A Marketer’s Quick Guide To Using Customer Testimonials And Feedback
What makes marketing successful?
Nowadays, customers are wary about trusting brands. Why should they trust a faceless company that promises a great product or service?
That’s where customer testimonials and feedback come in!
Testimonials and feedback help guide companies on how they should present their products and services, and what they can do to improve in future campaigns.
In this quick guide, you’ll learn of the following:
- What customer testimonials are
- How to use testimonials and feedback to tell stories
- How to segment an emailing list with testimonials and feedback
- How short product reviews are effective, AND
- How video testimonials are important
At A Glance
Testimonials, or what many would call ‘social proof,’ are effective when shared across the Internet. Customer testimonials are statements either written or filmed from a customer describing their experience of a product or service and the benefits. Testimonials can be used in email marketing, especially with welcome emails. In addition, testimonials can help entice new subscribers into trying your product or service.
With that said, you would still need to ask for feedback, in order for testimonials and feedback to work for your marketing strategy. While the asking part of marketing may seem awkward at first, it’s still important to give your consumers a voice when it comes to your products and or services. So, don’t be afraid to take the time to ask consumers for their opinions.
Telling A Story
With testimonials and feedback, you can tell a story of how your product or service can help others in the same ways as the customers giving you said testimonials and feedback. When you let your current customers tell their stories of how your product or service has helped them, other customers will see that and would more likely to try the product or service themselves.
Now, you can invite people to see or hear a customer’s story by creating an effective call-to-action (CTA) in an email newsletter. You can even add the CTA in the welcome email, so that recipients can learn more about the product or service through the perspective of other customers.
So, instead of just selling to your consumers, you’re telling them stories – success stories, in this case – through the testimonials and feedback from your current customer base.
Aside from that, your employees can also share testimonials for marketing purposes.
You can use an employee success story template, a structured format to showcase the achievements and experiences of employees within your organization. It helps highlight individual accomplishments, career growth, and contributions to the company’s success.
Customize the template per your organization’s branding guidelines. Make sure it fully supports the story your team member is telling to avoid sounding inauthentic.
Remember to respect the employee’s privacy and obtain their consent before sharing their personal story publicly.
You can also leverage emails to tell a story. Email testimonials serve as personal recommendations from happy customers. Share them through social media posts, website content, blog articles, and other promotional materials.
If you want to gather stories this way, add a call-to-action in your messages asking for feedback. You can also use surveys, follow-up emails after a purchase, or dedicated email campaigns.
Speaking of emails…
Segment An Emailing List
Segmenting an email list is another great way to use customer testimonials and feedback to your advantage. Here, you can create and send out surveys to certain recipients – preferably those currently active with your brand.
When segmenting your emailing list, you’ll need to create different categories, so that you know which survey approaches are right for your company to use. In other words, whichever survey email is successful, you can use for future email campaigns.
Ensure you have the necessary data to segment your email list effectively. This may involve collecting additional information through sign-up forms, surveys, or tracking customer behavior on your website or other touchpoints. You can establish them into groups like ‘Location-based,’ ‘New Subscribers,’ ‘Highly Engaged,’ or ‘Past Purchasers.’
Analyze your subscriber data and set subscribers based on the defined criteria. An email marketing platform or customer relationship management (CRM) system can handle that process in a few clicks.
Product Reviews
People love product reviews. However, they don’t want to have to read a long paragraph describing a product. That’s why it’s important to encourage short product reviews. Quick reviews and options are helpful in getting to the point about a product, and they feel more relatable to other people. As you can see, short reviews are compelling and human-like, rather than robotic and forced, thus increasing believability among consumers.
Videos
Nowadays, people will watch videos more than they’ll read text online. That’s why marketers are seeing the potential in using video testimonials. These types of videos offer not only product or service information, but also a human touch to the marketing. In other words, when people see that other people are using a certain product or service, they’ll be more comfortable trusting this social proof.
Conclusion
As you can see, customer testimonials and feedback are essential in your marketing endeavors. Though, too often, this tried-and-proven part of marketing is ignored by various companies. The good news is, you can break the monotony!
To recap, utilize the following when working with customer testimonials and feedback:
- Showcasing your customers’ stories
- Segmenting your emailing list
- Encouraging short product reviews, AND
- Encouraging video testimonials
By reading this quick guide, you and your marketing team will not only sell great products and or services, but you will also put a more human face to your brand. And, your customer – new and existing – will thank you for it!
We wish you the best of luck in your marketing endeavors!
