Posted by A few years back, most brands found no interest in using customer testimonials for lead generation or driving conversions, thinking of them as a few nice words no one bothers reading. Things have changed rapidly, and testimonials have found their way into almost any business’s marketing strategy. With 88% of consumers trusting online reviews as much as personal recommendations, testimonials are powerful tools that serve a number of purposes, from overriding potential objections to building trust in your products or services.
But displaying reviews on your website won’t be enough since not all users will have a chance to see them there. To unlock their full potential, you should incorporate customer testimonials in your email campaigns. This way, you ensure every interested reader gets access to satisfied customers’ reviews, thus giving them the attention they deserve.
Customer testimonials in your emails are an integral part of your digital marketing strategy. It allows you to influence your recipients’ purchasing decisions and build long-lasting relationships with them. Care to learn how? Continue reading to discover the most effective ways to include customer testimonials in your email marketing.
5 ways to leverage customer testimonials in your email campaigns
By harnessing the power of customer testimonials in your emails, you could see your conversions skyrocketing. But for that to happen, you have to do it right. So, let’s dive into the best tactics to integrate testimonials with your email campaigns and the most effective customer testimonial examples to spark your inspiration.
1. Leverage personalization
The vast majority of brands invest in email personalization to reach out to specific audiences with tailored content. And customer testimonials shouldn’t be any different. To apply effective personalization, you first need to segment your recipients, which is one of the key reasons you need reputed email marketing software like MailerLite, Moosend, and other solid Mailchimp alternatives.
These email marketing platforms give you access to all the necessary tools to segment your recipients based on their demographics, behavioral data, and interests — or any other type of information you deem appropriate in order to divide them into groups. Careful research into your audience translates into more accurate customer personas, which, in its turn, will help you target the right group with the right testimonial.
Prospective customers are more likely to respond well to reviews coming from people like them, with similar needs and preferences. So, the most efficient way to leverage personalization in your customer testimonials is to highlight the success stories of individuals your recipients can relate to. The more sophisticated your use of recipient insights gets, the more effective your testimonials will be, featuring tailored content that fits each segment’s needs.
2. Invest in the power of video testimonials
Unfortunately, many consumers have grown weary of written testimonials due to the increased number of fake reviews used by brands. So, there’s no better way to override their hesitations than investing in the power of video to convince them. We assume your company already creates lots of educational and promotional videos. But in case you leave out video testimonials, trust us when we say you’re leaving money on the table.
Video content is easy to consume, helping users grasp concepts quickly and effortlessly. Video testimonials, in particular, are more likely to evoke emotional responses from your subscribers. Your recipients can easily relate and feel connected to the customers in your videos, as well as get inspired by their success stories. This enhances their trust in your products or services, removing doubts and increasing engagement.
Start by asking satisfied customers to send you a video testimonial where they provide their honest feedback regarding their experience using your product or service. You can even perform a few tweaks to the videos shared so that they reflect your brand’s personality — as long as you don’t change the point made by your customers.
Danner sets an excellent example of leveraging a customer’s review to highlight the value of its products and how they help consumers overcome daily challenges. Rachael’s story adds a human touch to the email, and the brand takes advantage of it to display product recommendations and urge recipients to purchase.
3. Choose Short and Concise Testimonials
As mentioned above, you should take customer testimonials as they come. Successful testimonials are usually brief, specific, and direct. Recipients won’t bother reading endless product reviews. So, make sure you choose compelling reviews that communicate their message clearly and quickly. Also, use testimonials that provide specific details about your products or services to help readers understand what benefits to expect from their use.
However, it’s not as if you can’t use customer testimonials as an inspiration to get your creative juices flowing. What you need from your audience is concise reviews of your product or service. Then, it’s your job to fit their reviews to your specific email marketing objective and use them in a creative way to spice things up and grab your recipients’ attention.
Surreal’s email takes its customer testimonial email to the next level. Not only did they include brief and to-the-point reviews that prove consumers love the brand’s cereals, but they also employed humor and witty copywriting to further advertise the product’s taste. No better way to grab a reader’s attention than proving wrong a malicious 5-star review, right?
4. Include a complete customer success story
We talked about satisfied customers praising your products in short reviews. But you shouldn’t limit yourself to this type of review. Sometimes sharing a complete customer success story is what it takes to improve your sales conversion rate. People love stories, and letting customers narrate their entire experience is motivation enough for subscribers to follow their example.
What’s great about customer success stories is that they feel personal and evoke emotional responses while enabling you to show tangible results. If you can include images or, better yet, ask for a video testimonial, you increase the chances of your recipients taking action on the email message.
So, get your clients to talk about how your products or services impacted their everyday lives and solved their pain points. We understand that doing so isn’t as easy as it sounds. To convince them to participate, consider throwing in some type of incentive. We don’t mean bribing them to say what you want them to; remember, you need them to create authentic stories and use their own words. But offering a chance to watch a webinar for free or a small discount on their next order won’t do any harm and will make them feel appreciated.
Typeform created a dedicated email to share several customer success stories that demonstrate how the company’s clients overcame challenges like the pandemic. But even more importantly, they urge readers to discover more stories, thus getting them to notice their blog.
5. Make testimonials serve your email objective
Customer testimonials are much more than collecting flattering words about your company and users checking them out. If they don’t serve the objective of each email campaign you send, they will do your business no good. Testimonials that feel irrelevant to the overall email message will only frustrate recipients and lead them to turn away.
Brands send different types of emails based on their industry, business type, and overall marketing strategy. From follow-up emails to abandoned cart emails, everything in your message should be aligned with its specific objective. Therefore, you have to make sure the customer testimonials you choose to feature in each campaign fit that objective and guide users toward the action you want them to take.
Let’s take this abandoned cart email by Adidas as an example. The brand leverages the occasion to display customer reviews about the product left behind to urge the user to go ahead and complete the purchase. It doesn’t get more personalized and to the point than that, does it?
Final Words
Customer testimonials used in email marketing help brands build customer loyalty and motivate prospective customers to take action based on each email’s objective. Whether in written or video form, real-life experiences from satisfied clients enhance your brand’s credibility while garnering increased conversions.
If you already have customer reviews at your disposal, all you need to do is pick the most compelling ones and match them with the right recipient segment. Then, integrate them into your emails in a creative and effective way. Hopefully, the best tactics and examples shared in this article will get you inspired enough to create the most impactful customer testimonials!