Customer Testimonials: Examples, Ideas, Tips, and More
93% of consumers say that they look to customer testimonials when deciding whether or not to make a purchase. Hearing what real customers have to say about a product or brand helps drive trust—and business results.
In this guide, we’ve compiled everything you need to get the most out of customer testimonials for your business. We’ll share customer testimonial examples, customer testimonial templates, and tips for managing customer reviews. Plus, we’ll show you how easy it is to create your own customer testimonial video with your existing online reviews.
To hop to a specific section of the guide, click on the links below:
- Why customer testimonials?
- How to find positive customer reviews
- Questions to ask for customer testimonials
- Customer testimonial examples
- Customer testimonial templates
- How to make a customer testimonial using online reviews
- Tips for getting more positive customer reviews
Why customer testimonials?
Customer testimonials are so important and can help your business by leaps and bounds. Why? Because they foster trust.
Trust is so important in today’s day and age. With millions of businesses running targeted advertising campaigns, lots of the products you see likely come from brands you’ve never heard of. So how do you know if you can trust them? If you’re like the majority of consumers, you see what other consumers like yourself have to say.
92% of customers say they trust peer recommendations, according to Search Engine World. Fostering and sharing great customer reviews can help you gain the trust of potential new customers.
How to find positive customer reviews
If you’re interested in sharing customer testimonials, the first thing you’ll need to do is find positive customer reviews or happy customers to share. In this section, we'll tell you where you can look to find your reviews. We've also put together a handy downloadable worksheet that you can use to compile some of your best reviews.
Search online review sites
The first place to look is online review sites. Are people reviewing your business on Yelp? Google? Facebook? Foursquare? If so, peruse through and take screenshots of some of your best reviews. Keep the screenshots in a folder on your desktop for easy access, or add the review text into a doc.
Look on social media
The next stop? Social media! Take a look at your different social channels—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or wherever you post regularly.
Have you received direct messages from customers sharing their positive experience with your business? Have any happy customers commented on your posts? Take screenshots or pull examples of these rave reviews.
You can also search social networks for your brand name to see whether people are writing about you without tagging you. Twitter is a great place for searching for mentions of your business name.
Tap loyal customers
Think about your previous interactions with customers. Are there any names that stand out? Customers you’ve gotten to know on a personal level because they’re so engaged with you and your brand?
Whether you’ve communicated with them over email or spoken to them in person, they could be great candidates for a testimonial video. You could ask them to share a text review that you can use in a testimonial video. Or, you could ask them to shoot a short video clip of themselves talking about why they love your business, or even invite them to come for an in-person interview.
We’ll take a look at some questions you can use to elicit stellar reviews in the next section.
Questions to ask for customer testimonials
If you’ve invited a loyal customer to provide a testimonial for your business, questions can help lead them down the right path. These questions are designed to help you get the answers you’ll need to create a positive testimonial video:
- Who are you and what do you do? Ideally, potential customers will be able to see themselves in this person.
- How long have you been using our product or service? The longer the person has been working with you, the more credible your testimonial will be.
- What problem were you looking to solve? This will also help potential customers relate.
- How has our product or service helped you solve the problem? This gives the customer an opportunity to talk about just how useful your product or service is.
- Why would you recommend us? Anything that wasn’t mentioned in the previous questions will come through when you ask this more general question.
For a deeper dive, check out our blog post on 6 Questions to Ask for Better Customer Testimonials.
Customer testimonial examples
Now that we’ve taken a look at how to find great reviews and loyal customers for your testimonials, let’s take a look at some video examples. These customer testimonial examples showcase a few types of customer testimonial videos that you can make.
Individual customer testimonial video
The first type of customer testimonial video is the one that features an individual customer. These videos often feature interview-style testimonials in which customers respond to questions like the ones we shared in the previous section.
Multiple customer testimonial video
The second type of customer testimonial video is one that showcases many happy customers. Create a montage of a collection of people saying great things about your business for a burst of social proof.
You can simply ask customers to send you a selfie video. Then, cut the highlights together. It doesn’t have to be high quality to be effective. Check out this example for inspiration.
Collection of online reviews
For the last type of customer testimonial video, you don’t need to have any customers on camera. This type is simply a compilation of your best reviews and it’s the easiest to create. Simply pair text reviews with images of yourself or your product or service, as in the example below, which also happens to be a customizable template.
And speaking of templates, that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next section! After that, we’ll share a quick rundown of how to use a template to quickly create a customer testimonial using your online reviews.
Customer testimonial templates
As we mentioned above, the previous video is a customizable template. You can easily update the text with your own reviews and drag and drop to add your own photos and/or video clips. You can also change the colors and font and add your logo so the video matches your brand.
The Agent Testimonial template is just one of several customer testimonial templates available in Animoto. Click through to start using any of the templates below.
Product Testimonial template
The Product Testimonial template can also be easily customized. Simply copy-paste three of your favorite reviews and pair them with images of yourself, your product, or your service. This template is square, making it great for sharing in the feed on Instagram or Facebook.
Before & After Testimonial template
Sometimes seeing is believing. If your product produces dramatic results, you can show them off using our Before & After Testimonial template. This template was co-designed with Amazon.
One-word Review template
This template is similar to the Product Testimonial template, but designed for short and sweet reviews. This one only uses a single image, making it incredibly quick and easy to create.
How to make a customer testimonial using online reviews
Now that we’ve shared our customer testimonial templates, we’ll show you how to actually dive in and make your first customer testimonial video. We’ll be using the Product Testimonial template we shared earlier in our guide.
Here’s what you’ll need:
- 3 text reviews from happy customers
- 5 images of yourself, your product, or your service - If you don’t have assets, you choose our stock library from Getty Images
- Your logo - If you don’t have one, you can replace with text stating your company name
How to create your testimonial video
Once you’ve gathered your reviews and imagery, you’re ready to get started. If you don’t already have an Animoto account, sign up for free. Then you’re ready to get started.
- Step 1: Log in and select the Product Testimonial template or another one of our testimonial video templates.
- Step 2: Click to update the template text. Change the text to feature the 3 text reviews that you selected to include in your video. Include a quote plus the name of the customer.
- Step 3: Add a call to action and your own website address.
- Step 4: Drag and drop your own images to replace the images in the template. If you don’t have your own images, search our stock library for terms related to your business.
- Step 5: Drag and drop your logo file to add it to the end of your video. If you don’t want to include your logo, simply delete that block from your project.
That’s all there is to it! Once you're video is created you can download it and use it however you'd like.
Tips for getting positive reviews
We thought we’d close out our guide with a few general tips and best practices for customer reviews. There are a few things you can do to get more positive reviews—and decrease your number of negative reviews.
Tip #1: Provide excellent service
This tip may seem obvious, but the best way to garner positive reviews is through providing exceptional service. Going above and beyond is what will make you stand out to the point that a person will decide to give you a positive review. Here are just a few things you can do:
- Ensure that the quality of your products matches what’s displayed on your website.
- Respond quickly to customer inquiries—especially questions related to billing or personal data.
- Be friendly. Avoid using flippant language or making people feel like their questions are a nuisance.
- Deliver on orders quickly and professionally.
- Use bonuses, gifts, or giveaways to surprise and delight customers.
- Thank customers for their business. To go the extra mile, send a handwritten note!
Tip #2: Just ask!
If you don’t ask for reviews, many people won’t think to leave one—unless, that is, they’ve had a negative experience with your business. So start making it a habit to ask people to leave reviews on the review platform of your choice. Let them know it would mean a lot and help your business grow, especially if you know they’ve had a positive experience.
Tip #3: Respond to negative reviews
If you receive a negative review, respond! If the review is legitimate, let them know how you’re going to make things right. This will show potential customers that you’ve got your customers’ best interests in mind. Plus, it might result in the reviewer editing their review to give you a better rating.
If the review is based on false information, respond in a friendly way that makes this clear to anyone reading the review.
What do you do to garner positive reviews from your customers? Join our private Facebook group, the Animoto Social Video Marketing Community, and let us know!