Build Trust Amongst Your Customers Using Testimonials Plus Testimonials Templates
In building a business, one of the key relationships that form between the business and its customers is that of trust. The customer should trust that the business is looking out for their interests and there is not an iota of questionability on the product.
But building trust is not as easy as it may seem initially. Customers are generally hesitant to put their unwavering faith in a business that does not have any credentials to back its claims. Testimonials from existing customers are a way for businesses to communicate trust to potential customers and begin to address any hesitation they might have accumulated.
In this blog, you will learn
What Are Customer Testimonials?
A customer testimonial is a review or anecdote of a consumer who has purchased, used, and experienced a product or service. This review or anecdote outlines the customer’s reactions, whether positive or negative, towards the product in the question and therefore reflects on the entire business.
Customer testimonials are often positive reviews of a company’s offerings, explaining how that product affected a customer’s life in terms of overcoming an issue they were facing. These are then available, either on a website, blog, or presentation, for any potential customer to see and analyze, and gain an understanding of the business through others’ experiences.
Customer testimonials can be of various kinds. They are most often recorded in text form, with the consumer writing an email to the company or leaving a review. Alternate ways of acquiring testimonials are through voice recordings, videos, and selective quotes. Regardless of the form, each type of testimonial helps in building trust for the company and its products.
Why Are Testimonials Important?
- Testimonials are key in proving the value of a product or offering by a company by providing the experiences of others who have also experienced the product. The subsequent testimonial acts as proof of value in terms of their experience, usually written in clear and unambiguous language.
- They provide legitimacy to a product or service to new customers who are more likely to trust a potentially unbiased reviewer than the company’s own careful and sometimes excessively flattering messaging.
- They add an element of trust to the marketing of a product. A product that has testimonials to back its claims is more trustworthy than one that doesn’t.
- Customer testimonials act as social signals for other customers to buy into a product. In a market saturated with scams, substandard products, and con artists, having testimonials can signal to other buyers the legitimacy of the product, and disprove its existence as a potential scam.
How Do You Gather Customer Testimonials?
Customer testimonials need to be genuine and believable for savvy consumers to believe them. In today’s scenario, fake testimonials are all too rampant and can be identified by those familiar with them.
In order to gather genuine customer testimonials, there are few methods organizations adopt,
Interviews
Companies often conduct interviews with their patrons to understand their experiences with the product. These interviews can happen in person or through email and other online methods. These interviews can then yield quotes and statements from a consumer that can then be used as part of a business’ testimonials.
This is often the most straightforward way to get consumer feedback for a company and legitimate testimonials for other consumers.
Surveys
Another method is to send out a standard survey to consumers of a company’s product, These questions elicit responses from consumers regarding their experience of the product, which if positive, can be used as consumer testimonials.
Interestingly, negative responses to the survey can be important in the development and modification of a product to suit every consumer’s needs.
Giveaways
This is a newer method to gain testimonials. Companies are employing tactics such as hosting giveaways for consumers that leave reviews and provide testimonials. It incentivizes consumers to share their thoughts to win a free product, and it allows companies to engage in trust-building exercises by using testimonials and giveaways to attract new customers.
Social Media
New entrepreneurs are aware of the power of social media and are willing to harness it to promote their products. Testimonials on social can work in two ways,
- Sponsorships — A company can sponsor someone influential on social media to provide a good testimonial for a product.
- PR — Sending PR packages to social media influencers with free products, hoping for a positive testimonial that potentially reaches their followers and directs new customers towards the company.
Peer Reviews
Many websites have cropped up on the internet whose sole purpose is to provide reviews of services, products, and businesses. These testimonials, or reviews, are written by ordinary people who have used a product and intend to tell others about it on a relatively neutral platform. Here, having positive reviews can make a bigger impact than having good reviews on your own website or company branding.
Where Can You Use Customer Testimonials?
Customer testimonials can be powerful tools to show you chops as a business by having not just standard PR but actual customers provide proof of competency for your company. So, using them in appropriate places where they enhance the image and confidence in your company is key to using them smartly.
Some of the places where testimonials can be used are,
Websites
Having testimonials that speak to the good experiences customers have had with your product on your website is a great way to inform other buyers who visit your website about the legitimacy of your company. It also allows customers to understand how your product helped others in their problems, and so how it can potentially help them in theirs.
Review Sites
These days, rather than relying solely on reviews available on someone’s website, people often also check other independent review sites for authentic testimonials from customers. As such, having customer testimonials be present on this third-party site can lend more authenticity to a review for your business than one featured on your business’ website.
Social Media
Customer testimonials have also found their way to social media, where they are exposed to a larger group of people. Having a positive testimonial be available through one’s social media channel simultaneously allows potential customers to verify the company’s claims from the examples of other customers, and work as a marketing tactic to reach a broader customer base.
Sales Pitches
During sales pitches and presentations, while statistical information and data are important, having qualitative testimonials from real customers helps build the case for your product. Generally, numbers are something that can be manipulated to present a rosy picture, and the audience is aware of it. So having a testimonial from a customer that does not have a vested interest in the profitability of a company can provide a better frame of reference within a sales pitch on the efficacy of any product, service, or company.
Case Study Presentations
Similarly, when presenting a case study presentation for any aspect of your company, be it revenue and profit numbers, product response, or outreach, having testimonials alongside all the data can add a human element to the information, making it all the more believable and relatable to an audience. Learn how to create a big influence on your audience with these powerful case study templates.
Business Proposal Presentations
When giving a business proposal presentation, it becomes very important to market your company as much as possible. You need to present your products and services in their best light, and providing figures and content that communicates the utility of your product/service. As in the case of the above-mentioned presentations, customer testimonials provide authenticity and legitimacy to your product as they present real-world examples of the utility and reception of that product. Check out our Business Proposal Decks. Know about the must-have business proposal templates for creating winning presentations.
SlideUpLift’s Customer Testimonials Templates
SlideUpLift has one of the largest collections of customer testimonials templates. Our users find it very useful to deploy these testimonials templates in situations where they can be baked into a presentation. Every single template is fully editable and has been created keeping the theories of storytelling and vision science in mind, making each template visually engaging and highly creative. In order to present the best of your testimonials, using these testimonials templates saves you both time and energy, and provides the perfect backdrop to any information you need to add to your presentations. All templates are MS-PowerPoint and Google Slides compatible, and every element can be customized either to fit in a pre-existing presentation, work with company colors and visual elements, or standalone as a presentation slide for customer testimonials.
Source: Client Testimonials Template by SlideUpLift
Source: Customer Testimonials Template by SlideUpLift
Source: Customer Testimonials Template by SlideUpLift
Source: Client Testimonials Template by SlideUpLift
Check out more collection of customer testimonials examples.
Conclusion
Whether it be for marketing, or customer acquisition, customer testimonials are one of the best ways to grow your consumer base by demonstrating proof of experience with the product. They tell success stories and allow new customers to come to their own conclusions about your product. People derive comfort from the confidence of other people and so Testimonials have and will continue to carry an important place in the selling and marketing efforts of any enterprise.
Now you don’t have to scour the web to find out the right templates. Download our PowerPoint Templates from within PowerPoint. See how?
About SlideUplift:
SlideUpLift is an online platform to help professionals make compelling presentations using principles of vision science and storytelling. The platform contains an online library of pre-designed presentation templates for PowerPoint Presentations & Google Slides that can be used across industries and functions.
Check out our library of free PowerPoint templates & free google slides templates, which are weekly updated to serve the presentation needs of professionals. You will find the simplicity and ease of downloading the editable template, filling it with your content, and building world-class presentations in just a few clicks.
Originally published at https://slideuplift.com on August 27, 2021.
