Review Request Email for Restaurants

Send the request while the meal is still on the table. Restaurants that trigger the email two to six hours after the check closes see 8 to 12 percent of diners leave a review. Wait 24 hours and that drops to 3 or 4 percent. The trigger should come from your POS or reservation system (Toast, Square, OpenTable, Resy) on a "ticket closed" or "reservation completed" event, never on a no-show.

The offer matters because Google removes paid or incentivized reviews. Skip "free dessert for a 5-star review." Instead, thank the diner for coming in and, if you want, reward the next visit unconditionally ("next time you're in, your espresso is on us"). The reward cannot be tied to leaving a review, or to leaving a positive one. This keeps your Business Profile in good standing.

The copy is short, first person, and specific. Name the dish. Name the server if your POS passes the field. Mentioning a specific dish or server lifts review rates by roughly 20 percent over a generic "thanks for visiting." Diners respond to being seen, not to a corporate thank-you.

One rating, one button. Link straight to your Google review shortcut URL (the g.page/r/XXXX/review link from your Business Profile), so the diner lands on the star selector, not your homepage. In tourist markets where TripAdvisor carries the local traffic, link TripAdvisor instead, but never as a second button competing with Google. Pick one primary review destination per email.

Example subject line: "How was everything tonight, Maya?" Example body: "Maya, thanks for coming in. We hope the short rib and that bottle of Nero d'Avola hit the spot. If you have 30 seconds, a quick Google review helps other locals find us. No pressure either way. See you soon."

The HTML is built from nested table elements, not divs or flexbox. Gmail clips CSS layout, Yahoo mangles it, and Outlook ignores it entirely. Tables are the one container every inbox respects.

Every style sits inline on the element it styles: each cell, link, and paragraph carries its own font, color, and padding. Gmail strips style blocks for non-Gmail-served accounts, and several major clients ignore the head section. Inline CSS is what survives.

The button is bulletproof. Outlook 2007 through 2019 render email with Microsoft Word, which drops border-radius and padding on links and leaves a transparent, hard-to-click target. The button ships with a VML fallback so Word paints a real rectangle in your brand color, fully clickable. The MJML button component generates that VML for you on export.

Copy is live text. The headline, body, and button label are real text, not images, so they scale on large screens, translate when forwarded, and load the instant the message opens. Images carry only the logo and hero.

Dark mode is handled. A color-scheme meta tag tells Apple Mail and Outlook the message supports dark, and a data-ogsc media query swaps in a logo with a transparent background so you don't get a white box on a black canvas.

One mobile media query at max-width 600px sets sections to full width and bumps body copy up a point. Apple Mail and Gmail mobile honor it. We don't stack per-client overrides, because every extra rule is another thing to break.

Fonts fall back gracefully. The editorial serif stack (Georgia, Times New Roman, serif) loads on every client; a custom web font loads only in Apple Mail and the Gmail app, so the fallback has to look right on its own.

Copy the full HTML export from this page.

In Klaviyo, create an email and choose "HTML Email" (not the drag-and-drop builder). Paste the HTML into the source view. For a triggered send, build a Flow off your POS event: in Toast or Square that is "Placed Order," in OpenTable a custom "Reservation Completed" event. Add a 2-hour time delay so the email lands the same evening for dinner service.

In Mailchimp, start a campaign and pick Code your own, then Paste in code. Drop the HTML in. For automation, trigger a Customer Journey off an API event from your POS or reservation tool.

Swap the brand. Replace "Olive & Ember," the logo image URL, and the two brand hex values (find and replace in your editor). Update the address and social links in the footer.

Wire your merge tags. In Klaviyo use {{ first_name|default:"there" }} for the greeting and {{ person|lookup:'server_name' }} if your POS passes the server. In Mailchimp use *|FNAME|* and a custom *|SERVER|* merge field.

Build your Google review URL from your Business Profile. Click Get more reviews, copy the short link (it looks like g.page/r/ABC123/review), and paste it into the button href.

Test before you schedule. Send a proof to an iPhone (dark mode on), Gmail web, and Outlook desktop. Click the button on a real phone. If you have Litmus or Email on Acid, run a full render check. Restaurants lose catering inquiries to broken buttons more often than to bad copy.