The Power of Testimonials: Elevating Trust and Success in Your Online Business

Ever wonder how to instill absolute trust in your customers and soar your e-commerce business to new heights?

This episode promises to unlock that secret for you with a keen focus on customer testimonials and social proof. We dissect the myriad forms of testimonials - text, photos, videos, and audio clips, and guide you through the exciting process of acquiring them.

Learn the perfect timing to request these testimonials and how they can be a powerful tool in solidifying your customers' trust.

Access the show notes for this episode at ecommercemadeeasypodcast.com/27. 

Mentioned Resources: 

Customer Trust Series Part 2: Exploring Authenticity and Transparency in E-Commerce

This week’s episode is sponsored by our Search Engine Optimization Mini Course.  Our Free online digital course that teaches eCommerce and website owners how to level up their search engine rankings with some simple, doable steps!  Join us at www.ecommercemadeeasypodcast.com/seominicourse/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:35

I get asked a lot how do I create customer confidence and trust online? Well, let's think about it. What are the first things you do when you're shopping at a new online store? I bet you look at customer testimonials or social proof first. In this episode, we will talk all about the ins and outs of effective customer testimonial and social proof how to get them, what to do with them and how to maximize this effective way to create customer trust in your online business.

Speaker 1: 1:07

Welcome to the Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, kiri Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and the easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together.

Speaker 1: 1:40

Welcome back to this week's episode of e-commerce made easy podcast. Today, we are talking about customer trust, and we actually have a series of topics all around customer trust that we're building for you. Today is the first one in this series where we're talking all about trust via testimonials and social proof. I'll remind you later in this episode to be sure to visit our show notes at ecommercemadeeasypodcastcom forward slash 27, where we'll link to the other episodes in this series and the future as we build them. We're going to be sprinkling them throughout the next upcoming months and we won't be doing them quite straight in a row, because I feel like we just have so many things to talk about with them. I want to break it up so that you can chew on and digest each one individually and really implement it before we go into the next topic on customer trust. Okay, so let's dig right into it.

Speaker 1: 2:39

So, customer testimonials can come in many forms and I would say back in the day, it was much more common to just have a text version of a customer testimonial, where somebody will just type out a glowing review and post it on your website and that's what you would have. But in our modern day too, we need to make sure we're also getting video testimonials as well as a photo. If you were doing just a text based testimonial, it's a good idea to get a photo to go along with that testimonial of your customer too. If possible, you can also have people submitting voice clips of testimonials. So many times people record audio if they're a bit shy to do video, but they want to better express how much they appreciate your products and or services. So we want to be looking at all the different types of testimonials that you can be receiving. I think it's great to receive testimonials and just the text format, but it really packs a punch for those who are more audio learners or want to see a bit more of the customer that is telling the story. It makes it a bit more believable when you see an actual person talking on video and giving the testimonial that way too. So make sure that you also consider video testimonials for your best clients. That really will up your trust on your website.

Speaker 1: 4:10

Okay, so how do we go about getting these? So getting testimonials is just probably not going to fall in your lap, especially anymore. I feel like, you know, chin or so years ago, customers were in. People were a little less busy. I mean, we always say this, right, we get busier as the years go on but I feel like people were really, you know, shouting the praises on businesses back then and would very easily just give people testimonials without really even asking. But now it's very important that you actually ask for testimonials and don't feel bad about it. It's a completely normal, natural thing to do, because we all get busy and we may not think about it. We may not know where we can place the testimonial on your website. We might, you know, want to do a video testimonial. What you can do is always request that text based testimonial where they type it out and then, if you find a particularly good one and you can, you know, approach them and say do you mind to do this on a video and read your testimonial to the audience, or just speak it again in your own words to my audience.

Speaker 1: 5:20

I've had a lot of your best customers, whether you sell products or services, would love to do that, especially if you have a stellar customer service. So really think about this. I know this is one of the things I definitely do is look at testimonials of people or products that are new to me, and I want to get a good feeling about whether I can trust this business or not. You know there are scams out there online, so building this customer trust is super important. So when can we ask for these customer testimonials or video testimonials? Well, I would recommend doing it after purchases. If you are selling products, so physical products that are getting shipped out, you could send, have a system set up and we can help you with that if ever needed. That will automatically send them an email in, say, a week or two or however long you want to give them to use and try out your product, and it will kindly ask them how they love their product and to write a testimonial For a digital product. I would do about the same as you do for a physical good and ask for it about a couple weeks after they get the product.

Speaker 1: 6:34

For coaching services or services like that, where you're, you know, providing service and knowledge to people, you might want to do that one a little bit closer to whenever they are done with your services, or maybe even during your services with them. You want to really kind of bring it out when it's really top of mind, because something like a coaching service is not quite as tangible as, say, something that's shipped to you or a digital good like a PDF or something that you have kind of in your possession and have with you so asking for those testimonials right after a service type of transaction, you're going to want to probably do that a little bit sooner than a product based type of transaction. You could also have a system where you ask for a testimonial, say in a specific set period of time after you know you deliver the goods or services, and then if you don't get the testimonial, don't be afraid to ask again. We are all busy people and I know that I have personally myself been asked to give a testimonial.

Speaker 1: 7:48

The person who helped me learn how to do a podcasting I remember that Crystal asked me say a few months ago, say, hey, do you mind to write up some words or do a video testimonial for me? And of course I wanted to do it. But life got busy and a week later I hadn't done it yet and I knew she kind of had a deadline because she was wanting to use it and upcoming marketing material. So what did I do? When I saw that email again, I was like, oh, my goodness, I'm so sorry, crystal, I haven't gotten a chance to do this yet. I got really busy. Is it okay to still do it Now? That's being me being good on following up with her because I really appreciated the knowledge that she gave me and how she helped me shortcut my ability to start podcasting. But she could have also followed up with me a few days later, or maybe five to seven days later, because we all get busy.

Speaker 1: 8:42

So don't be afraid to follow up, especially if you know that customer has some you know love for you and would love to give you some support and write you a testimonial. So don't be afraid to follow up. I'm sure you can relate that you've been busy before you're meant to do something and time got by and you just didn't quite get there, but then you felt bad because you didn't. So don't be afraid to ask again to so follow up is definitely the key in my business. In it, even when you're asking for testimonials, don't feel like you're bugging somebody, okay.

Speaker 1: 9:16

So what do you do with the testimonials once you have them? Well, for one, you definitely want to have these on your website. Ideally, it would be wonderful if you had a place where they could submit it and then you could review it to make sure it's not spam, and then you prove it in boom, it's on your website automatically and you don't have to do much else than that. If you get a testimony that's sent to you in the email, though, or maybe it's posted on social media but you want to display it on your website, a good rule of thumb is to then screenshot it and put it up as an image, because we tend to not believe, sometimes, text that's typed by the website owner. So when you provide a screenshot of an actual email or a review on social media where it's really obvious that it came from social media and shows you know the format, the familiar format of, say, facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram or something like that, then they're going to be it's going to be a lot more believable, so make sure you're posting this on your website. Another thing that you can do is you can create social media posts out of these testimonials. Whether it's automatically posted on your website and you want to take one of those testimonials and put it on social media, you can do that. Again, I recommend screenshotting it if you can, and then making you know, kind of dressing it up if you want to put your branding with it. Screenshotting it to put that image on social media is better than copying and pasting the text and putting it on social media, because it's a lot more believable if it is a screenshot, like we just talked about right Now for video testimonials, those are really great to have on your website.

Speaker 1: 10:55

I would put them, you know, below the fold. This is generally going to be for those who are wanting to look a bit more into your products or services. Now there could be some cases where you might want a very key testimonial up above the folder, up towards the top of your page, to really catch the consumer's attention. Especially if you're selling high ticket items. I would definitely put that video testimonial up higher. But you want to make sure that you put the video testimonials in a very nice, clear way that you can have on your website. Whether you have a dedicated page for it or whether it's somewhere on your homepage or specific product or service that you're selling, you can definitely put it there. If you're doing e-commerce, you could put video testimonials towards the bottom of product pages. Especially if that's a testimonial on that specific product, you definitely want to have it on the product page that it's talking about too.

Speaker 1: 11:48

And then here's something else you can do that's kind of along the lines of testimonials is, let's say, you sell services or maybe a bundle set of products that solves a problem. So you can do client spotlights as a testimonial as well, where you're weaving in your story of how you help the client as well as weaving in some of their feedback on how you did help their client, and that's going to create a very strong social trust on your website if you can do client-based spotlights too. And that's kind of a different way to do the testimonial without being just a blaring testimonial, and it speaks to your praises of your client or customer as well as their praises to you. So it's kind of a give back as well, right there. So let's say you don't have any testimonials yet. Maybe you haven't been in business very long or you have, but you haven't been asking for testimonials.

Speaker 1: 12:50

Something else you can do is social proof, and that can help also boost your customer trust on your website and in your social media. So it's a bit different from testimonials in that it isn't necessarily user feedback but it's numbers and success stories, so you can show off the number of people that you have helped and start talking about. You know, we've helped 6,000 clients over the past 20 years, for example. I think ours is actually closer to 9,000 clients. But, for example, we can talk about the number of clients we've helped over the years. We could talk about the revenue we've helped our clients bring in and increase, and especially the increase in revenue. So we could talk about that on our websites. For social proof, you can also go to just social media stats, like the number of followers on Instagram or the number of followers on Facebook or LinkedIn, et cetera. You can also just talk about your case studies, kind of like we went back where we were talking about of client stories. You can also do case studies which are a little bit worded a bit differently and use that for social proof too. You can also talk about how your products have helped others. So it's not necessarily directly a feedback from the client, but you can express your own words, how you feel like you've helped clients, what you've done for them, what has improved in their life, what pain points have you solved, what have you made things easier, given them more time, more money, etc. So you could talk about social proof in that way by doing case studies and things like that.

Speaker 1: 14:35

All right, so let's recap this week's episode, our first in our series on customer trust. So today we talked about testimonials, why they are so important for online businesses. No matter whether you sell physical goods, digital goods or services, it is imperative to have so that you can build trust in new potential clients. We can get those testimonials via typed text from our customers. We can get them via video, via audio, a combination of those. We could also get some testimonials via social media and post them on our website.

Speaker 1: 15:14

Now we need to be making sure that we're asking for those testimonials and then, if we don't have a whole lot of testimonials that, for whatever reason whether we're newer in business haven't been asking for them, etc.

Speaker 1: 15:26

You can use social proof and talk about how you've helped people, how many you've helped, who you've helped, what the results were. You can also use your statistics on your social media, like your number of followers and the likes and the comments on posts and things like that. So those are so many ways that you can really build customer trust via testimonials and social proof. So I hope that was helpful for this week's episode of eCommerce Made Easy. Keep in mind that we are going to go more into customer trust in future episodes on our podcast, so I suggest that you subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss out on those and come back and visit eCommercemadeeasypodcastcom, forward slash 27 to look at the show notes for this episode, and there we will be linking to the future in this series of our customer trust. And that's all I have and I hope to see you again next week.