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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
For a deeper dive, check out our blog post on 6 Questions to Ask for Better Customer Testimonials.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s all there is to it! Once you're video is created you can download it and use it however you'd like.
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.
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:
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.
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!
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