How To Increase Trust With Testimonials

Are you asking for testimonials and putting them to use across your website? 

It can be hard to find the time (and the right way) to ask your customers for a review without feeling like you’re pestering. In this guide, we’ll take you through a selection of ideas to help you engage with your customers post-sale. 

The truth is, if they’re happy with your service, then it’s more than likely they’d be happy to leave a golden testimonial if prompted, and the payoffs for prompting them can be huge. It's been found that displaying your customer's comments can increase conversion rates by 270%.

Examining the feedback of previous customers has become a key part of the online buying process. Seeing that other people have purchased and enjoyed the available products or services is one of the best ways you can build trust with your prospective customers and increase the likeliness that they will buy.

Luckily, collecting customer feedback doesn’t have to be a difficult task as there are several effective methods that you can implement to gather and display quality testimonials. We’re going to cover these in this post to help you get started. 

 

What Makes A Great Testimonial

All testimonials are good testimonials, but the great ones stand apart from the rest. These should be the core focus of any of your campaigns. The more quality testimonials you have, the better your results will be.

Here are the points to bear in mind when you’re trying to encourage a great testimonial from someone:

Identifiers

It is essential to have the name of the person providing the testimonial. It’s even better if you can get their general location and even better still if you can get a picture of them. Testimonials are about building trust and if a testimonial isn’t backed up by the individual that shared it, it can start to ring alarm bells. Even more so perhaps than if you didn’t have testimonials at all!

Length

“Great product, love it” - this kind of testimonial is positive of course, but it’s really underselling your product. Testimonials of this length are perceived as pretty meaningless in the eyes of potential customers. It’s not telling them anything. Always try to get a paragraph’s worth of testimonial out of a person when you go to the effort of asking. 

Emotion

Online buying decisions are fueled by emotion. Your testimonials should aim to reflect how a person felt about your product rather than the product itself. People aren’t interested in how a product functions for example. They want to know how this product changed a person’s life for the better, how it has helped them, why they bought it in the first place. You can encourage these kinds of responses through open-ended questions which will also naturally help to increase the length of your testimonials as well.

 

Asking For Testimonials

So when’s the best time to ask for a testimonial? What’s the best way to approach the subject?

When asking a customer out of the blue what they thought of their experience shopping with you, it can feel awkward and a little uncomfortable.

However, when a customer makes a purchase on your site, they are expecting you to contact them anyway. They’ll be expecting confirmation of their order and a dispatch notification at the very least. 

This gives you the perfect opportunity to naturally ask for a review by taking advantage of the Order Management System.

Not only does the Order Management System help you keep track of your orders, but it can also be used to update your customers at every step of the process. You can personalise these notifications to send a polite reminder to your customers to leave feedback.

When you first contact them with their Order Confirmation, you could attach a link to a simple survey with just a few questions. You could create a Custom Form page on your website specifically for this.

At this point in time, they won’t have any feedback on your product so they can only share their thoughts on their experience purchasing through your website. This can provide you with useful insights to optimise the user experience of your website while also creating a lead-in for a more thoughtful review of their received order later on.

It should require as little commitment from them as possible, so try to keep it to 4 or fewer questions. Some examples could be:

• How would you rate your experience with us today?

• Why did you choose to buy from us?

• Would you shop with us again?

• Would you recommend us to a friend?

• How would you rate our website out of 10?

• How did you hear about us?
  
  

The key here is to ask questions that indicate whether their experience has been positive so far and allow for you to then ask them to expand upon their answers later on. You are conditioning them with just a small commitment at first that makes it harder for them to say no later on. 

When you post the order to to your customer, it’s good practice to include a dispatch note in the parcel. This provides a great opportunity to thank them once again for their purchase and ask if they would leave a review.

You are able to customise your Dispatch Note to include your logo and any other text you would like to include. In the text area, be sure to thank them once again for their purchase and ask if they would leave a review. You can then provide them with a link to your Testimonials Page for them to share their thoughts.

After your customer has received their purchase, follow up with a personal email to check if everything was okay with their order. If you have a newsletter this is a great time to ask if they’d like to join it too and receive information about what you do, offers that are on and new products.

Whilst the personal email may not work at scale, during the start up phase of your business when you’re trying to grow this is a good way to build those testimonials that you can keep on using over and over for years to come. 

Don’t feel disheartened if it takes a while to receive an email response.  Not everyone will reply and more often those that do may also be letting you know about a problem they had. Don’t take this kind of feedback to heart. You’ll always get the rough with the smooth, and can turn these comments into improvements in your processes and products. 

The positive comments and thanks will come in response to your message, these customers will reply because they appreciated your follow up email, liked the personal touch and are pleased with the order they placed. It’s also likely that this additional step will help you build a relationship with them that will increase the likeliness that they’ll buy from you again. 

When you receive a positive reply that has the potential to be a testimonial, this is the cue to ask if they’d be happy for you to use their comments on your website and marketing information. It’s extremely important to get their permission to do so, as you’ll be publishing their name online. This could be personally identifiable information and you don’t want them to get an unwelcome surprise when they see their details published. 

When you ask for their permission to use the comments they’ve sent you, double check if they’re happy with their comments or want to change them in any way. 

 

Using Testimonials On Your Website

Once you have put your process in place for gathering your testimonials, it’s a good idea to set yourself up a document to store and categorise your testimonials. Use this to log where you use the testimonials and when. You can also keep information about their consent here too, so you have a copy of this stored and the customers contact details.

As your list of testimonials grows, consider categorising them based on what product or service has been focused on as this can make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for and helpful in placing them on your website.

As with all marketing, the more specific and relevant your content is to a customer, the better it lands.

When you have testimonials that relate to a specific product or service of yours, you should include this on the relevant page. This will have a lot more impact on your prospective customers than a generic review of your business as a whole and can help to improve conversions on that page. 

Hopefully, there will come a point where every page on your website has a specific testimonial on!

Find out how to add testimonials in Content Pages >> 

Testimonial pages

Another option that you can consider for your website is to set up a dedicated testimonials page to gather feedback. You can link to this in the follow up email you send and ask customers to complete it.

If your customers are looking for one place to browse feedback from your previous customers, this is an ideal solution. It also serves as a subtle reminder for your customers that you want to receive their feedback.

While the quality of reviews left on a testimonials page might not be as high as directly asking for a response (as mentioned before), referring customers to this page can help you acquire more testimonials in a shorter space of time.

You can also set up your request form so that it allows your customers to upload pictures of their products. This can be fantastic for promoting specific products and can be really useful if you plan to share your reviews across social media. 

See The Full Testimonials Page Here>>

Product Ratings

A quick indicator that you can display to your customers on your listings is Product Ratings.

Product Ratings allow users to rate what they’ve bought on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. This has proven to be a very effective use of social proof. You can see that big retailers such as Amazon and eBay also implement this system across Product Listings on their sites.

Additionally, Product Ratings are detected by Google and other search engines when they crawl your site which they are then able to display on your search listing. As a result, offering a Product Rating on your products could help to improve click-through rates in search engines. 

As mentioned before, the less time that needs to be invested in a review, the higher your response rate will be which makes this a highly effective method for accumulating feedback. 

To switch on Product Ratings in your shop:

1. Log into your Create account.

2. Select Shop on the top menu.

3. Select Settings >> General Configuration from the left-hand menu.

4. Select the Products tab.

5. Switch Product Rating to ON.

6. We recommend switching your Product Rating Permission to Registered Website Users. This ensures that only customers who have purchased the product can leave a rating.

7. Save your changes. 

Trustpilot

Naturally, people are still very sceptical when it comes to online testimonials. That is how sites like Trustpilot have become so popular. Feedback on review sites can feel more authentic as they are controlled by a third-party site that users must register for an account with in order to use it. 

Using a third party such as Trustpilot comes with a whole host of other benefits as well as this.

They have established a brand that is focused solely on the practice of accumulating testimonials. As a result, they have developed a number of features to help you accelerate this.

Further to that, reviews reportedly account for 8.4% of the decision Google’s search algorithm makes when ranking your site. Trustpilot integrations come with Schema Markup to help Google detect your testimonials and display them in search results. 

Check out the stats below:

There are a number of ways that you can display and encourage reviews with Trustpilot. One such way is by integrating a TrustBox on your website. There are a number of different formats, some are free and some are premium features and you can choose what works for you based on your requirements. All of them are easy to integrate with your Create site.

Find out how to integrate TrustBoxes on your website >> 

 

In Summary

Testimonials are a crucial part of any growth campaign. The more you have, the more capable you are of nurturing trust between you and your potential customers. 

It doesn’t need to be difficult to acquire feedback and there are ways to reach out to your customers as part of a natural after-care process. Alternatively, there are ways that you can automate the process of acquiring reviews for your business.

Of course, the more effort you put into acquiring reviews, the better your results will be. By reaching out to customers personally and finding out more about their experiences, you not only receive a much more detailed and emotional review, but you also receive important insights that can help you to build on what you have already achieved. It’s entirely up to you!

Don’t forget that your Account Manager is on hand to advise you on setting up any of the features mentioned in this blog post.

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below about this topic. What’s your process for acquiring feedback? Do you have an “outside the box” approach to reaching out for testimonials?