6 Great Ways to Add Testimonials to Your Website
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Positive customer testimonials are a great way of promoting the quality of your services and building trust in your brand.
Displaying them on your website can form a key part of your own digital marketing and online branding.
If a user lands on your website and can see real-world reviews and testimonials of your products or services, they’ll be much more likely to convert into a customer.
Working out how to display testimonials on your website, however, can be hard. You don’t want to be too in-your-face but you also need to be sure that users will see them.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the different types of testimonials to add to your website and how you can display them for the best results.
What Are Testimonials?
Testimonials are reviews left by customers, usually positive, who have used the services of your company in the past.
A customer testimonial helps to give credibility to your brand by showcasing a real-life customer who has used and liked your product or service.
Within a testimonial, a customer will usually talk about which of your products or services they have experienced and why they liked it.
Why Use Testimonials?
People buy from people, and testimonials help to build customers’ confidence in your brand and your offering.
Of course you are going to say that your products are the best on the market or that your service offering is of the highest quality, but it’s hard for a user to know whether to trust you or not.
Customer testimonials help to create that trust. They allow potential customers to see what people really thought of their experience with your business.
And of course, the more glowing testimonials you have, the more likely a user is to make a purchase from your online business.
How to Get Testimonials
There are various ways you can get testimonials to add to your website without constantly badgering customers to leave you a review.
The first is to target customers once they have completed their purchase. A great way of doing this is to send an email to customers at a set time after they have received their order.
For example, you could set an email campaign to go live two weeks after every customer receives their order, asking them to leave you a testimonial of their experience. This gives them enough time to try the product and form an accurate opinion.
Advice from the Experts
Top tip! Don’t ask customers for testimonials too soon. If you haven’t even shipped a customer’s order yet, don’t ask them for a review. For starters, they can’t review a product they haven’t received and secondly, they’ll probably be a bit annoyed that you’re focusing on asking for a testimonial rather than packaging their order!
Another way to collect customer testimonials is by targeting returning customers. When a customer makes a second or third order from your online store, you can direct them to a landing page to leave a testimonial. After all, if they are returning for more they must have had a good experience!
You can also look for testimonials on social media and in your customer service inbox. Sometimes a customer will go out of their way to praise a brand if they have a particularly good experience and these can make the perfect testimonials to add to your website.
Advice from the Experts
Top tip! Don’t spam customers by asking them for a testimonial. We recommend asking each individual customer no more than twice before moving on. Not everyone will want to provide you with a review, so it’s best to take the hint rather than annoy your customer base!
Find Out More
Our guide on How To Ask Customers for Reviews is full of more handy tips!
6 Ways to Add Testimonials to Your Website
Below we’ve listed some ideas for creating testimonials to add to your website to help build customer confidence in your brand.
#1. Create Case Studies
Storytelling is great for capturing users’ imagination and building a relationship with them, which is why creating case studies can be so beneficial.
Case studies are in-depth testimonials based on how a specific customer has used your product or service, what made them pick you, the results, and their opinions.
Case studies are a great way to enhance an existing content marketing strategy and are particularly useful for more complicated services where you may need to give users as much information as possible.
A case study testimonial puts the focus on a specific user and details every step of their experience and relationship with your brand.
#2. Film Videos (Customer Interviews)
Video testimonials are great if you want to engage potential customers with your testimonial content.
With the rise in video platforms such as Tik Tok and YouTube, many users actually prefer to consume content in video format over written text.
Video testimonials should be short and entertaining and should convey a user’s opinion of your brand straight away. A video testimonial will usually feature one of your previous customers talking about their experience of your brand.
In order to direct the videos and ensure the end result meets your content needs, you can conduct and film interviews with your customers before editing these and presenting them as video testimonials.
For more information on how to optimize videos for your website check out our expert guide.
#3. Use Animations
If you want to present your testimonials in a video format but don’t want to ask your customers to appear on camera then animations may be the way forward.
An animated testimonial will usually feature the testimonial written on the screen or spoken via audio, while an animation depicts anything from the service being carried out to the customer shopping on your website.
Animations can also highlight key facts or figures from the testimonial, ensuring that the important information is easily digestible and not lost within the wider testimonial. They’re a great way of engaging users and presenting in-depth testimonials without having to bombard them with a large amount of text.
Animated testimonials allow users to see a more human side to your company, getting an idea of the types of users who engage with and use your brand.
#4. Publish Blog Posts
If you’ve got a blog on your website then this can be a great place to add testimonials.
Blog posts are the perfect way to engage your audience and provide them with more detailed and relevant information to help them make an informed purchasing decision.
If you already create blog posts as part of your content marketing strategy then you’ll probably know that it can sometimes be a struggle to think up topic ideas.
Posts that showcase some of your testimonials, therefore, come with not only the benefit of portraying client testimonials to your audience but also of providing you with content ideas.
You can create blog posts around individual clients and how they have used your services or combine multiple testimonials into one post showcasing what your customers have to say.
#5. Use Social Media Posts
It’s not just your website where you should showcase your testimonials either. Sharing standout reviews and quotes from customers on your social media channels as part of your social media strategy creates engaging and useful content for your followers.
You can also feature testimonials from social media on your website. You can embed tweets from customers or screenshot positive comments from your Instagram account and include them all on your testimonials page.
Advice from the Experts
Top tip! Remember you can collect testimonials in a variety of ways and showcasing different formats such as Google reviews, social media commentary, and written testimonials only further helps to build trust in your brand.
#6. Publish Quotes
Quotes are perhaps the most traditional form of testimonial and are direct quotes from your customers that you share on your website.
Usually, a customer will provide one to three sentences about their experience and feedback of your brand and why they would recommend you, and you can post these on your website.
How you share them is up to you. You can create a dedicated testimonials page, feature them in a sidebar or section on your homepage, or even in a pop-up. Many popular website builders come with testimonial quote boxes built into your template, which is an easy way to add quotes to your pages.
You’ll include the customer’s name and sometimes extra details such as a headshot or the exact items they ordered from you.
The more quote testimonials you have the better but try to ensure they aren’t too lengthy so that they aren’t overwhelming and off-putting to users.
Adding Testimonials to Your Website: Summary
Adding testimonials to your website can offer potential customers the incentive they need to convert and make a purchase of their own.
If you want to build trust in your brand and create your very own community of customers then testimonials are the answer. To take it one step further, you should also be following up on all your customers too.
As we’ve explored in this article, there are various ways you can add them to your website from creating in-depth case studies to utilizing video content and social media.
If you enjoyed this article why not take a look at our expert digital marketing tips next?!
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