How to Get Testimonials for Your Business
Dec 29, 2020
This post is all about how YOU can get more testimonials for your business…
Why? Because a businesses best marketing is the thing stood right in front of you – your own customers. If you’re a business owner, head of marketing or just anyone looking to boost the number of testimonials then carry on reading as I talk about a few of the best ways that I’ve used and that I know deliver some amazing results.
It takes some brave people to run their own businesses in today’s risky, topsy turvy world. A big, virtual high five to everybody who is having to deal with some serious challenges in their businesses today. I hope that this post could help play even the smallest part to help you get some new customers and help you bounce back. I’m here to hopefully inspire small business owners with tips and tricks that I’ve picked up along the way, but also focusing on how tech can be used to solve those problems of yours…
And today’s problem to look at is…how to get more customer testimonials to market your business.
Why Do I Need More Testimonials?
Well, they’re Free, for one. And once you really get clever with them, you can completely automate them. They’re also the best because it’s far better to have a customer tell everyone else how good you are, than you just bigging yourself up.
So one of your first key focuses in your business should be to collect, store, and promote those testimonials across everything, your website, social media, brochures, emails, adverts, anywhere you can! If you have been in business for over a year, then I would suggest that you should have a page dedicated to testimonials on your website, and that you should be collecting one from every possible customer you can.
Over the years, this will easily provide you with hundreds of testimonials that you can use to boost your marketing and grow your business, regardless of what type, or size, or sector or service. It works for everyone. Have you ever gone to look at reviews on Amazon before buying something? [Find a really obscure / funny one]. Read the obscure comment out.
Eeesh.
So testimonials are a huge thing that you should be focusing on as one of your main marketing pillars for your business. I’m going to go through a method I’ve used to consistently boost and bring in testimonials from customers. It might be obvious to some, but often missed by so many people I speak to… and that is to ASK for them.
I know! Simple right!? Asking for testimonials is one of the quickest ways, because not many people are going to be sat there thinking “wow, this product/service is incredible, I’m going to write a testimonial for them!” Unless of course there is something really special about your business. IT Support though – in it’s nature, people contact you because things aren’t working. You get on and fix it, so they can get back on with things, not to waste more time on a survey. How many times have you been on the phone to some insurance company or your internet service provider, and then stuck around for the customer satisfaction survey after? I know I don’t..
Ask for testimonials from your customers. Heck – you can even write them for your customers if you need to. Do you think case studies are written by the customer themselves? No! Testimonials don’t have to be any different. In the early days of running my own business, I would personally email customers who I know are too busy to respond, with something like; “Would you mind leaving us a recommendation? It only needs to be a couple of lines – in fact, I’ve written something below which I think would fit nicely – let me know if you’re happy to use that, otherwise if you have a moment to write something down in your own words?”
9/10 They would just reply back with – Yep that looks great to me. And there are many ways of asking for them too. A personalised email or a phone call is just fine, but these are difficult to scale as your business grows. So what you should look to do is automate collecting your testimonials.
From something as simple as adding those “How are we doing?” smiley faces to the bottom of your emails … to using tools like Zapier, or Microsoft Power Automate, where you can set up a whole flow of “If this happens then do this”….
- If customer receives order then send an email to ask how they got on.
- If customer support ticket gets closed then ask them how we did.
And just a quick note here, from my experience with a decades worth of testing various formats of asking people to leave feedback, writing “thank you, if you’d like to leave us a recommendation then click here” or “Please click this link to complete our satisfaction survey” Does Not Work.
This is a surefire way to make sure you get no testimonials or feedback from your customers. The best format I found, was using something like Customer Thermometer, (Use code pmatheson20 for 20% off first 3 months) where you can use those 4 Smiley Faces and embed them in emails. Your customers only need to click once, and you have feedback. Once they’ve clicked, they can opt to leave a personal comment, but they’re not forced to.
And that’s it. There’s no 10 question survey, no form to complete – just one click. Changing testimonials to this format took me from getting 1 to 2 pieces of feedback a year, to at least that every single day of the year.
Been to IKEA recently?! Well, probably not right now… but they even have the 4 smiley faces as physical buttons laid out around the store to stay on top of their feedback. The only last thing I have to add here, is to read a book called ‘The Ultimate Question 2.0’. It teaches you all about the one, single question that you should be asking all of your customers, and how to use that to dramatically improve your business.
For those already accustomed to Net Promoter Scoring or NPS – it’s all about that.
Where and How to Place Your Testimonials
Don’t forget that you can also use these tools to collect staff feedback, here’s a video I’ve made previously about collecting Staff Feedback.
Once you have a workflow in place to automatically collect feedback from as many customers as possible, then there is just 1 thing left to do. And that is to Publicly display them. On the ‘Testimonials’ page on your website, in your marketing brochures, newsletters and on your social media channels – you might even want to get some graphics made up with quotes from those testimonials and use something like Testimonial Tuesday or Feedback Friday to promote them…
My one top tip here, with social media marketing, is to use something like Meet Edgar to not just schedule your posts, but to completely automate and rotate them indefinitely. Have you ever come across those businesses where they would have huge gaps in their social media presence? That was me when I first started. Monday morning I would spend 2 hours loading up a weeks worth of social media posts into whatever scheduling app I was using at the time… and then a week later I’d do the same.
Which was great! Until I had a holiday. Or got busy. Or sick. Or ran out of things to post. That was until I came across Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar
For about $10 per month, Meet Edgar will not just schedule your social media posts across the likes of Facebook, Linked In and Twitter, but it also categorises everything. You create a category for testimonials, and every so often, you upload a bunch of your latest testimonials. Meet Edgar then posts out a Testimonial however often you want to.
The magic here is that when you are busy, or sick, or on holiday – Meet Edgar will automatically re-use your testimonials, and keep posting them, indefinitely! May your social media channels be silent no more! And even more awesomeness – is that Meet Edgar also links into services like Zapier. So your whole workflow can be when customer receives product or closes their support ticket, ask them to click on a smiley face.
Then that leads on to: If customer clicks on smiley face, and leaves a comment – then send this through to Meet Edgar as a Testimonial, ready for posting. Errr – Quick note here again… Don’t ever automatically publish something that you have no control over. It may sound obvious, but if your customer leaves a comment, maybe they use a swear word, or leave a “It was great, but it would be even better if you could have ….” – which you’d rather not have show up on your social media accounts! So add a task in once a week or so to check over any new or draft testimonials to tidy them up, format, spelling – whatever they need before publishing.
Now, Meet Edgar is normally around $20 per month, but before posting this I checked and discovered that if I sign up with them today (because I no longer have an account as that went with the business) and pay the full price, then I can offer everyone else the same service for only $10 per month, so a $10 discount every month that doesn’t expire. Here’s the link for Meet Edgar.
Meet Edgar is great – you can pull in news feeds from other websites if you want to share current news. Hook it into an RSS feed from your own website to easily share your own blog posts or articles.
Negative Feedback
One of the greatest things you can receive, is negative feedback. Yes I said that right, and I’ll say it again…
One of the greatest things you can receive, is negative feedback. Why would I talk all sorts of crazy? Because it gives you something to action, something to do, some ideas on how to improve on what might already be an awesome product or service. I mean, receiving positive feedback all the time will feel great and all, and is great for sharing, but it won’t help you improve things like a nice piece of constructive feedback.
My rules of thumb for ANY negative feedback, regardless of what it is for.
#1 – Call them back immediately… and I mean as soon as physically possible. Understand why they left the feedback, and get to the bottom of the issue. Make sure you are 100% in terms of your understanding on what’s happened. Of course, apologise and try to put things right, of course you should do that.
#2 Make sure you do something about it not just for NOW, not just to fix this one persons issue – but to make sure that this particular issue doesn’t happen ever again.
#3 Once that thing… that system or process has been put in place to prevent it happening again, then let your customer know what you have done, to communicate the fact that you’ve taken their feedback on board, and have changed your business because of it.
Sometimes that action alone can result in swinging what could be a bad experience of your business, into a huge positive. A customer who was never going to buy from you again might think – actually, they do care, I’m going to buy from them again – heck they might even leave you a testimonial!
Share Feedback
Your feedback should be shared with your staff. They need to know that they’re doing a good job, and if they’re not doing a good job then take some time to talk to them – perhaps get any facts straight, because it might just be a grumpy customer than an actual problem somewhere… but it also gives your staff the chance to realise that something’s gone wrong somewhere.
You can automate this too, by sharing that feedback through something like Microsoft Teams, or Slack – and without boring you with the technical details, I wrote an article earlier this year about how to set all of that up which you can find here.
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My name is Pete and from 2011, I started and grew an IT Support and Services Company from £0 to over £1m in turnover before selling the business in 2020. New video’s on our channel every week! I upload vlogs, tech reviews, how-to / behind the scenes technology videos.
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Disclosures: All opinions are my own. Some links in the descriptions are affiliate links that if you click on, I’ll receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
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