Customer Reviews Examples That Help You Generate Leads

Customer Reviews: What Are They Even?

Customer reviews are short messages in which the customer tells their honest opinion about your product or service.

Oftentimes a review may include a start rating as well as the piece of text.

Review is a type of user generated content, and also leverages the psychological phenomenon of social proof.

Especially positive reviews are a good way to use the experience of happy customers to convince potential customers about the credibility of your brand.

Reviews are often written on third-party review sites, such as Google, Yelp, Amazon or social media.

The definition of review is a bit different from testimonial, which is an exclusively positive endorsement from a customer.

How to Respond to Reviews

It is important to manage online reputation by responding to online reviews.

Sometimes you might even get to turn unhappy customers into promoters by acknowledging their feedback.

According to BrightLocal, 89% of consumers would use a brand that responds to all of its online reviews.

You will have to be prepared to answer to both positive and negative reviews, as 

• 67% of consumers consider leaving a good review after a positive experience, and 
• 40% consider leaving a bad review after a negative experience.

Let’s go through both scenarios briefly.

Responding to Positive Customer Reviews

We have generated an extensive guide for responding to positive reviews, and here are the main points:

1. Responding to positive reviews gives you a chance for free advertising and getting testimonials
2. It makes the customer feel appreciated
3. It can increase your visibility in search engines

Read the guide for specific examples and templates!

Responding to Negative Customer Feedback

Perhaps even more important is how you handle the negative reviews.

Here are some hot tips:

You should NEVER…	You should ALWAYS…
…take negative feedback personally	…apologize
…argue with the customer	…acknowledge the issue quickly
…try to solve the whole problem in the review site (rather contact privately after initial response)	…keep the initial response short
…use faceless generic response	…personalize your response
…ignore the unhappy customer	…follow up after the resolution
…focus on your own feelings	…focus on the customer

Refer to our article with 4 negative review response examples for more information and review response templates!

Impacts of NOT Having Customer Reviews

If you do not have any customer reviews, negative or positive, are you even in business?

Customer stories from existing customers are the most trusted source for consumers when it comes to credibility of a brand.

Customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family.

• The average consumer uses approximately 14 minutes on reading reviews before making a purchase decision.
• They read on average 4-9 reviews before making their mind about a brand’s trustworthiness
• B2B buyers also read reviews: 92% of them are more likely to make purchases after reading a trusted review

The more reviews you have, the more likely people are to trust you. That is the power of social proof!

If you don’t have any reviews or customer testimonials, you are walking on thin ice.

Luckily, there is an easy way to collect more customer reviews.

Trustmary’s software lets you collect reviews, testimonials and video testimonials from your loyal and happy customers.

5 Great Customer Reviews Examples (and How to Get Them)

With Trustmary, you can import existing online reviews from G2, Capterra, Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor, and Yelp to your own website.

You can also use our testimonial forms to collect testimonials and video testimonials remotely.

Here are 5 real-life examples of great reviews and testimonials, and tips on how to gather similar customer feedback for your own website.

Example #1: Star Rating

This simple star rating review is imported from Google reviews.

The short and concise review from a happy customer can be easily embedded in places where there isn’t a lot of space: such as a CTA bar, lead generation form or lead generation popup!

How to Get Star Ratings

If you don’t have customer reviews on other sites yet, start collecting them with Trustmary’s survey forms.

Here’s a visual explanation of the review survey form logic.

This is only one example of how you could formulate your review form. You can customize the colors, add your own logo and personalize the questions.

However, I recommend you keep the survey as short and simple as possible. That way you will more likely get reviews in the first place: people don’t want to spend too much time writing reviews.

Here’s the form if you want to test it yourself:

Example #2: Detailed Review

One of the most important things that build credibility for your business is authentic customer reviews.

There is no question that this detailed customer review for a hair salon in Yelp is authentic. It even mentions specific employees and the service that was provided.

If the hair salon in question used Trustmary, they could highlight this comment on their website next to Jessica’s profile!

Example #3: Review with Constructive Feedback

Capterra is a third-party review website that asks detailed questions about the business. 

The platform asks for pros and cons by default, which means that reviews include constructive feedback.

Even though this customer review is not overwhelmingly positive, it is a great example of how you can seize the opportunity to leverage the negative feedback.

When you respond to the constructive feedback, you can show that you care about the customer and take their concerns seriously.

And let’s not forget that brands that only have positive reviews can seem a bit fishy…

Example #4: Testimonial

As we briefly discussed earlier, a testimonial is essentially a positive review.

Testimonials are asked from customers that have already expressed their satisfaction with the product or service.

Testimonials often highlight the customer experience more extensively than reviews and offer valuable insights about the buyer’s journey.

In this example, the customer writes about his most important marketing channel and tells how Trustmary has helped his business in that area. He even names specific product details.

How to Get Testimonials

One of the best ways to ask for testimonials is to include the request in an NPS survey.

This way you can target the testimonial request exclusively for happy customers, who already have indicated their willingness to recommend your services.

It happens by setting conditions for questions, thus personalizing the survey according to respondent’s previous answers.

Here’s how it works:

As you can see from the picture, if you set suitable conditions for the survey, you can collect feedback from unhappy customers at the same time.

If you end up using the NPS survey, don’t forget to utilize the full potential of NPS! It can help you track customer satisfaction in the long run as well.

Example #5: Video Testimonial

Video testimonials are the next level of social proof.

Video is highly effective, as it affects our emotions much more strongly than text.

It has a huge impact when other customers see the face of the happy existing customer, hear their voice and notice all the nonverbal cues.

And think about this: the customer is ready to give their face for your marketing purposes for free and take time to film a video. Isn’t that convincing?

Here’s a video review example from our customer Björn Freudenthal:

How to Get Video Testimonials

You might think that video testimonials are difficult to produce and take lots of time. 

That is not the case with Trustmary.

You can ask your happy customers to submit remote selfie video testimonials with a simple form.

Here’s the simplest customer review template for such a form:

Once again, you can include other questions in the form as well if needed.

If you are looking for more specific answers, feel free to modify the questions or add more detailed description for the video review.

We have compiled some great tips on how to ask for video testimonials.

Generate Leads with Customer Reviews

On top of collecting testimonials and reviews, Trustmary helps you utilize them. We offer many different testimonial widgets that you can use to display reviews on your website.

Get new customers and leads with lead generation tools that include customer reviews.

With Trustmary, you can supercharge your lead generation forms and lead generation popups with reviews and testimonials.

This has a great effect on conversion rate. Our client Körkortskolan experienced a staggering 32% increase in sales by featuring just a single video testimonial on the checkout page!

Make review collection into an active strategy for marketing and lead generation with Trustmary.

Further Reading

• How to Respond to Positive Reviews?
• 4 Negative Review Response Examples
• Customer Review vs Customer Testimonial Definitions
• The Ultimate Guide to Gathering and Using Reviews
• Review Marketing – aka How to Leverage Your Reviews

FAQ