Countless details go into creating a successful online business.
You need a great offer, a convincing sales pitch, professional presentation…but all of that won’t matter if you can’t show that others have used your services and have come away happy.
That’s where testimonials are so valuable.
They can allow you to tell a story through the words of your best customers, showcasing your strengths and building instant credibility in the eyes of your prospects.
In fact, there are numerous benefits to testimonials that many businesses aren’t even aware of. But to get the best results, you should use a customer testimonial template to enhance your efforts and get the most out of every single happy customer.
Let’s explore why using a customer testimonial template is the right way to go below by going through some of its main benefits.
Establish Social Proof
The primary and most important function of testimonial templates is to establish credibility and serve as social proof that reassures your prospects that your company is reliable and can be trusted.
Customer testimonial templates usually use a proven framework for structuring and designing the message, so it has a much higher chance to drive your main points home and look professional and believable.
Your customers want to hear from people that are just like them, who have used your product and have come away happy with the results.
That way, instead of having to trust your word that your product works, they can look at what other people have to say, and feel much better about committing to your company as well.
What’s more, testimonials can tell your story more informally. That helps to showcase what your business is all about in a language that anyone can understand.
Have a Consistent Format
Today, there are more types of testimonials than ever before.
And to get the best results, you must make sure to use a wide range of testimonials, because different customers might prefer different types of testimonials on your site.
For instance, while some like reading testimonial quotes on a sales page, others may want the added credibility that a video testimonial can offer. Others still may prefer to go on third-party review sites where they can get a more unbiased opinion about your services.
With a customer testimonial template, you can cover all bases and ensure that your testimonials are consistent across multiple platforms and formats.
By using a testimonial app, you can tweak and adjust the templates to your own preferences and make sure that they remain consistent with your brand, your product, and how you want to be perceived in the marketplace.
Improve Testimonial Quality
Testimonials can come in all shapes and forms, and that also means that the quality can significantly vary as well.
As you can probably relate, there’s a massive difference in the effectiveness of a thorough video testimonial and a simple two-word testimonial that says something like “good company”.
When reading testimonials, people want to hear the stories of people that bought the product before them. They want to know if the product delivered on its promises, what kind of results did it help to achieve, and why it worked so well for that person specifically.
These types of testimonials allow prospective customers to imagine themselves achieving the desired result with the product as well, and can get them much more invested in the idea of buying from you.
And with the help of testimonial templates, you can set up a specific formula for how you want the testimonials to be structured, and have your best customers use that formula when sharing their own experiences with your product.
For instance, if you’re using a video testimonial, you can’t expect the person to sit down and touch on all of the essential points you want to be covered on his own.
But if you provide a basic framework in the form of questions that you want to be answered, they won’t have to worry about the structure and can just answer those questions in their own words, one by one.
By using a customer testimonial template to guide the way that your testimonials are structured, you can even emphasize different aspects of your product’s in various testimonials, which can allow you to tell the full story of your business through testimonials and avoid displaying reviews that all say basically the same thing.
Boost Your SEO Efforts
One of the less-known benefits of using a consistent and proven format in your testimonials is the effect it can have on your search engine rankings.
Google absolutely loves first-party social proof, and so if you can format your testimonials using the review schema markup code, you can eventually not only get a review rating displayed right there on the search engine results page but also gain a considerable credibility boost in the eyes of Google and see your rankings improve as a result.
What’s more, merely having the review score next to your results page will instantly make your site stand out from the rest, improving your click-through rates and giving your website an added boost of credibility in the process.
Drive Conversions
You can’t underestimate the impact that having a sound and tested testimonial template system can have on your site’s conversion rate.
Time and time again, testimonials have been proven to boost conversions in almost all cases, especially if they were informative and trustworthy opinions and didn’t look suspicious to the prospective customers.
And that makes complete sense.
For many buyers, testimonials are the thing that gets them over the hump when they’re considering taking the leap and buying a product.
For many, the understandable skepticism that needs to be present when buying something online can only be overcome with social proof elements that the buyer can believe.
Therefore, the quality and informativeness of your testimonials are, often, the deciding factors not only in how high your conversion rate can be but even in whether your product can carve out a place in the marketplace at all.
