Imagine converting high-quality potential leads to regular customers using customer feedback and a minimal budget.
That’s customer testimonials for you!
95% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision, and over 58% of customers would even pay more for brands with high positive reviews.
User-generated content (UGC) used as lead magnets is all the buzz lately.
And the most efficient form of UGC – customer testimonials, is one of the most powerful drivers for social proof and brand awareness.
But it’s super critical to perfectly capture a client testimonial and display it in a way that attracts attention and instills trust in potential customers.
So, to help you in this quest, we’ll provide all the essential elements that make a well-articulated customer testimonial template and a hands-on guide on creating one using Trust.
Before that, apart from winning more customers, what are client testimonials used for?
Why do you need to collect testimonials?
Here’s why using authentic testimonials must be a major part of your brand’s marketing strategy:
- Testimonials are from real people, and your website visitors or prospective customers read them to learn about your product or service. Text and video testimonials allow visitors to relate to your current customers and form an instant connection with your brand.
- They build brand credibility. We’ve all been scammed due to fake product reviews, but when you use testimonials with pictures of real people, you portray your brand as trustworthy and reliable.
- They enable top-quality lead generation. Displaying an eye-catching testimonial page on your website or social media channels garner attention and can convert readers into long-term customers.
- Video testimonials in marketing are incredible sales weapons as they are more engaging and showcase your customers talking about their experiences with your brand.
Who to ask for effective testimonials
The secret behind high-quality testimonials is not entirely the content but who they are coming from. Here’s how you can find the perfect customer base:
1. Ask your best customers
You may be wondering how to identify the ‘best’ customers. Below are some ways to group them:
- Find customers who’ve repeatedly purchased or consulted with your business. They are your most loyal customers, aka fans.
- Search and sort high-spending customers. You can track metrics such as average high order value to find customers who spend the most.
- Look for long-term customers. This is a no-brainer, as long-term customers would be more than glad to submit a great testimonial.
- Look for customers who’ve referred their family or friends. You can find this group if you have a referral code that a group of customers previously used.
- Explore your brand’s Google reviews and reach out to users who’ve submitted a 5 or 4-star rating.
Sorting your customers based on these segments is a sure-shot method to fetch effective testimonial videos or reviews.
2. Reconnect with ‘highly-satisfied’ customers
Maybe you’ve already sent a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey or plan to send one. Either way, NPS lets you identify highly satisfied customers based on their rating for your business or products on a scale of 1 to 10.
If you’ve recently sent an NPS survey, sort out customers who’ve rated 8 or more, and ask them if they’d like to submit a testimonial video or quote. You could always send a new NPS survey to your new customers.
Since satisfied customers are most likely to submit the best testimonials, this method is fool-proof.
Testimonials: The essential elements + 3 testimonial templates to use
A winning customer testimonial template must have the following vital elements:
- The customer name and headshot to bring more authenticity into the testimonial page.
- The customer’s credentials and a link to their social media profiles. This way, your readers can be confident that your testimonials are from real, credible sources.
- Testimonial templates must be properly structured and formatted to ensure clarity.
- All the right questions your potential customers would like to learn the answers to. For instance, why did the customer choose your business? How did your product or service help them? How has their overall experience been working with your brand? Offer a clear benefit to convert more leads.
Bonus: Use engaging video testimonials to make your testimonial templates stand out from your competitors’ testimonials and create an emotional connection using solid social proof.
Here are three top-notch testimonial examples that you can use to ensure you master these elements:
Text testimonial template
Video testimonial template
Product testimonial template
Are you wondering how to create a testimonial with zero design or coding skills?
Trust can help!
Let’s get started.
How to build a testimonial template with Trust
Step 1. Log in to Trust (or sign up if you are new)
Trust has a 14-day free trial and does not require your credit card details.
Sign up here!
Step 2: Request a testimonial using an online survey form
Once you’re in, navigate to the Trust dashboard.
It will give you the option to add testimonials and create custom testimonial request forms.
Next, on your Trust dashboard, navigate to Forms > Add New to create a new submission form.
Trust’s testimonial request form helps you create custom guidelines, request consent, create personalized welcome messages for your customers, and more.
Choose one of the 3 forms: Standard, Interactive or Smart.
All forms are similar in terms of the information they collect. However, they slightly differ in their features and appearance once published.
Effective testimonials must have all the essential information leads need. So, here are some details your testimonial request form must include:
- General details. To add these, go to the General tab, fill in your form name, and add custom colors.
- The testimonial type. To add this, go to the Testimonial tab and select the testimonial type you intend to collect. You can choose text or video testimonials, or both.
- If you collect text testimonials, enable the AI testimonial generator to make it super easy for your customers to write testimonial texts.
- A welcome message and a touch of personalization. To add this, go to the Welcome tab to add a welcome message for your customer.
- Custom guidelines that make it easier for your customers to submit a great testimonial. To add these, go to the Guidelines tab and enter your guidelines.
- Social media channels. To add this, go to social media and request social media handles.
Once you have set up your form, Trust will give your customers the option to record a video, type a written testimonial, upload a video, or import an existing testimonial video from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Vimeo.
You’re all set, and it’s time to share your testimonial request forms.
Step 3. Share your request forms
Trust makes it super easy for you to share and collect a video testimonial or text review at the click of a button.
You can share your created forms in two ways: using a custom URL or publishing it on your website – here’s how that looks:
To access the form link, navigate to Forms > Activity. Then, click on the “Copy form URL to clipboard” icon.
Once you’ve done this, you can simply copy and paste the URL in emails or on personal chats and request that your customers submit an awesome testimonial.
And the best part about this is that your customers do not have to install or log in to the Trust app to submit their responses.
To create a dedicated snippet on your website or landing page to collect customer testimonials, navigate to Forms > Activity. Then, click on the “Add to website” icon.
You instantly get a pop-up message with a code snippet and options to add your testimonial request “inline” or as a “pop-up notification.”
Click on “Copy to Clipboard” and paste it into your website builder app (such as Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, etc.).
As soon as a customer submits their text/video testimonial, Trust sends you an email notification so that you can quickly log in to your Trust dashboard and preview their response.
Step 4: Curate and publish your testimonials
You can find the list of submitted testimonials – unpublished and published – on your Trust dashboard. To access them, click Testimonials.
Here, you can preview each of them and edit the testimonial names for easier identification for you and your team.
And next, it’s finally time to publish your testimonial.
Under Actions, click on the publish icon.
You can preview or edit the testimonial before you hit publish to ensure the structure is as expected.
It’s that simple. You can then use these testimonials on your social media posts, add them to your landing pages, share them in case studies, and more.
Where can you add customer testimonials?
Placing testimonials are as important as curating them. You must bring them into the spotlight so your target audience can instantly connect and resonate with your published testimonials.
Here are the best places to add your customer testimonials:
Testimonial page
Most brands have a dedicated website page for video testimonials, customer quotes, customer success stories, and case studies.
Such pages have a notable advantage with lead generation as they share real life examples of customer success stories and offer personal recommendations.
Home page
Prospects land on your home page 8 out of 10 times to understand your offering. Therefore, adding testimonials to your home page copy is a great way to build an emotional connection with potential customers.
You can take your product testimonial up a notch with video content and use your customer voices to highlight your product features and benefits.
Social media
In this digital age, social media is a major deciding factor, especially for younger audiences. To attract their attention, you can leverage your social media accounts and share testimonials from your happy customers as posts or stories.
Product or service pages
If you’re a business selling products or services directly on the website, adding testimonials lets you highlight your offerings better.
Product testimonials with images add solid social proof to your claims.
Testimonial template best practices
What makes a testimonial template stand out and create a lasting impression on the reader? We’ve rounded up some best practices you can follow:
1. Use website elements
Website elements such as widgets, pop-up notifications, and badges to capture a reader’s attention. You can use Trust’s library of widgets, badges, pop-ups, and rich snippets to create custom testimonial templates and post them on your website.
2. Add customer videos
Videos are more enticing than traditional text testimonials. Use them to capture a great customer story.
3. Include customer headshots.
For text testimonial templates, it’s best to include a customer’s headshot to add more authenticity to the review.
4. Link to customer profiles
Make your testimonials fool-proof by linking back to their social media profiles, such as LinkedIn.
5. Ensure your customer highlights a benefit of your product.
Good video testimonials talk about your product or service, but great video testimonials also talk about the customer’s experience and benefits of using your product/service.
6. Tell a story
Ensure your testimonial templates explain how your product changed the lives of your customers. Leads want to know how things were for current customers before and after using your product.
Create demand by collecting testimonials from happy customers
Text and video testimonials speak for themselves. Use them as powerful marketing tools and convert potential customers with less resistance.
When using testimonials, it’s important to structure and display them effectively to get the highest ROI. So, let Trust help you on your testimonial journey from start to finish.
Trust is easy, simple, and takes less time than making yourself a cup of coffee. Try Trust’s 14-day free trial today!
