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What Are Customer Testimonials, and How Do I Collect them?

3 min to read

Customer testimonials are reviews from people who’ve bought your products or services. They highlight experiences that your customer has had with you, such as:

    • • How your product or service solved their problems.

 

    • • Their experiences with your customer support or sales teams.

 

  • • Your product or service’s standout features.

 

Testimonials offer social proof and highlight what you can do for your customers, but not having these on your site can keep skeptical potential buyers wary and force them elsewhere. You should ask for testimonials while enthusiasm is still high after a recent experience for authenticity and detail.

Key Takeaways:
  • Testimonials showcase positive experiences from real people
    • As you build trust and credibility with customers, you should collect testimonials and allow others to make a purchasing decision based on what they read.
  • Timing and simplicity are key for collecting testimonials
    • Ask customers for testimonials as soon as they have a positive experience. Offer more than one option (i.e. forms and surveys) and you'll get more responses to choose from.
  • Respect customer privacy and foster transparency
    • You can use partial testimonials, miss out pictures, or use initials, but you should state your privacy policy to ensure your audience knows these are real.
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What Are Customer Testimonials, and How Do I Collect them?

Tips for better customer testimonials

Improving customer testimonials can be done in the following ways: 

  • Offer gifts, discounts, or prizes as an incentive (e.g. the opportunity to win a free one-month subscription if they fill out your form and submit by the deadline). 

  • To comply with data privacy laws, always ask for permission before using testimonials (or make it clear in your privacy policy that the user agrees to letting you). You should also make sure that you can use any names, photos, company details, etc., before publishing.
Pro Tips:
If you don’t have the time to directly reach out to customers, you can still collect reviews. Encourage people to leave reviews via forms in emails that you send and invite feedback on social media. You can also automate outreach requests via newsletter platforms like Mailchimp or set up campaigns with Hocoos.

In addition to your website, make it possible for others to leave reviews about your business on platforms like Trustpilot and Google Reviews. 

How do I ask customers for testimonials?

Ask for testimonials straight after you’ve completed a project, solved a problem, or solved a conflict (or anything similar). Customers will offer feedback when the experience is at the forefront of their minds. 

Pro Tip:
Get customers to answer questions so that they don’t need to think about what to include. For example, you can ask them to include details about who assisted them and why they had a positive experience. 

What if customers don’t want to give a full name or photo?

Never use details or pictures without permission; you can always just use first names, initials, or company names instead. Respecting your customers’ privacy will make them more likely to do repeat business with you while going against their wishes will force them to look elsewhere and potentially land you in regulatory hot water.

The most important part of a testimonial is that the story is genuine and that the customer had a positive experience; the rest isn’t an absolute necessity.

Pro tip:
Transparency : State your privacy policies wherever you publish your testimonials if you use partial ones.

Can I use testimonials from social media on my website?

Yes; social media testimonials are just as effective as other ones (and can sometimes feel even more genuine). Ask the customer for explicit permission before publishing them on your website.

Pro Tip:
Each time you share a social media testimonial, link to the customer’s profile or tag them so they can see it and you can upkeep your integrity.

Conclusion

You can gather customer testimonials directly, from social media, or through feedback forms. It doesn’t matter where you get them from, as long as they’re genuine; fake reviews are going to lose you trust. Place them strategically on your website where other customers can see them.

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