The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Client Testimonials
Discover how customer testimonials serve as powerful social proof for prospective customers. Explore the top 7 FAQs for beginners and learn to leverage testimonials for conversions. Check out our client testimonial examples, set up a testimonial page, and stop driving new customers away.
The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Client Testimonials (With Bonus Testimonial Page & Video Testimonial Examples)
Date
Nov 6, 2024
Description
Discover how customer testimonials serve as powerful social proof for prospective customers. Explore the top 12 FAQs for beginners and learn to leverage testimonials for conversions. Check out our client testimonial examples, set up a testimonial page, and stop driving new customers away.
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Done
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Although you may not believe it, many people still do not know the power of customer testimonials.
Customer reviews and testimonials can increase the credibility and sales of any business by convincing potential customers that it is a reliable and trustworthy product or service provider.
Maybe you are reading this guide because you are trying to learn how social proof works in marketing.
Maybe you are trying to convince your team to implement testimonial marketing with more strength.
Whatever your case, this article will help you clear up the main doubts related to this topic or allow you to explain in a simple way to people who are not familiar with how testimonial marketing works.
Here are the seven most frequently asked questions regarding customer testimonials.
What Are Client Testimonials, and Why Are They Important for Business?
Testimonials are positive experiences your clients had while interacting with your company, shared in any format.
They usually discuss your products, services, and everything that the interaction with your business entails, such as the features of your product, delivery times, customer service experiences, prices, values, mission, and so on.
These recorded experiences serve to show potential clients why working with you or buying one of your products is a good idea.
They are clearly focused on the positive things about a business and highlight the benefits, with the aim of attracting other clients through positive experiences.
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According to Webflow, "testimonials not only boost conversion rates by 58% but also elevate revenue per website visitor by 62%".
Other positive results of using testimonials as a marketing tool are the increase of authority and presence and the establishment of the brand as an icon of reliability, results, and prestige.
You can think of testimonials like mini case studies ready to provide all the benefits of a use case document in a condensed, visually appealing version.
The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Testimonials
1. How Do Testimonials Differ From Reviews?
Reviews are comments your users leave on a platform review, such as Google Reviews or Yelp, following their own initiative and describing their experience using your product.
Due to that, they can be very short or a bit vague.
Reviews aren't inherently bad, but they have some sort of lack of control.
There are some reviews that are very good because some people take their role as reviewers seriously. There are also a few customers who want to support businesses they like and leave generous reviews once in a while.
That's cool, but you can't rely on those works of goodwill to grow your business.
You could use some of those reviews (the best ones) to add them to your main testimonial marketing strategy, but you need testimonials to be the core of it.
Testimonials are pieces of social proof that you collect intentionally and strategically.
You request these from your star customers. The real success stories.
These are more complete and sophisticated in nature because they are requested, collected, and showcased with a conscious and thought strategy, as we will learn in the next questions.
2. What Are the Best Practices for Gathering Authentic Customer Testimonials?
Increase Customer Satisfaction, and You’ll Have Good Clients
I mean "good clients," such as clients who leave testimonials and advocate for your brand.
To receive great testimonials, you need to provide a great customer experience.
And it's a cycle: as you improve the services, customer feedback will be more positive, and happy customers will leave more comments on your testimonial page.
Ask for a Testimonial Using Software
Get a tool like Testimonial to automate the most important parts of the process for you: requesting, collecting, organizing, and showcasing your best testimonials.
3. How Can I Encourage Satisfied Clients to Leave Testimonials Without Feeling Pushy?
It all starts with making things simple and clear.
As I shared above when the business-client relationship is healthy and a clear win-win, your clients will mostly feel prompted to leave you a testimonial when you ask.
1. Follow the 80/20 Rule. Give 80 Percent and Only Ask 20 Percent or Less.
So, if you are providing a great service or product and adding value, feel free to request a testimonial once in a while and only follow up once if you don’t have a reply.
You don’t want to be like those apps that give you a pop-up requesting a review every time you log in.
2. Take Advantage of Specific Moments When Your Client Could Be Grateful or Positive About Your Service, Then Make the Request.
For example:
When your client hits a milestone or success metric.
When you have a customer support interaction with a very positive outcome.
After providing a discount or promo.
3. Allow Your Clients to Act.
Depending on your industry or type of business, you can be more passive and let your clients decide whether to leave a testimonial.
You could:
Include a testimonial in your email signature and add a link for clients to visit your testimonial collection page.
Create a professional email signature with an embedded testimonial using this free tool.
Add a non-invasive banner on your website with an invitation and link for clients to leave a testimonial.
Add a general invitation inside your newsletter on product updates so that anyone interested can leave you a testimonial.
4. Enable Rewards for Your Clients After They Leave a Testimonial
Setting up rewards in exchange for honest feedback can increase the success rates of requests and testimonial collection campaigns.
Testimonial allows you to set up automatic or manual incentives for people who leave a testimonial. You can work with different budget and reward options.
Create and run a full testimonial marketing system with Testimonial to ensure that every dollar invested yields a positive return.
Ensure Your Client Don’t Feel Like Leaving a Testimonial Is a Burden
By making the request email or message very short and clear
By using a dedicated landing page that is optimized for testimonial collection, like this one:
If you observe, it is straightforward and short to read, and your clients can leave their feedback in one click. It also provides guiding questions to ensure your testimonials have higher quality.
The point of this collection landing page is that you don’t have to stress to create one more website just to request your clients’ experience and that your clients can effortlessly send text, video or images directly to your dashboard, too.
4. What Specific Questions Should I Ask Clients to Get Detailed and Valuable Testimonials?
The truth is that there are not right or wrong answer here.
The only thing to consider is that questions do matter because they will guide your customer to find the quality of your testimonial.
What are some things you can do to find the ideal questions?
You could benefit from testing different questions sets to do this. You can use Testimonial forms, which will give you the opportunity to create two different versions of the same collection page or more. You can tag which testimonials are coming from which collecting page and evaluate which set of questions is providing better results.
5. How Can I Ensure That My Testimonial Page Reflects the Unique Strengths of My Business?
The testimonial page is a dedicated website where you can display testimonials together - text, image, video testimonials, and comments from review sites like G2, Capterra, and other social proof and e-commerce platforms.
To leverage it, share the link with your potential customers. They will see your best testimonials and click on relevant links directing them to your brand or products.
You can also enable your testimonial page to be indexed by search engines so it can be found in organic searches.
Going back to the question, how do you make sure this testimonial page reflects the unique strengths of your business?
1. Start by Gathering High-Quality Testimonials
As I explained in the second section of this article, when you provide value and then ask for testimonials using a system like the Testimonial runs for you, then your testimonials will flow and be highly profitable and drive new business like crazy.
2. Highlight Your Preferred Testimonials on Top
Testimonial supports different levels of organization for testimonials in the Wall of Love or dedicated testimonial page. You can organize them by date, randomize them on refresh of the page, or you can also simply highlight your favorite testimonials and set your page to show those first.
It makes a lot of sense to set your page like that if you have some favorite testimonials which you think will make the most impact.
That is the case with Rewardful’s Wall of Love and the testimonial Justin Jackson left them.
Rewardful is the all-in-one affiliate management software for SaaS.
If you check their testimonial page you will see that Justin Jackson’s video experience always shows in the first or second row.
Justin is a business leader with over 40k followers on X. His product is an important competitor in the podcast-hosting industry.
Justin is an example of a customer whose claims are not to be ignored.
These are a few things that he said:
Transistor has +700 affiliates working for them via Rewardful
They can track their affiliate's performance, pay them, and more
Transistor would have never grown as fast as it did without Rewardful
Justin claims he is a "big fan"
He highly recommends this software compared to competitors because it is affordable, has better technology and support is better
If an influential person said things like that about your product, wouldn't you put them on top of your page?
3. Highlight Specific Text Within Your Testimonial’s Body
You can now use Testimonial features to accentuate a particular text in your clients' testimonials to show how much they love you.
You can enable this highlighted text feature through your testimonial’s settings, using our AI features. You can also customize the highlight colors, background, and more.
This help article will help you set up highlighted text on any of its form.
4. Use Your Wall of Love to Showcase Articles, Assets, Podcast Features, and More
Your testimonial page is literally your own wall. You can use it as you wish, and there are not rules around it.
With that on mind, you can take advantage of different features like:
Custom Cards
Testimonial Integration with External Videos
Add Images With a Link to Showcase Other Assets
6. What Formats Work Best for Effective Client Testimonials (e.g., Text, Video, Audio), and How Do I Choose?
While there are text, image, audio, social media, and many other forms of reviews, you want to place a strong emphasis on videos because these will increase your conversion rates far more.
Why Are Video Testimonials So Important?
Video is an upgraded social proof experience. It’s the ultimate experience.
Most likely, you won’t be able to drive your customers to events or prospects’ offices to have them speak well of you.
Yet, you can use tools to record them sharing their experience in front of a camera and then share their honest experience with the world.
These simple changes in your marketing strategies are like going from “telling” to actually “showing” your prospective customers how good you are.
It won’t mean a lot to you, but when the validation comes from the words and experiences of other people, they will mean the world.
Prospects that belong to your ideal target audience will be automatically sold because they will connect with your already-paying customers in many ways.
Marketing is all about connection, and video experiences are one of the top ways to achieve this at a deep level.
I hope the answers to these questions will help you or someone in your network get started with testimonial marketing.
The value that you will get from leveraging social proof intentionally is huge. Invaluable, I would dare to say.
If you have any questions about this topic feel free to send us a message in the chat window here. I hope to hear from you soon.