Let’s face the reality! Trust has become the currency of online businesses, particularly those dealing with services. When you are the owner of a business, you know the importance of online reputation. Customer testimonial and user generated content have become crucial promotional tools for any modern day business. It is true for both brick and mortar stores and online platforms. See for yourself here how scientific research backs this notion. It is demonstrated that storytelling can be used to encourage customers to leave a favorable testimonial for your website.
It is interesting to note that the line between mom and pop stores and big corporations can be easily blurred. How? Just build a cult brand followed by many and having favorable testimonials. One way to do that is to treat valuable customers as your brand’s ambassadors. In doing so, customers are likely to feel empowered and provide an honest opinion.
This is where the testimonial plugin can be used to facilitate testimonial submission process. Here we list out five great ways through which customers might feel the need to write great reviews about your company.
1) Make It Easy To Leave Reviews
Even your most happy customers might get irritated. Why? Simply because you don’t have a straightforward testimonial plugin through which customers can provide their feedback. An easy-to-use testimonial plugin can solve this. The medium can be your website and other relevant review sites, such as Yelp, Angie’s List, Google Local and LinkedIn.
Nevertheless, being a marketer you might be in a better position to know when your customers are delighted and are willing to leave a review. Here you must ensure that your team makes an effort to ask customers to leave a testimonial on general review sites such as TrustLink and TrustPilot. As more and more people hear about your brands, you can increase your chances of expanding your business. For this, here you can have a bird’s eye-view of the relevant online places where you can direct your customers to provide a testimonial, and then collect as many testimonials as you can.
Another simple way to acknowledge a customer’s buying decision would be to send a post-purchase email. This is simply to thank the individual and ask for a feedback. It is always better to facilitate a customer write a testimonial immediately after the purchase when the momentum is still high.
2) Listen To Your Customers And Leverage Negative Reviews
You do realize that making an emotional connect with your customers is a key to spreading brand awareness. However, you cannot achieve this until and unless you attend to customer queries and complaints and try to resolve them quickly. A smart testimonial widget should allow to track customer responses and leave personalized messages on various platforms. In this way, you can gain trust and make room for other customers to leave an honest feedback.
If you can pacify an upset customer with better service, the customer’s negative feedback can also provide positive returns on your marketing dollars. More importantly, if customers are made to see both positive and negative comments it can work for your brand. This is because customers are more likely to put trust in your website than in a website with synthetically created positive comments. This can also be a way to showcase the human side of your business. Once satisfied, unhappy customers can be encouraged to write a testimonial about how they found back the lost trust in your business.
Look here to check how you can enhance the efforts to understand what customers like and dislike. After this, you can promote different ways to facilitate the testimonial submission process.
3) Provide Incentives To Your Customer
It is true that the issue around customer incentives to write favorable reviews is highly debatable. However, you can always motivate customers to leave a testimonial by offering them discount coupons and surprise gifts. You should not limit yourself to providing these material benefits. It is also important to understand that adding value to the post-purchase experience of customers is a key success factor. In case you are wondering how to do this effectively, you can check out some of the relevant case studies here.
You can leverage the power of your testimonial plugin to inform customers about the scope and range of incentives in a creative fashion. Technology has also improved in a big way for marketers to boost creativity. For instance, consider the gamification strategy. This has come up as a unique way to entice casual customers to provide their honest opinion on your website or social media platforms. Once your company has accumulated financial resources through initial success, gamification can be used. Changing customer preferences and the need for advanced data analytic are the key drivers for such strategies, as shown here.
4) Showcase Your Customers’ Testimonials
Is your target audience the millennials? If yes, you might gain huge fan support if you start highlighting your most valued customers on a regular basis. Your testimonial plugin can be a unique way to let your customers know about this and encourage them to provide suggestions for improvements.
You can always ask your customers, who took the time to provide a favorable feedback if they would like to be featured on your website or social media platform. Nowadays, short videos posted on your YouTube channel have also become a fad to getting people talk about your business. See here for yourself how LG empowers its customers to talk about its home entertainment products through its YouTube Channel.
5) Develop An Internal Culture To Obtain Customer Reviews
You will always benefit if you can create an internal organization structure to motivate and influence your employees in soliciting customer testimonials at every point of interaction. Check out here what Jim Bush, American Express’s VP of World Service, has to say about giving employee freedom to interact with customers.
In a nutshell, through these valuable interactions, your employees should be able to enhance the functionality of your testimonial plugin. This can be achieved by incorporating additional features and performance tweaks. Thus, by making the process of obtaining customer reviews a part and parcel of your sales and promotion strategy, you can objectify your marketing expenditure in a better way.