automatically, Klaviyo needs it pasted into the footer.

Step 5. Test. Send to Gmail on web and Android, Apple Mail on iPhone and macOS, and Outlook on Windows. Toggle dark mode on each. If you have Litmus or Email on Acid, run a full render; if not, a manual pass through those three clients catches roughly 90 percent of issues. Watch the button in Outlook and the cream background in Apple Mail dark.