How to Get Great Testimonials From Customers

Increase your credibility with great testimonials

Testimonials are some of the most important words your future customers need to hear. They contribute towards building your reputation and they effortlessly generate trust with your audience.

Even if someone comes across your service or product for the very first time, testimonials show that they’ll get fantastic service too. Thus, they play an important role in the buying behaviour of customers.

Today we’re focusing on how you can master acquiring positive testimonials from your customers.

Why are great testimonials so important?

It might seem obvious, because who wouldn’t want proof of people singing your praises?

But we need to go deeper and show how testimonials form part of your bigger marketing objectives.

Trust = more sales

The most important benefit of great testimonials is the fact that they can help you make more sales, especially in the online space.

If you’re trying to sell services or an online course, then you absolutely need your prior clients to send you their rave reviews so that you can proudly display them on your website, sales funnels and sales landing pages.

Great testimonials inspire confidence in your product or service which makes potential customers more likely to buy.

While most forms of traditional advertising have been eclipsed by online marketing, word-of-mouth remains as powerful as ever.

Build your brand

Nowadays it’s not enough to just have a business anymore. You need to build your brand.

Branding goes beyond your font, logo and colour scheme. It’s also the feeling that people associate with your company when they come across your content online.

The more people can confirm your product works or that your customer service is exceptional, the more you’ll get credibility and recognition for your brand.

This is easily done with social media networks like Facebook that offer their business clients an opportunity to add customer reviews. You can also use social media of other platforms to help increase engagement with your audience and potential clients.

Your social networks are a great way to communicate even when you haven’t met any of your audience in person.

You get to share valuable stories from your customers

As humans, we enjoy amazing stories and this gives us something positive to focus on. We are hard-wired to listen to stories so if you can weave your customer testimonials into a story, even better.

It’s empowering and does the reader/listener good to hear optimistic stories from other people. This is ideal for your business.

Even though the story is told from a satisfied customer point of view, your new potential customer will picture themselves in the same situation. By making the customer the hero in the story, you won’t overwhelm them by being “sales-y”.

This is important because people should not feel overwhelmed by a market trying to “buy” them over. But, instead, the customer is sharing their excellent experience of your brand.

Opportunity to improve

Great testimonials show that what you offer is in demand. Is there a way that you can leverage off this?

Let’s say you have an online course that people LOVE.

It’s a 3-month online course that they work through in their own time, and it gets your students proven results. You have tons of testimonials attesting to the fact that people truly benefit from your course.

Now, how can you use this information?

Certainly, you can use it to sell more of the same course, because it’s showing you that your course is effective!

So our idea is this: why not create a shorter, more intensive course with the top features of the main course?

You specifically target high-achievers who don’t have time to waste and you sell the course at a higher price point.

Why?

Because you can now position it as a 6-week intensive course and you support them by hosting weekly Facebook Lives in your private group.

Anyone who enrols will get more coaching and more access to you, so they will have to be prepared to pay more.

Sound good?

You can get students for both courses because each one offers something slightly different to the end-user. Some people will prefer the cheaper, “I’ll go through the material myself” option while others want to be coached by you and do the course quicker.

You can make money from both options.

And how do you sell these? You use great testimonials of course!

Tips to get great testimonials for your business

• Ask for them!

So many business owners are afraid to ask for testimonials! We see it ALL the time!

When we are setting up funnels for our clients and building sales pages, it’s amazing how we sometimes struggle to get testimonials from our clients, because they’ve never gotten around to asking for them.

Please ask that your happy clients send you a short written testimonial. If they’re comfortable on camera, then a video version will be great too.

People are quick to complain but very slow to give compliments. So you need to be proactive in requesting testimonials. This is something you can delegate to a competent admin person once you’ve trained them on how you expect the process to work.

• Provide prompts and questions

Writing isn’t everyone’s natural skill. If you want your testimonials to stand out, then you need to provide people with a bit of guidance.

Otherwise, your testimonial might be along the lines of: “It was nice.” or “Great job” which will do nothing to impress anyone.

Some questions you can ask include:

1. What problem or issue were you struggling with before?
2. What was the biggest outcome or result from using our product/service?
3. What exactly did you enjoy most about our product/service?
4. What made you decide to purchase this product/my coaching/this online course/package?
5. What were your initial hesitations about buying, and what made you decide to go for it?
6. List three benefits you’ve gained?
7. If you were recommending us to your best friend, what would you tell them?
8. What made our offer stand out from everyone else’s?
9. What was the biggest outcome from using our product/service?
10. What would you tell anyone still on the fence about purchasing?

• Don’t fake it

Whatever you do, do NOT fake testimonials and reviews! It’s cringey, desperate, totally dishonest and all-round bad business practice.

Rather have no testimonials until you can get a few genuine ones.

• Offer a small incentive

As with any business transaction, it’s a “give and take” situation. If you’re struggling to get reviews or great testimonials, think about offering a small incentive. You can offer a discount voucher or a free sample of the product. You can also offer a free “sneak-peak” into the course where you give them access to one lesson or a free trial before they can buy the pro version.

You can also offer to give them a shout-out on social media. Some people LOVE this! They love being recognised and promoted as well, so it’s a win-win situation.

There are many ways to give free offers and get it to work in your favour with a great testimonial in return.

• Use beta versions to your advantage

A beta version is the untested/unmarketed version of a final product. You would offer your beta version to your warm audience (that already knows, likes and trusts you) and tell them that you’re still finalising the product. Note, this works best with online products such as courses, demo software application, video games, social network platforms and so on.

Please do not sell faulty physical products!

It doesn’t matter if the beta isn’t perfect, that is what it is all about, scouring for imperfections and learning what your clients like and dislike. That way you can optimise until you have a really phenomenal product to sell to the world at large.

The benefit of people buying your beta version is that they get it at a fraction of the cost that the final product will sell for, but you can also include a condition that they have to provide you with a testimonial.

• Save them!

Sometimes you might receive unprompted testimonials but simply forget to capture them. This could be when a customer says in passing: “What awesome service” or “I love shopping at your store” or “I’ve learnt so much from your coaching, thank you”.

In these moments, it’s important to say: “Thank you for saying that, I really appreciate it. I’d love to learn more about how we’ve helped you. Would you be interested in giving us a testimonial?”

Then arrange to get the information at a later date when they have time. You can use the questions we provided to give you the framework for your testimonials.

The point is, listen out for opportunities to extract longer testimonials from people. They might only say a few positive words, but you need to open the door wider and extract the full benefits they’ve experienced.

• Ask permission

Again, it might seem obvious that you’re going to USE the testimonial on social media, your website and anywhere else you choose, but some people freak out when they see their name and/or photo online.

So get permission! Make it explicitly clear that you want to use the testimonial so you need to find out how much information from them you can post/print and have visible in the public domain.

So, add a section dealing specifically with their consent and permission.

You can provide various options and your customer can make a checkmark at the level that they feel most comfortable with:

1. Anonymous
2. First name and job title only (or area or industry, depending on which demographic is best suited to your business)
3. Full name and job title (or other valuable demographic)
4. Profile picture, full name and job title (or other valuable demographic)
5. Video and profile picture, full name and job title (or other valuable demographic)

And then respect these boundaries. Don’t post a picture of a person on your website unless they’ve given you permission to do so.

• A quick note about private Facebook groups/DMs:

This point follows on from the one above regarding asking permission.

Facebook groups are a wonderful place to grow a close-knit community centred around your course or online services. It’s also the place where your biggest fans will hang out, and you might see a lot of positive, uplifting words from them in there.

It’s common for older members of the group to encourage newer member by saying things like “I got so much value out of this! It’s amazing and has totally transformed my life.” etc.

These kind of statements are fantastic forms of social proof because it’s literally one of your customers gushing about what you’ve sold them.

But…

If you want to take screenshots of positive statements online like comments in a private FB group or a student who’s messaged you directly (or emailed you), please ask permission before using.

Chances are your fans would love you to use their words (they also feel acknowledged in this way) but best to check first.

• A few more tips

– If you’ve already requested a good word or feedback from your customer, it’s time to follow-up on it if they haven’t sent it after two weeks of asking.

– Maker sure that it comes in writing, very few things beat hard copy

– Get a picture of them, if you can. Pictures add that much-needed sense of emotion and connection with the viewers. You can ask for a photo (headshot) from the customer providing the testimonial.

– Say thank you after they’ve delivered because showing appreciation says a lot about the way you do business too.

– Offer them a small reward as an alternative thank you. They went the extra mile, now reward them and give them a discount on something. Your customers will appreciate it.

*Tip: Don’t harass your client or customer for a testimonial. They are also busy and sometimes unable to get to it immediately.

You can follow-up at a later date, and if there’s still no reply, then don’t become a nuisance.

The takeaway about how you can get great testimonials to help boost your business

We hope we’ve shown you that testimonials from customers are not a nice to have, they’re a have to have.

They work their quiet magic behind the scenes to build trust and give you a stellar reputation.

If you haven’t been asking your customers or clients for testimonials thus far, it’s high time you change your strategy and start asking.

These snippets are game-changer when it comes to improving sales and business.

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