How to Collect More Testimonials from Clients

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Testimonials are great social proof for your services or products. But gathering reviews can be a rather tricky task for some businesses.

That’s not because people don’t like to leave reviews, but because most business owners and marketers don’t know when and how to ask for testimonials.

You can request reviews both in-person and online. In-person approaches can be at company events, at stores, and face to face after someone makes a purchase.

We’ll only discuss the different ways to gather testimonials online in this post. If you’re struggling to get customer reviews for your products or services, then we trust that this article will help you a ton.

We’ve got creative ideas along with practical templates that you can use. So without further ado, let’s get started!

How to effectively collect testimonials

There is no one best way to ask customers for testimonials. It depends on your business or your client’s business and the customers.

One approach that works well for collecting reviews is creating a landing page on your website and sharing the link on emails, social media platforms, and text messages.

1. Ask right away

The first step for collecting more testimonials is to ask for them—at the right time. You should send the request right after the project ends or when the customer purchases.

You can automate the review request to include your customer’s first name to personalize it even more.

2. Use follow up emails

Since sometimes people don’t respond to the first message, you can send the request again after a week or as needed depending on your business.

You can disguise the link in a regular check-in email—this is a polite way to reiterate.

Leave the link at the end of the email after asking your customers how they feel about the product or if your services are helping them in the long run.

3. Incentivize your review requests to get more responses

Another great way to collect more testimonials is to incentivize your messages. You can offer them discounts, deals, a free one-month subscription, no delivery fee, and other such incentives.

Feel free to personalize these offers and make the customer feel special and valued.

Ideas and templates to get more testimonials from clients

If you’re unsure about how you can ask your existing clients for reviews and testimonials, then here are some creative templates you can use:

Email request testimonials templates

Emails can be highly effective for gathering testimonials.

You can streamline this process by creating a landing page where your customers can easily leave a review.

Testimonial.to is great for exactly that. You can add a link to Testimonial.to in your email request. It’ll look like this, with a dedicated page(s) for collecting testimonials:

Here are some key things you should remember when writing an email requesting a testimonial:

Keep it short and to the point. Your clients probably don’t have the time to read through a long email.

Remind your customers of your connection with them right at the beginning, so they know who’s emailing them. That could include mentioning the project you completed or the product(s) they bought from you. Reminding them of all the hard work you put in or how fun it was to work with the client is also a great opportunity to leave a great review.

Say something about how much time they need to spare for the review. For example, here’s the link to our testimonial submission page. It’ll take you about five minutes to add a video testimonial here.

Don’t say anything suggesting you’re only looking for positive reviews. Always use customer-centric language. That can increase responses by showing you care about their experiences and want to improve your services.

Explain how they can submit the testimonial. For example, follow the link to open our testimonials page. Record a video testimonial by clicking on the ‘record now’ button. Review it, and click submit.

Thank them in advance for participating. Here, you can mention that reviews help small businesses like yours offer your services to even more people. Or it’s been great working with a great client like them.

Here’s a template you can follow. It includes all the things we’ve mentioned above. Have a look at it to see how the points come together to create a professional, courteous, and to the point email:

If you don’t have an extensive email list or your business doesn’t really interact with the customers on email, social media might be the place for you.

You can request reviews from your followers on any social media platform: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even YouTube.

Here are some templates you can follow for that. You can use these to either personally message the followers on social media, or use them as captions in your public posts for everyone to see:

Or you could post a small message on LinkedIn:

A direct message (DM) on Instagram could look like this:

Direct messaging can help you personalize the message and get more responses. But publicly posting is also great if you have many loyal customers who regularly engage with your posts.

Once again, having a landing page set up for testimonials is super helpful for the customers.

You can simply include that link in your social media posts and collect many more reviews.

Testimonial.to’s wall of love is also excellent for gathering reviews from social media. This page gathers social proof from all social media and puts them in one place. Here’s how it looks:

Other creative ways to request testimonials

Although email and social media are by far the most common ways to collect testimonials, you shouldn’t limit yourself to these. Here are some more channels you can use to get reviews:

Text message

SMS or direct text messages are harder to ignore.

Everyone has their phones nearby all the time. And we all instantly look at our screens when we get a notification. That makes SMS a great way to gather testimonials.

Here, you should include a compelling CTA and add a link to the feedback landing page.

You can send the testimonial request after someone visits your store, or when you solve an issue for the client, or in periodic check-in texts.

Links on your website

You can use the popups on your website to direct your visitors to the testimonials page. That’s great if you can track your customers and show the popup to repeat visitors.

If you don’t want to use popups, place the testimonial request CTA where it’ll likely be seen the most. That can be in the sidebars or the top banner.

Thank you pages

Immediately asking the users for a review can be great. Just make sure that you don’t come off as annoying. That can work great for eCommerce sites where you can ask for a review on the website experience.

Later, you can follow up with these customers via email to get a video testimonial of the product.

How to collect testimonials—in a nutshell

Testimonials show that you care enough about your customers to ask them what they think of your services or products. It adds a personal touch to your company while also serving as excellent social proof.

Try out our templates to get more testimonials for your business. Also, check out Testimonial.to to see how we can help you create fantastic landing pages.

These can make it much easier for your customers to leave video testimonials, thus increasing the number of reviews you collect!