One of the best and most reliable ways to sell your products is to amplify what your happy customers think with reviews or testimonials. And it is completely free.
But why do you need customer reviews, you ask? Well, have you ever tried telling people how good you think your services and products are? If you have, you probably found out that a self-review is not worth the paper it is written on.
Effective testimonials help you sell because they tell the world that your product is worth buying.
However, if you are using testimonials to market your business, they have to compete in the market. There will be reviews from many other similar services and products. For this reason a testimonial should be written to explain why your skills, rather than those of your competitors, are worth buying.
It is unfair to give this writing task to your customers.
Here are my top three tips that will help you collect effective customer testimonials that really sell your business:
Tip #1: A review should showcase a great result
The best testimonials tell this highly effective story: I got this service, and it helped me achieve this goal for my business.
Below you can see two examples from my testimonials. You can see that my customers made applications that were successful. And, in their own words, the help I gave them played a big part in that success. What a wonderful outcome!
These reviews sell my services very effectively:
“Anastasia has helped me tremendously by proofreading my application to a Masters programme, which was successful.“
M., happy Masters student
“Anastasia created an important video to support an application for a funding bid to Lloyds Bank. Without the amazing video editing she pulled together, we would not have been successful.“
Cheryl, CEO
London Plus Credit Union
Tip #2: A review should be focused
If you work on a long-term project you will be providing many great services to your customer. Instead of trying to fit ten reasons why your services are good in one sentence, just use one.
Pick one of the things you did great and ask your customer to tell you why it was valuable to them.
For example, look at this LinkedIn testimonial. This is from someone that knows me quite well and has worked with me for years. They probably have loads of reasons why they think I would be a great employee. But I already had similar testimonials from other people on LinkedIn.
I did not want my customer to waste their time writing a testimonial that would not be an effective addition to my profile.
That is why I asked them to speak about a successful internal campaign I organised, specifically to show my professional interest around mental health and wellbeing in the office.
This review focuses on promoting me as an employee with an interest in mental health and wellbeing in the office:
Anastasia led and delivered many great projects. One I particularly enjoyed working on with her was when she organised a week of activities to mark mental health awareness week. Anastasia showed fantastic project management skills. She drew in people from around the business to build a varied program of activities, including workshops, training sessions and digital content. She maximised engagement across the business, increasing participation levels from previous events.
Tip #3: A review should be human
When you are helping your customers write a testimonial, make sure you do not put words in their mouth.
The point of the testimonial is to be a genuine review from a happy customer.
Pushing someone too much to say certain things will make the testimonial sound fake and will probably not feel so nice for your customer, either.
I usually give a few options to my clients to help them write a review:
“… You could think about how my consultation helped you redesign your website’s homepage, or how it helped you feel more confident about writing blogs and improving the SEO for your website.”
This way, my customer has a framework to help them write a great review, that will ultimately help me sell more of my services.
These are my top three tips for writing reviews that really sell your business.
What do you think? How do you collect feedback from your customers?
Are there areas of your business that you would like to develop? Perhaps you want to grow your Instagram following, or sell more products on your website.
There are many ways we could work together to get things started. 💪
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