One of the best sales tools is the positive experience of other people. Testimonials and referrals can help establish trust and credibility more than business marketing on its own. According to Neilsen, in 2012, more than 70% of people trust reviews and recommendations from strangers, especially with the adoption of social media marketing and an influencer-based economy.

This reinforces the importance of curating reviews on your website, social media channels, and search results. Reviews matter now more than ever.

When I am considering buying a product or service, I scour the web for reviews and comments to help decide if I will jump in and make a purchase. Not surprisingly, I’m not the only one that does this. Trust is hard to establish, especially if you have never met the person or interacted with the business selling the product or service. But learning from others who were brave enough to jump in headfirst and had a great experience really helps!

That’s why getting testimonials or reviews are critical to your business's growth and success. In this article, we’ll talk about ways to incorporate testimonials into your website and digital marketing, where you should gather this data, and ways for you to get people to leave a review, which can be the hardest part.

Adding testimonials to your website is a straightforward way for visitors to learn what other customers' experiences have been like. You can add them to your homepage, have a dedicated page for testimonials, and sprinkle them throughout your website.

On your homepage

The homepage is a great place to showcase a few of your best customer testimonials. This can help visitors immediately learn about other people’s experiences. It is a good idea to use testimonials sparingly on your homepage to draw people in, but there is no need to share too many here. So select the best of the best testimonials to highlight. 

You can display the testimonials as an image or live text or a combination of both. If you make a testimonial into an image, make sure to test it on mobile devices to ensure you can still read the text when the image scales (sometimes it gets pretty small). 

It is also a good idea to couple testimonials with a call to action, such as learning what other customers have to say. This can help your website visitors dive deeper into your site where they can learn more from other customers’ experiences.

On a testimonial page

Having a testimonial page on your website can be a great way to highlight customer experiences. You can feature text, images, and video quotes from your customers paired with links to learn more. This page is a sales tool to sell your service(s) and/or product(s) with the help of some of the best comments from your best customers.

Don’t forget to have a call-to-action to encourage people to learn more by following links to product, service, investment, booking, or contact pages. There are multiple journeys you can have people take from here.

Other pages

You can also feature testimonials on other pages throughout your website. Use them sparingly to illustrate a point. Well-placed quotes from happy customers can encourage leads to take action and become a customer.

In order to showcase testimonials on your website, you’ll need to ask your customers to leave reviews. You can set up a customer feedback survey (using a PhotoBiz Form, hint hint), but it is also important to encourage people to leave reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other websites. Collecting reviews on third-party websites can help people discover you through organic search results. 

A Google My Business page is a great place to collect reviews. By setting up a Google My Business account and claiming your business, you can also respond to reviews to engage happy customers and help resolve issues with those who don’t have such nice things to say (hopefully you won’t experience too many of those). 

While it is great to curate testimonials on your website, people often look to third-party review sources to get a fuller picture. They want to see both the positive and negative reviews and choose which testimonials to read, rather than just your favorites. Nothing and no one is perfect, that’s to be expected. If and when you receive negative reviews, how you respond is also important.

Collecting reviews may be one of the most challenging things you do. You can request reviews on your website, in follow-up communications to clients, and in social media posts. The key is to make it easy for people to leave reviews and then share them to help other people learn about your business! 

People are most likely to leave a review in the moment, so when you can tell a customer is really really happy, ask them to leave a review. Make sure to send them a link to make it really easy for them to do it. 

Unfortunately, people are more apt to go in search of a place to leave a review on their own when they have an unpleasant experience compared to a good one. It's just nature, and it's how we ward off businesses we dislike and let others know of our displeasure. 

So to get those positive reviews, you’re going to have to ask for them. Here are some ways to collect reviews.

Create a form and send it to your clients

After you close a sale on a product or provide a service, send a follow-up email thanking your client for their business and include options to leave feedback or a review. The simplest way to collect feedback is through a form on your website, and we have tools and templates to help you do just that. You can make a survey-style form with multiple questions or keep it super simple and just ask for comments. It’s up to you how much information you want to collect.

Automate it

You can automate collecting feedback using the Email Automation function of our Proofing, Invoice, and the Scheduler tools. Simply set up an email series and include one that asks people to leave a review. We recommend using the general message type and including a button that links to a form to fill out. You can choose when the email is triggered, such as sending it immediately after your appointment is done after an invoice is paid, or sometime later (days, weeks, or months). How soon you’d like to ask your customer for a review is up to you.

Ask them

Lastly, you can just ask your clients in person, over chat, or a one-on-one email to share feedback you can use as a testimonial on your site. You don’t need a formal process of collection, simple asks work really well too. Just make sure you get permission to share their feedback on your website.

If you need help incorporating testimonials into your website or setting up forms to collect this data, reach out to our support team.  You can call 866.463.7620 or log into your account to live chat with us.