As a marketer, asking for a business testimonial from your customer/s is an excellent way of building on your marketing efforts and is an effective marketing tool.
After all, a good customer testimonial is like a certificate and can help attract potential customers, its a powerful video marketing tool.
It announces to the world that your product or service solved their problem and made a positive difference in their life.
Besides, customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating of 89% for content marketing.
However, the best part about customer testimonials is not in the “getting the testimonial” part, but more in the “showing it to the world” part.
Adding an effective video testimonial to your home page adds value and authenticity to your website.
It’s like the expensive Turkish rug you bought recently, and you can’t wait to unroll it on the living room floor.
As we have already mentioned showing the testimonial, let’s go a step further.
Let’s talk about video testimonials, what they are, why they’re important, and how to get them from your customers.
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What Are Video Testimonials? 📹
The simplest way to explain testimonial videos is a customer video recording their pleasant or even a life-changing experience using your product or service.
The objective of collecting video testimonials is the same — building more trust.
But, adding them in your landing pages will help you score some bonus points with your website visitors and potential customers.
As per HubSpot research study, 72% of the consumers prefer videos to text for receiving marketing information.
This means a prospective customer will pay more attention to a video testimonial than its written counterpart.
Making this assumption only by looking at a single statistical number will be an incorrect analysis.
To delve more into what makes video testimonials so important, let’s head over to the next section of this blog.
Why Are Video Testimonials Important? 📝
To understand the complete effectiveness of video testimonials, stopping only at the definition is not a very good idea.
Let’s get into the more microscopic details of video testimonials and understand how it is different from written testimonials.
More Human And Visually Appealing 💯
You must have guessed this already.
Video testimonials have a lot more visual elements to offer than written testimonials. These visual elements add up to the aesthetic of the content.
The person’s posture, tone of voice, and facial expressions together strike a personal chord with the audience, and create a foundation for a video that has maximum impact.
Compare this with a written testimonial. The letters and words do not have a lot to offer to the reader.
They don’t move, act, smile or frown to make the content more human. Instead, the onus of interpreting the message is the reader’s task.
This is hard work that brings me to the next most important point: what makes video testimonials so effective.
They're Easy To Watch And Come With A Higher Engagement Rate 🥰
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to watch a video till the end. That’s why most of us end up watching more movies than reading books every year.
The same concept applies to video testimonials too. It’s easier for your audience to watch a video than read multiple lines of text.
Moreover, testimonial videos can give you a high engagement rate of 52% if it’s less than 4 minutes in length.
This is excellent news if you’re planning to include customer testimonial videos in your email campaigns.
Your prospective clients will not only watch the video but also engage with it. This is a perfect opportunity to embed a sign-up link, demo request form, or even your YouTube channel link in the email content.
Higher Scope For Storytelling 📚
Videos help your customers to talk more about your product. They can get more personal, emotional, and descriptive about the usability of your product.
This opens up the gate for storytelling.
Instead of directly diving into how your product is good or better than other alternatives, users can start by telling more about themselves and what they do.
They can build on what challenges they were facing, and how after using your product their life got better.
This sequence of storytelling instantly connects with the audience and builds more trust.
It gives a broader picture of your product to your audience, and they can connect with your brand more deeply. In a way, your single customer testimonial is multi-dimensional now.
Improved Branding 👏🏼
People are more likely to share content with others if they like what they’re consuming.
This is even better for social videos like customer testimonials as they can generate 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
If we join the dots here, it’s as clear as day that a video testimonial can help you get more shares.
This is great for your branding because people will know more about your business from the people who have used your product and benefited from it.
Also, as your branding improves, there is a mighty chance that you start getting leads because 93% of companies have claimed to get new customers from their video content on social media.
So it’s about building an online reputation without pushing your audience, but by giving them the power to use their judgment.
You can include more powerful elements in a video than other types of media.
People Remember Video Content 📼
I bet you still remember the dialogues from your favorite movies. The best part — you don’t have to make efforts to scribble it somewhere or keep reciting it until it gets registered. It just gets auto-saved, and that’s the power of videos.
Videos have a retention rate of 95%.
If a user skims through one of the customer testimonial videos on your landing page, they will remember it for a considerable amount of time and it will affect their customer journey.
Suppose they watch a video of a boutique store owner generating higher profits after using your product.
In that case, they will remember it and talk about it with their friends who own similar businesses.
To capitalize on this strategic advantage, you can keep the videos short and use an additional resource like an infographic that they can download and share.
How To Get Video Testimonials From Your Customers 💁🏼♀️
Like any other marketing activity, approaching a customer for a video testimonial should be done tactfully. And, when it’s about testimonials, which is their thoughts and experiences, a humane approach is requisite.
There are many ways of planning your approach.
However, there are a few basic steps that you should not forget to follow.
So here’s a humble list of the most necessary techniques that can help you convince a user for a video testimonial.
Make A Shortlist 📝
The more the merrier” may sound very enticing to you, but for collecting video testimonials, it may not be an excellent idea.
Approaching every customer in your database will demand an excruciating amount of time, and it will dissipate your marketing efforts.
To avoid this, come up with a shortlist. Huddle with your team, and identify different parameters that will help you to classify your most valuable customers.
For instance, Customer Lifetime Value(CLV) can be a good criterion to identify your regular customers.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a formula. It can be as simple as a list of vintage happy customers. To conclude, find the one that fits the best for you.
Know Your Customer 👥
Before you start reaching out to your customers, take some time to understand their relationship with your product.
Find out how long they’ve been using your product, their previous interaction with your team, and what features they like using the most.
This exercise will help you make a mental picture of your users even though you have never met or interacted with them. Once you have figured this out, you will be more confident about communicating with the customer and the video will have a personal element added to it.
Personalize The Content 💌
Like many marketers, you might be tempted to use boilerplate email content to reach your customers.
DON’T DO THAT.
If you want your customers to open up, give them the faith that you have worked hard in reaching them.
Besides, your customer is not obliged to provide you with a testimonial.
They’re already paying you their hard-earned money. Go back to the notes that you have collected in the last step.
Refer to them, then plan your content. Yes, this is hard work, but the result will bear some good fruits. This is more important if you have a sizeable millennial customer base because 70% prefer personalized communication.
Plan An Incentive 🎁
A bit of incentive often works very well in marketing campaigns.
It should not be looked at as an expense or a kickback, but more like a reward.
Make it equally clear to your customer so that they’re not under the wrong impression.
Incentives encourage users to take at least a look at what you’re trying to say.
Furthermore, they will also look at it as a return for having a long relationship with your brand.
While deciding the incentive, choose something as simple as giving a gift card or a free upgrade for one month. This will keep the process agile and help with tracking the campaign performance.
Record A Video Message 💻
Recording a video message for your customer is a great way of initiating the conversation. It creates a more personal journey and is empathetic at the same time.
It’s personal because you can add so many details to it as compared to written text. Likewise, not everyone is comfortable facing a camera.
By sending a video recording you can make things easier for your customer.
- You can begin by telling them that how valuable their testimonial is for you and your team
- Follow this with what exactly are you expecting from them in the video
- What steps they can follow to get started with recording
- What are the tools they can use to record the video
This will form a perfect touch base with your patrons and reimpose that you care for them.
So in this case, there is a high probability that most of them will appreciate your reach out, and write back to you for more information.
The other positive angle of recording video is that it can be done quickly in a very cost-effective way. You don’t need a studio set-up.
A free screen recording tool can also get the job done for you in a very professional manner. If budget is a hindrance for you, you know where you should be looking.
Follow Up 👋🏽
Despite your best ambitions, your email can get ignored or stay unread for a long time. Don’t give up.
Sharing a video testimonial is probably not at the top of your customer’s priority list. But a follow-up email can improve its ranking.
Before following up, it’s always a good idea to give a little thought about how to go about it. At this stage, you should be planning on -
- How long should you wait before sending a follow-up email?
- What time should you be sending them?(Fridays and Mondays should be avoided)
- What should be a good subject line?
Once you’re done with these, try to keep the main content short. Start by giving a bit of context from the last communication.
This will set the platform and remind your user about what this is all about. If possible, record a different video message this time.
Offer them help by asking them a convenient time for talking about this arrangement.
Likewise, try different ideas to spruce up things because follow-up emails work. And, if I take the liberty of quoting a number here, it increases the chance of getting a reply by 21%.
All Set To Start Collecting Your Customer Testimonials? 👩🏼💻
Well that was a complete walkthrough on video testimonials. I hope it has given you clear insights into how you can go about collecting testimonials from your customers.
To quickly reiterate, video testimonials are not very different from the written ones.
However, the power of video makes it more appealing and engaging. It comes with a range of benefits:
- It drives traffic
- Improves branding
- Gives a boost to your conversions too
While all that is great, have a well-thought plan on how you will be approaching your customers for these testimonials. There is no straightforward way of doing this.
Taking random steps will give poor results from your campaign performance.
Start by creating a shortlist so that you’re very clear about who you are targeting. Once that is set, go deep in researching your customer behavior and personalize the content accordingly, in a way that gives the video an emotional impact.
Are you looking for a boost-up?
Add an incentive so that your customers feel rewarded for their hard work.
To make your chances of hearing back from your customers more concrete, add a quality video message to the email. This will instantly build an emotional bonding with them.
After following all the above steps, if your campaign is still lagging, plan a follow-up.
Experiment with the content and ask for an appointment if necessary. Not giving up is the way to go for collecting testimonials.
If you don’t have video testimonials right now, it’s alright. But, it’s critical for the branding of your business that you start thinking about it soon.
Bookmark this blog so that you can come back here if you feel stuck.