How to Acquire Customer Testimonials
03/08/2019 | Share:
In our blog post on How Online Customer Reviews Can Affect Your Business, we covered the different aspects of customer reviews in great detail. Reviews can be a great benefit to your business and can be leveraged to create testimonials which showcase the best aspects of your product or service.
People are more likely to trust your business if you have impactful testimonials and some social proof. They are unbiased opinions of happy customers who have made a purchase with your business. It acts as reassurance for the potential customer, letting them know that the people before them have had a positive experience.
If you’re lucky enough to already have a large pool of reviews from which to choose from, this is great news! If you’re just starting out or you’re finding it hard to get content for testimonials, read on.
Simply Ask
One of the simplest ways to acquire testimonials is to ask for them! This could be done in a number of ways.
Perhaps you have some customers that have bought from you several times. They’re clearly impressed with your products and see the value that they provide. This means they are less likely to give you negative reviews. If you have the capabilities, segment your email audience to target these people only and creatively ask them to fill in a survey or leave their opinion somewhere. You’d be surprised how many people leave a review.
If you’re just getting started, you may not have many regular customers. You could also try following up on recent purchases with a review request via the customer’s preferred method of contact. This should happen after the customer has received their product, of course. This may not always give you testimonials you need, but the volume is likely to be higher and you are also receiving valuable feedback on how to improve at the same time.
With so many e-commerce businesses looking to receive reviews and following up with an automatically generated email, a more personal touch might do the trick. Another method to try would be including something within the packaging of your product, asking the customer to leave a review. Everybody loves receiving parcels in the post, so why not capitalise on this good feeling moment by asking the question then.
Offer some incentive
A great way to gather customer feedback is to offer them something in return. Something simple and easy would work, such as a 5% discount code or free shipping on the next order in exchange for an online review. Feel free to get creative with what you can offer!
If your business is looking for something a little more involved, such as video testimonials, why not make it into a social media competition? Providing you have the time and resources, of course. Video testimonials showcase your product and its features a lot better than a few sentences but they require a substantial amount of effort from the customer.
Edit existing reviews
If you already have some reviews, you can pull out your editorial pen (or keyboard) and edit these down to focus on the positive aspects of the review. Perhaps a customer had some issues, but they were impressed with the delivery. You can focus on making a testimonial from this part of the review. Just make sure you take note of the negatives and work on this for the future!
Make it simple
Some people, whilst happy with your product or service, don’t always have the time to leave a long review. By offering the option to leave a star rating or a score out of 10, it takes just a couple of seconds. Over time, you’ll hopefully build up a great average rating which can then be used additionally to complement the testimonials you’ve gathered using the methods above.
