The Copywriting & Design Blog

In the April 12 post, we looked at a strategic approach to getting customer testimonials for your product or service (we’ll say product from here on, but the advice applies to services as well).  I thought it would help to give an example of this approach in use:

Let’s suppose your product is a car-rental service, operating exclusively in central Florida, called Sunrise Rent-a-Car.  Here’s how your brand statement might look:

For budget-conscious families and business travelers coming to central Florida, Sunrise Rent-a-Car provides higher-quality vehicles and better service than the national car-rental giants.  Sunrise makes your visit to central Florida easier and more pleasant, because we:

- deliver your rental to you at curbside, just outside of baggage claim

- add points to the airline-miles account of your choice every time you rent from us

- guarantee that every car we rent will get at least 35 mpg, saving you on fuel costs

- provide with every rental a Garmin GPS for the customer to use during his/her visit

Remember, you don’t need–and probably shouldn’t have–one testimonial that covers all these points.  The impact on your prospects will be greater if you have (on your web site or other marketing communications) a series of shorter, easier-to-read testimonials, each focusing on one or at most two of these benefits.  It’s usually much easier to get these shorter statements from your customers, because you will be asking them to “testify about” a specific benefit(s).

That doesn’t mean all your testimonials are equal in value, of course.  In the brand statement above, the words in bold type are your product’s primary benefits–the words that you want your audience to associate most strongly with your product.  For each of these benefits, your first step is to acquire either one great testimonial, or a minimum of two very good ones.

For now I’ll leave it up to you to decide what makes a testimonial great (or very good), based on your own knowledge of your industry and the players in it.  But don’t wait until you’ve got these primary-benefit testimonials before pursuing the ones that reflect your brand statement’s supporting bullets.  You need ”stars” as well as “supporting actors” in your testimonial production–because neither type can win over your prospects all by themselves.

Sure, customer testimonials are everywhere . . . but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them on your web site or in other marketing communications.  Do testimonials right and they still can help lift your product or service above your competitors.

Doing them right means doing certain things before you ever ask someone to give their opinion of your product (we’ll say product only from here on, but the advice applies equally to services). The first thing to keep in mind is that you’re going to need multiple testimonials in order to get the overall impact you need.  You don’t want your testimonials to all sound the same, so it’s best to plan out an entire set of them all at once.

Your planning should be guided by a brand statement for your product.  Make it as concise as possible–just a paragraph or two that describes who your product is intended for, the one or two primary benefits that it provides, and the ultimate desired result that it produces or helps to produce.

This brand statement should be supported by bullet points,  some of which “prove” the claims made in the statement, and others that briefly explain additional, less-important benefits of the product. Now, use this brand statement to define the focus of each testimonial you\’d like to have.  Testimonial #1 should focus on one of your product’s primary benefits, and #2 should emphasize a different primary benefit.

Additional testimonials can focus on the support points in your brand statement, but should also refer (at least briefly) to one of your primary benefits.  Focusing like this helps in two ways:

- First, it makes it much easier to ask for and receive a testimonial from your customer.  “Pat, I appreciate your business, and I was hoping you could give me a testimonial about [benefit #1] for our marketing materials” is a specific request that your customer can respond to fairly easily.  On the other hand, “Pat, could you give me a testimonial?” is too broad.  Don’t make Pat (or anyone) figure out what to focus on when crafting their testimonial.

- Second, because the focus ensures that the testimonial will be about something, it’s more likely that the testimonial will have a real impact on the reader.  It also ensures each testimonial will be different enough to be worth reading.Important: Don’t tell your customer exactly what to say.  Assume they are capable of some original thought, and let them express their thoughts in their own words.  No matter how good an original testimonial is, it almost always needs at least minor editing.

Key question, however: If your customer says, “Oh, I’m too busy . . . just write up something for me, e-mail it to me and I’ll let you know if it’s OK to use,” are you really getting a valid testimonial from that customer?