One of the most important things to have on your website as a service provider is testimonials (and not just any old testimonials — you want to have amazing ones!). So today, we’re going to discuss exactly how to get good testimonials from your clients.
Adding feedback from past and current projects to your site is a great way to convince prospective clients to book a call with you. They will see that you have successfully worked with others in the past, and that a lot of them have good things to say about you.
How to Get Good Testimonials From Your Clients
Be Strategic About When You Ask for Testimonials
When you’re figuring out how to get good testimonials from your clients, one of the key things to remember is timing.
The quality of the testimonial that you will receive from a client is going to depend a lot on when you ask them. For example, you wouldn’t want to ask after only having worked with them for one week, and you wouldn’t want to ask three months after the project is over, either.
Timing is everything!
Make sure that, when you communicate with your client, you are constantly thinking in the back of your head “is this a good opportunity for me to ask for a testimonial?”
One of my favorite ways to get a good testimonial from a client is to wait until right after I’ve done something that they really love. Once I get some great feedback from them (after we’ve worked together for a few weeks or months), it’s almost a guarantee that they will give me a really awesome testimonial.
Create a Survey for Them to Fill Out
Customer testimonials and case studies are considered the most effective content marketing tactics by 89% of B2B marketers. In fact, Neilson did a study that revealed that 92% of consumers say they trust testimonials above any other type of marketing.
So, obviously, learning how to get good testimonials from your clients should be a big priority in your business!
Setting Up Your Form
When it comes to creating the form, there are a couple of different options, but I highly recommend Typeform. They have a free version of their software that is super easy to use and looks really pretty!
Other tools you can use for this include Google Forms and SurveyMonkey.
Another benefit of using a form to collect testimonials is that it keeps a record of it for you! The responses won’t be buried in your email or get lost in the shuffle. If you move websites or need to reference them again in the future, you’ll always be able to go back and find them again.
One more helpful tip for when you create the survey is to leave the wording vague when you ask questions. This allows you to use the form for multiple kinds of clients and customers.
For example, if you perform multiple services for your clients or have different packages (i.e. graphic design, social media, etc.), you’ll want to make sure that your testimonial form is appropriate for everyone. Technically, you could just create multiple surveys, but it’s a lot easier to just make the wording vague.
Collect Other Information
When it’s time for you to ask your client for a testimonial, don’t waste the opportunity to also get some other feedback from them! If you ask for a testimonial without using a form, you won’t have the chance to ask them other questions.
Here’s a few examples of questions you might want your clients to answer:
- How did you find me?
- What was your favorite part about working together?
- What could I improve on?
- Would you be interested in learning about my referral program?
You can also use the form to collect stuff like their headshot or even a video testimonial. If you upgrade to the paid version of Typeform, you can allow them to upload files directly to their form submission.
If you don’t want to upgrade to the paid version, you can simply ask them to upload the file to Google Drive/Dropbox and then add the share link to a certain part of the form.
One final thing that you’ll definitely want to include in your testimonial is a request to use their feedback to promote your business. This is a legal thing — you just need to make sure they know you are going to use their words (or a portion of their words) as a testimonial.
You can also add an option for them to remain anonymous if they want to (but hopefully they won’t, as anonymous testimonials are nowhere near as effective).
Typeform Tips (that you can do on the free version)
Here’s a few tips on how to best utilize Typeform and its free features:
- Add a welcome screen to your survey to remind people about what form they are filling, or give them specific instructions
- Save your fonts/colors into the ThemeKit so that you can easily design future Typeforms for your business in your branding.
- Embed your Typeform into your website instead of rerouting them to the Typeform website.
(P.S. If you’re not already subscribed to my channel, you totally should go and do that!)
Share the Survey with Your Clients
One of the things I’ve learned about how to get good testimonials from clients is that you need to get them to want to share their feedback with you.
Create an Email Script for Testimonial Requests
It’s good to go about asking for testimonials in a certain way, but it doesn’t have to be hard.
When I decide that it’s time to ask one of my clients for a testimonial, I simply send them a canned response that I have set up in my Gmail. (Here’s how to set up canned responses if you don’t already have them enabled.)
So, the next time you’re ready to ask someone for a testimonial, whip up a template that you can use as a canned response later, and save it for the next time!
When creating my own template, I followed the advice from this article on testimonial requests.
Make it Easy for the Clients
Another tip for how to get a good testimonial is to make it super easy for them to give you that feedback. So, when you request a client’s testimonial, make sure that you stress that it’ll be quick and easy for them to complete.
Most of your clients are probably super busy, so you want to make sure they don’t feel inconvenienced by your request.
I’ve also found that I get more testimonials when I specifically share the URL of my Typeform survey with them, instead of just simply asking for a generic testimonial.
A lot of clients freeze up when they get asked to write a recommendation or testimonial, because they’ve never done it before or just don’t feel very confident in their writing skills. To make it easier on them, it’s important to give them some guidance when you ask for feedback.
Using a form like we talked about above allows them to feel more comfortable with writing their thoughts down, especially because you can ask them specific questions like “What has been your favorite part of the process?” That’s way easier to respond to than “hey, I need you to write me a testimonial.”
And even though they’re responding to a question and not just a generic request, you should still be able to pull their answer (or part of their answer) to stand alone as a nice statement about your services.
Make it Easy for You
To make those whole process easy for you, I suggest using a bit.ly link or a Pretty Link!
If you have the Pretty Link plugin on WordPress, it’s super easy to turn your Typeform URL into an awesome link like: www.mirandanahmias.com/leave-a-testimonial.
Or, you can simply embed the Type form onto your site, which I briefly show you how to do in the video above. I personally don’t like doing that, because often it doesn’t come out as nicely formatted as when it shows up on the native Typeform site. But if you don’t have that problem, it’s much more professional to leave it nicely embedded on your site instead.
Use the Testimonials on Your Site
After you figure out how to get good testimonials from your clients, it’s time to add them to your site!
Proper Testimonial Placement
One of the most effective ways to convince people to book a call with you, or hire you, is to have some awesome testimonials right where they can see ‘em!
So here’s your homework: make sure your testimonials aren’t just sitting in a dusty old corner of your site on a page called “testimonials” or “client love.”
It can be handy to put all of your testimonials in one place, but I don’t like this for two reasons:
- It gives the client too much work. If someone is considering hiring you and are perusing your site to check you out, you want to make booking a discovery call with you a super easy choice. Putting your super convincing testimonials right in their face makes the choice that much easier.
- If you have awesome testimonials and they’re hidden out of site, or are stowed one too many clicks away from your services page, there’s a good chance that potential clients may not actually see them. What if they don’t get that far? Shove your amazingness in their faces!
So, instead of having a dedicated page for testimonials (or in addition to), do yourself a favor and add a few of them to both your homepage and your services/work with me page. If you have individual landing pages for certain packages, put them there, too!
How to Display Your Testimonials
Once you’ve discovered how to get good testimonials, you don’t want to let all that good juju from your clients go to waste. So make sure to display them the right way!
The first rule of the game is to make sure that you include a headshot. As long as your client has indicated that they don’t want to be anonymous, always include their photo next to what they’ve said about you!
This is important because it’s adding photos of actual humans to a website page leads to much higher conversions (sometimes double the amount!) and opt-ins.
The next thing you want to do is figure out exactly how you’re going to show them off. In WordPress or Squarespace, it’s fairly simple to add a photo with some text next to it. You probably already know how to do that!
Another option would be to use a page builder like Visual Composer (that’s what I use!), Thrive Content Builder (another favorite of mine), or OptimizePress to create a fancier design.
Or you can design graphics for the text and photo, like I’ve done here.
Your final option would be to try out a plugin specifically for displaying testimonials. I’ve used this free one by Axelerant before and liked it. Another option, which looks super professional and comes with a whole bunch of different cool templates and styles, is the AP – Custom Testimonials plugin.
As you can see, there’s quite a bit of work that goes into properly asking your clients for testimonials, but it’s totally worth it, because when you do put that work in, you’re bound to get way better responses!
Those responses can go a long way to convince prospective clients to work with you, so when you’re thinking about how to get good testimonials, remember that they’re a crucial part of your marketing strategy as an online service provider.
