A customer testimonial is a comment that truthfully endorses a product, service, or person. It should state the qualities that made this valuable for them.
Testimonials are one of the surest ways to provide social proof for your business. It tells customers that other people have used and likes your products or services and it explains why in a way that will hopefully resonate with the right potential customers for your business.
Excellent testimonials can be used on your landing pages, your sales pages, and your newsletters.
When done well and used correctly, testimonials will increase your conversions. But first, you’ll need the right ones.
So how do you get them?
You need to find ways to get testimonials that are truthful and make your products or services stand out. You also need to find ways to get these without irritating your existing customers. This intimidates so many business owners that they avoid doing it all together and miss out on the amazing benefits testimonials can offer.
Here are some tricks for getting the right testimonials that will reassure nervous buyers and distinguish your business from the competition.
1. Check Up On Your Customer
Contact your customer shortly after they’ve completed their purchase and ask how things are working for them. This gives you the chance to possibly fix problems for disgruntled customers and turn their experience around. More often, it gives you the opportunity to discover happy customers. When you receive these positive replies you can ask if you can use it as a testimonial, possibly after editing it down to a shorter length.
2. Check Your Social Alerts
Don’t underestimate using testimonials from a variety of sources. Assuming you have alerts set up for your name, your company’s name, and the name of your most popular products, you will eventually find tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, or another form of mention for your products or services. If you see a great post, direct message the user and ask if you can use it as a testimonial.
3. Send a Follow-up Survey With the Right Questions
This is an opportunity to ask the kinds of questions that will elicit truthful endorsements that list out the qualities that appeal to your customer base. Who knows better why customers use your services than your happy customers?
Ask questions that focus in on the benefits gained from your products or services. Ask about their results. And–this is key–ask about the kinds of objects your potential customers may have.
Do your customers worry about buying something that won’t work for them? Ask your happy customers how it worked for them. Do your customers worry about the time it will take for a specialist to handle their problems for them? Then ask your customers how they felt about how much time the project took.
This is how you get truthful testimonials that say “They solved my problem so quickly!”.
Reassure Nervous Buyers With Your Testimonials
It may take you some time to build up your testimonials. That’s okay. Put the effort in to work on eventually getting there, because the effort is worth it. Testimonials add social proof, which means credibility. And that means an increase in conversions on your website.
