Table of Contents
- Benefits of Customer Testimonials
- What Are Customer Testimonials?
- Using Customer Testimonials Increases Credibility and Trust
- Some of our customers have told us that testimonials they collected years ago still drive new sales for them.
- Social Proof Boosts Conversions
- Video Testimonials Give an Additional Face to Your Brand
- Customer Feedback Highlights Your Strengths and Solves Objections
- Collect Customer Testimonials to Highlight Features
- Reviews and Testimonials Address Most Objections
- People don’t like to be sold.
- Are Testimonials the Best for Your Business?
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Title
The Pros of Customer Testimonials (Are There Any Cons?)
Date
Nov 17, 2024
Description
These are the pros of customer testimonials: Learn how to use them to make money and scale your business. We couldn’t find any cons, but you’ll have a chance to judge that.
Status
Current Column
Person
Writer
Would you buy something from a spammy website full of weird pop-ups?
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The answer may be too obvious, right?
You will probably never open it again.
As weird as it may seem, your visitors' minds when your website lacks social proof.
Yes, I am talking about customer reviews and testimonials.
If you fail to build trust and credibility on your website, your product or service will not be considered trustworthy.
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Buyers want to know who you are, where your company is based, and if what you sell is worth it, even before they listen to what you have to say or read the first few lines of your product page.
This is a must nowadays.
This part of customer experience is well understood by the best marketers worldwide.
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They build their websites, landing pages, creatives, and ads using positive reviews from satisfied customers as the base.
Since we are all social beings, the validation that customer testimonials and reviews can give to potential customers is priceless.
In this article, I will explore the benefits of both customer testimonials and reviews, compare them against each other, and share my best advice on where you should focus your attention for the benefit of your business.
Benefits of Customer Testimonials
What Are Customer Testimonials?
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.
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These recorded experiences show potential clients why it is a good idea to work with you or buy one of your products.
The main benefits of using text and video testimonials as part of your marketing strategy are the following.
Using Customer Testimonials Increases Credibility and Trust
When customers share their experiences, and you include the best positive stories in your marketing materials, you are setting your brand for success.
Most types of customers are more likely to buy from you if you display testimonials on your website.
Why? Because testimonials are often the most memorable, relatable, and human parts of your design & copy combo.
They show your best customers, sharing the experiences that took them to make a purchase and why it was a great decision.
Do I need to say more?
You can have a killer copy about your products and services or a great-looking design, but if you lack video or written testimonials will cause potential customers to leave immediately.
This is 2024. People don't like to see endorsements, positive star ratings, and online reviews and testimonials: THEY NEED them.
Client testimonials are endorsements. Positive testimonials are the number one way to build trust.
Ask your customers to share their experiences. Encourage them to share the specifics, their Use a tool like Testimonial to get the whole thing moving. Then, wait and see the difference.
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The impact will be seen and felt EVERYWHERE on your marketing efforts.
Believe me. You can do a lot of SEO, rank 1st place in Google My Business, and reply to every negative review; yet, without the right testimonials showcased in the right way, your role as a business owner will always feel heavy.
The power and effect on potential customers' minds are so great that testimonials may be one of the most overrated business investments of the present.
Some of our customers have told us that testimonials they collected years ago still drive new sales for them.
For example, check this simple yet powerful example.
This regular checkout page includes a reminder of what the product can do for you and all the add-ons, bonuses, or upsells available.
Some would say the checkout page is a place to claim victory. But the truth is not.
Many users have entered their credit card details, changed their minds, and left.
You have a business to build. Please read that again.
Many users have entered their credit card details, changed their minds, and left.
I love how Ship 30 for 30 included one of their best testimonials in the middle of the checkout page elements.
This image testimonial is perfectly placed.
This is how you make testimonials a conversion machine.
The student even closed her comments with the words, “Don't hesitate!”
How many prospective students have read that testimonial and clicked the “buy” button instead of abandoning the checkout page or “leaving it for later”?
I don’t know the metrics, but I’m pretty sure that single details have generated a ton of extra sales for this business.
Social Proof Boosts Conversions
Now that we are speaking about conversions. This is the second benefit I want to discuss.
Trust alone is not the purpose. That's the start.
How do you get people who have never paid or used a product of yours to have experiences with your business?
You record a testimonial of your best client experiences or get some text testimonials.
That's as far as you can get.
You probably won't convince your customers to take a plane from San Diego to London to give a presentation on your behalf every week.
But you can get glowing testimonials EASILY (using a tool like Testimonial) and then place them in a core section on your website and see the magic happen.
- You will get more sales
- You will get more referrals
- You will be better clients
Increased conversions are one of the advantages of testimonials.
But honestly, it can also become an issue.
Why? Because you may eventually have to improve your systems to service more clients, create a waitlist or simply turn down some business.
Okay, probably that was poor sarcasm or a bad joke!
But you understand me. As you can see, the pros outweigh the cons completely.
I want more of those issues, for real.
Video Testimonials Give an Additional Face to Your Brand
The following truth may sound too obvious, but many people don’t apply this in marketing: you need to humanize your brand to make it successful.
Humans don’t connect with logos, ideas, images, or animated cartoons in the same way as they connect with other humans.
That is why Vayner Media has only 262,000 followers on Instagram, and its founder, Gary Vee, has over 10 million followers.
And that is exactly where testimonials in video format come in.
You can humanize your brand by using faces your prospects and customers can relate to.
Video testimonials are a perfect way to achieve this.
The faces, voices, personalities, body language, and other elements present in your video will make your testimonials relatable and pleasant.
The best is that you don’t have to limit yourself to a single face; you can capture as many testimonials as you need to.
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Then, you can use those videos in different settings, such as ads, checkout pages, pop-up windows, website banners, social media posts, and inside your blog content.
Doing precisely that can help you build great rapport with your target audience and indelibly ink the idea of your solution in their minds.
Customer Feedback Highlights Your Strengths and Solves Objections
Collect Customer Testimonials to Highlight Features
Your product or service has its own unique characteristics.
It comprises different features, elements, pricing options, tiers, etc.
Naturally, the first step to putting your offer into the world is to create a website or landing page whose copy is attractive.
The images, colors, explainers videos, or any supporting assets that you decide to include should work together to make your prospective customers understand what you sell.
Chili Piper’s website is a good example.
Once you have prepared that, adding high-quality testimonials is the next natural step.
Why? Because when your customers talk about your service or product in these testimonials, they act as promoters of your product.
This is what Chili Piper’s testimonial page looks like:
This customer testimonial illustrates different aspects or features of their product:
Users may share their story from the perspective of:
- How a specific feature made their day
- How you are the only one who offers that feature
- How a specific feature helped be more productive or earn/save money
- How a specific feature makes your offer better than the competition because it works better
- How a specific feature makes your offer a better value vs. price deal because they only include the feature in higher-priced tiers or products
- And more
So, if you want your top or newest features to stand out and be clearly understood by your prospects, leave the explanation to your customers.
You may be thinking, “This sounds good, but how on earth can I ensure customers talk about THAT one feature in their reviews or testimonials?”
And I would add, how can you ensure they do it in the right way?
Well, that’s where Testimonial.to comes in.
You can use Testimonial to create a collecting page like this one ⬇️ in just a few clicks.
You can set up any questions that you wish or add a video that guides your users to share what you consider relevant to create outstanding testimonials.
The best part is that you can change these questions as you wish if you need to focus your efforts on different features or aspects of your product.
You can also sign up for the Premium or Ultimate Plan, which includes Testimonial forms.
Each form can have its title, description, and set of questions, among other things.
It will also serve as another landing page or collection page within the space you can use to collect testimonials and apply tags automatically for easier management.
That way, you can set up forms inside testimonials, which could be variables or your main space, and direct questions to specific features.
This is very useful if you are creating a social collection campaign related to a specific feature of your product. You can learn how to set up testimonial forms here.
Reviews and Testimonials Address Most Objections
One of the most important skills that salespeople can have is dealing with objections.
Your prospects may like your product and want the solution you are selling, but there are things that don’t connect in their minds yet.
Your job as the marketer of your product or service is to solve those objections so that your cost prospective customers go directly into paying mode.
Remember, this is their hard money, so they won’t give it to you unless they want to and are completely sure your solution is what they want.
If you are like most small business owners or solopreneurs, you don’t have a sales team working for you to solve these objections.
So, what do you do?
Put your army of full-time sales workers to help you nonstop.
That army is built by collecting high-quality customer testimonials.
This works so well for the following reason:
People don’t like to be sold.
Your prospective customers don’t like feeling pressured.
They don’t want to jump into another video call or have your ads interrupt their video.
Using testimonials in your marketing is a great way to sell them indirectly. That way, they won’t feel they are being pitched or convinced.
Since your customers’ experiences will discuss relevant points of interest about your product, they will work as sales agents who “talk” to them.
What are some of those points of interest your customer will usually approach:
- Opinions, experiences, or positive feedback about a feature (as explained in the previous section)
- Pricing
- Service expectations
- Onboarding
- Customer service
- Experiences (like how you exceeded the requirement to help them, the time you gave them a discount, how your documentation works well, etc.)
Your testimonials will work to solve your customer objections in terms of lack of budget, trust, need, urgency, and others.
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Remember, marketing is a science.
You can plan this carefully and make it work for you:
Make your research to understand what are your prospects’ main objections and then focus on creating testimonial collection campaigns whose content could help solve those objections.
When you have the social proof ready, you can go ahead and place it on all of the places where your prospective customers will engage: social media posts, newsletters, email marketing content, checkout pages, ads, and, of course, your main website and related pages.
Doing this will give you good opportunities to convert more.
Are Testimonials the Best for Your Business?
Hey! We have come to the end of this guide. Thanks for sticking out.
Wrapping up: I mentioned that testimonials are great for building trust, increasing conversions, humanizing your brand, highlighting features, addressing objections, selling indirectly, and more.
The truth is that I could keep going for a long time.
Other important benefits of customer testimonial (that I didn’t mention because you want a guide not a book) are the following:
- Testimonials are highly repurposable. You can (and should) use them everywhere (blog posts, ads, newsletters, read them on your podcast, add them to your show notes, show them on your YouTube videos, and a lot more!)
- Testimonials foster retention. Clients who have shared their honest experiences will feel more connected and committed to your brand and mission.
- Testimonials are great for SEO
Finally, testimonial marketing has literally zero cons, especially with an ally like Testimonial on your side.
Testimonial makes the process easy, affordable, and almost automatic:
It allows you to request, collect, organize, and showcase your testimonials in any format.
Don't think it twice and do what is best for your business: start or improve your testimonial marketing game today.
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