Migrating your account to Reviewshake from Grade.us is a simple process, and we’re here to help every step of the way. Below is a checklist of the steps to be taken, as well as a division of tasks with a timeline.
1. Sign up for a Reviewshake account (you)
Start by signing up for an account on our website. We encourage you to create your review sources, try out the landing pages, widgets and other functionality you are currently using with Grade.us.
2. Importing seats (Reviewshake)
Once we get your billing setup, please send us your list of seats and we will import them into your Reviewshake account. It would help to have a breakdown of the seats that belong to you and those who belong to your resellers. It’s important to note that you will still be running Grade.us in parallel, meaning that your clients will not notice any difference at this point.
We use an automated import tool to facilitate, as well as spot checks by our team to ensure everything works as it should. This import tool uses the publicly available landing page for each client to import the following:
- Seat name
- Seat short name (to maintain URL consistency)
- Company logo (uploaded to their landing page)
- Review funnel (eg. stars)
- Review sites
- Manual reviews that have been input into Grade.us
Our landing page URLs use the same format as Grade.us, so once you switch your DNS to us, your client will not notice any major difference.
We will also generate the widget snippet code and default campaigns as part of this step, and send you a Google Sheet containing the following information for each client:
- Name
- Short name
- Landing page URL
- Opt-in page URL
- List of review sources
- Campaigns
- Widget code
- Users
This sheet provides a point of reference for all your client accounts, and our respective teams can add notes in case of any required changes.
3. Spot check (you)
At this point our team will have imported your client seats, and we will ask you to do a spot check on your side to ensure that everything looks fine.
4. DNS update (you)
We recommend that you start by updating the TTL on the DNS record(s) pointing at Grade.us servers to be as low as possible, in some cases this could be 300 seconds (5 minutes). This ensures that the DNS propagation once you switch your DNS to our servers will happen as quickly as possible, resulting in very little downtime for your clients.
When you are ready to switch over, follow the procedure in the Configurations → General Settings → Custom domain wizard to setup your custom domain on our side. This will involve:
1. Adding DNS record(s) that point your domain to our servers
2. Adding DNS records that authorize us to create an SSL certificate for your domain (for SSL)
3. 30 minutes for the updates to propagate and go live on the account
In addition to the custom domain DNS, we also recommend setting up your custom email address, which is used in any communication from Reviewshake to your clients (eg. review notifications). This involves adding 3 CNAME records to your domain.
5. Client communication (you)
You will start communicating with your clients at this step in the process. We suggest that you prepare the email(s) that you will be sending beforehand, and feel free to share them with us in case you would like a second opinion.
5a. Updating widgets (you)
Part of the migration involves updating the widget code snippet (aka review stream) on your client websites. As you don’t know which clients are using the widgets, we recommend sending them an email that contains the new code snippet.
This email can mention that if they are not using the widget, they can ignore the email; if they are in fact using it and need help, they can simply reply to the email.
5b. Users import (Reviewshake)
Once we get your go-ahead, we will start creating users for your clients in our system. At this point, they will start receiving notifications for new reviews and private feedback from us, always using your custom domain as mentioned in step #4.
6. Cancelling your Grade.us account (you)
Once you’ve migrated your clients across to Reviewshake and switched your DNS across to our servers, our servers will start serving the requests. It’s now safe to cancel your Grade.us account.