Whether you’re just starting to gather reviews from your customer base or you’re ready to start showing off testimonials on your website, it’s important to strategize the best way to present customer success stories to your audience.
Online testimonials help create social proof, the phenomenon of humans tending to copy other humans when making decision. In terms of marketing, this means that people would rather invest their time (and money) with businesses deemed useful and popular by customers.
And when it comes to the importance of customer success stories, often referred to as testimonials, the statistics don’t lie. In 2019, it was reported that 82% of people read reviews about local businesses and that the average consumer reads 10 reviews before feeling ready to trust a business.
But, if your customer success page isn’t holding your audience’s attention, then all the hard work you’ve put into gathering those reviews will be for naught. So, how can you highlight these stories in a dynamic way?
We’ve rounded up our top five tips for compelling customer success story pages, along with our favorite real-life examples. Let’s take a look:
Be Purposeful
When it comes to listing testimonials on your website, we have two big pieces of advice:
Spotlight What’s Important
If your customer testimonials go on for paragraphs, it proves they had a great user experience. But in most cases, your future customers won’t want to read that much copy.
Pick the most important points from your longer testimonials and highlight them. This way, it’s easier for potential customers to skim several customer success stories and gather more information at once.
Get Specific
Ask your customer’s permission to use relevant information, such as their name, location, company and job title. Small details like these give your reviews more credence.
If you feel comfortable, ask for a professional photo to add to their review. Not only do photos draw more attention, but they also look more authentic.
Casper lists short and sweet testimonials on their website and has also chosen to include a rating feature, the person’s location and a profile avatar for each review. Although it isn’t a true photo, a small addition like this makes the review feel more legitimate.
HubSpot uses the full name, full job title and company of this reviewer, along with a professional headshot. Seeing Leela’s picture along with her testimonial helps bring her thoughts to life and makes their testimonial page more engaging.
A bonus piece of advice here: notice how clean these layouts are? Nothing will frustrate your audience more than if your testimonials are formatted poorly. Focus on making your testimonial page easy to read.
Roll the Camera
Videos have become a staple in marketing strategies across the world and this popularity isn’t slowing down any time soon. In 2020, 92% of marketers say that video is an important part of their marketing strategy, and it’s estimated that the average person will spend 100 minutes a day watching videos by 2021.
With video being such an effective tool, it makes sense that video testimonials would be a smart route to catch someone’s attention, especially if they’re easily consumable (which means two minutes or under).
Now, we know what you’re thinking – does video fit in your budget?
Larger companies such as ChowNow may have the resources to hire a camera crew to collect interviews along with other engaging footage. And if you have the room in your budget, investing in a professional video production company is a good way to take the stress out of filming customer success stories.
But your videos don’t have to be that complicated. Notice how BigTime’s testimonials are filmed simply and only include the important stuff – their client talking about their great experience.
This style of video testimonial is something any small business can replicate with just a camera (digital cameras, computer cameras or smartphones will work!) and some good lighting!
Read more about Video B2B Marketing here
Show off Your Social Media
Sometimes your best reviews are right in your company’s social media notifications.
Recent studies have shown that nearly 54% of customers turn to social media in order to research their products. If you’re getting good press from your audience on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, it’s time to take advantage of it.
Highlighting your social media reviews allows potential customers to see unprompted feedback from your community. And as a consumer, when these voluntary testimonials are positive, that shows your product is worth their time and money.
For example, Bizzabo created a particularly beautiful testimonials page, where they literally revolve around their customers’ Twitter feedback.
Of course, putting together a design like Bizzabo’s may be a strain on a smaller business. Your social media testimonials can be just as effective in a simple, clean format like Hubble’s carousel of both testimonials and selected Instagram posts they’ve been tagged.
Plus, a more compact style like this carousel can easily add customer success stories to your pages without taking up too much additional page length.
Tell Your Story
Now, I’m sure that when it comes to marketing, you’ve heard the phrase “tell a story” plenty of times. It may seem like an old cliché, but the power of narrative prevails when it comes to presenting your company’s stories of customer success.
For example, Basecamp’s testimonial page not only plays on their outdoorsy brand identity, but it takes their audience through the journey of their past clients. This starts with a look at all the apps they used before switching to Basecamp.
Basecamp then presents feedback from both before and after their customers started using their product, showing its positive impact.
For their customer success page, ZenDesk took a different storytelling approach.
Instead of aggregating testimonials as a whole, they zeroed in on the unique needs of certain customers and specified how their services were able to help.
As you’re starting to tell your story on your customer success page, be sure to not overthink it. As long as you’re focusing on telling a meaningful narrative about your customers’ experiences, you’ll be on the right track.
Gather External Endorsements
Depending on your industry, your business likely has a listing on websites like Google Business, Yelp or TripAdvisor, and the valuable testimonials you receive there shouldn’t be left off of your website.
Adding these customer success stories from outside websites helps to further social proof on your customer success page. Businesses aren’t able to curate these responses, so when they’re overwhelmingly positive, that’s a sign to potential customers that they’ll also be happy with your business.
Both Chicago Detours and Avant chose to put testimonials from websites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Trustpilot in easily accessible places on their website. They also included a rating feature as a visual to continue to draw the user’s eye.
It’s Time to Start Building
If your business is receiving positive feedback, it’s time to get it up on your website for everyone to see! With the tips we discussed above, you’ll be able to create a compelling compilation of your best customer success stories to entice future customers.
If you could use a little help from anything to designing your customer success page to compiling customer testimonials in the first place, contact our team today!
