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 testimonial and display it in a way that attracts attention and instills trust in the reader.

So, to help you in this quest, we’ll provide all the essential elements that make a well-articulated testimonial template and a hands-on guide on creating one using Trust. 

Before that, apart from converting leads, what are testimonials used for?

 

Why do you need genuine 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. Testimonials allow visitors to relate to your existing 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 a customer testimonial with pictures of real people, you portray your brand as trustworthy and reliable.

• They enable top-quality lead generation. Displaying eye-catching testimonials on your website or social media garners 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.

 

Testimonials: The essential elements + 3 testimonial templates to use 

A winning customer testimonial must have the following vital elements:

1. A customer headshot to bring more authenticity into the testimonial.

2. 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.

3. Proper testimonial structuring and formatting to ensure clarity.

4. All the right questions your potential leads 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? 

5. Bonus: Use engaging video testimonials to make your testimonials stand out from your competitors’ testimonials. 

Here are three top-notch testimonial templates 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.

A customer-winning testimonial 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 and 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, video or both.

• If you collect text testimonials, enable the AI testimonial generator to make is 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 handles. 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 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 testimonials 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.).

A sample testimonial request form using a URL

As soon as a customer submits their 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 pages, add them to your landing pages, share them in case studies, and more.

 

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 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 designs and post them on your website.

2.  Video testimonial templates are more enticing than traditional text testimonials. Use them to capture a great customer story. 

3. Include customer headshots. For text testimonials, it’s best to include a customer’s headshot to add more authenticity to the review.

4. Ensure your customer highlights a benefit of your product. Good testimonials talk about your product or service, but great testimonials also talk about the customer’s experience and benefits of using your product/service. 

5. Ensure your testimonials explain how your product changed the lives of your customers. Leads want to know how things were for customers before and after using your product. 

 

Create demand with winning testimonials

Video and text testimonials speak for themselves. Use them as powerful social proof weapons and convert leads 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!