Customer Reviews Template: Ask and Showcase

The Importance of Customer Reviews

First things first: let’s refresh our memory about why customer reviews are important.

You might be surprised how many benefits there are.

1. Trust and Credibility

Reviews and testimonials are a form of social proof. 

They build trust and credibility for your brand. They show that you are a legit business.

A company that has no reviews anywhere is like a ghost. Do you even exist if you have no reviews at all?

2. Aid Purchase Decisions

Reviews help your customer make purchase decisions.

Honest opinions by other customers help the prospective customer understand your product.

Moreover, if you happen to have video reviews, you are winning. 

Seeing how the products work in real life can help the customer even more!

3. Improve Customer Experience

When the customer knows that you are a legit and trustworthy company, they can relax and feel good about the experience.

We all know that feeling when we stumble across an ad or a new online shop.

“Is this place for real? Will I get scammed? What about the quality?”

Real people’s real comments help alleviate that doubt.

4. Increase Website Conversions

Most reviews can be found on external review websites, like Google or Yelp.

However, showcasing reviews on your own website increases conversions. 

When the potential customer is on your website already, the recommendations by other customers make them convert faster.

5. More Traffic

When people share their experiences with brands online, you might get surprising results.

I just recently read about a product on a Facebook group, and it took me about 2 minutes to go from “I didn’t know stuff like this exists!” to “I need this” to “Add to cart”.

So, positive reviews on the internet can drive traffic to your ecommerce site.

That’s word-of-mouth at its finest.

6. Offer Customer Feedback

On top of more conversions and sales, customer reviews are customer feedback that offer you valuable insights.

Even though negative reviews don’t feel nice, they are super important.

Those negative reviews tell you when something isn’t working. 

You have a chance to fix it, as opposed to not knowing about a problem in the first place.

7. Help SEO

This might surprise you, but reviews do get you better results in the search engines.

Google reviews are an especially effective ranking factor for businesses.

In addition, reviews add those natural, organic keywords to your website. This helps Google to find your page.

Templates for Getting Online Reviews

Now that we know the “why” for getting reviews, let’s tackle the “how”.

Usually, getting reviews is no more complicated than just asking.

71% of consumers will leave reviews if the company provides an easy way to do so.

What is an easy way?

Provide the customer with a review form during the right moments. 

Send it via email, SMS, QR, or embed on a website if you want the feedback directly after an interaction.

Remember to make the review form brief, so that everyone who opens the survey will also complete it.

Here are a few tried and tested review forms that get you replies.

All of them are available in the Trustmary app and can be modified as much as you would like.

1. Star Review Template

With this easy template, you ask for star reviews.

They are familiar to all, and especially useful as product reviews.

Star reviews help your customers form an opinion about the product with one glance. 

Additionally, your customers can leave open feedback in which they tell the reasons for their score.

Test out the template yourself:

2. Feedback and Testimonial Template

This template offers you a great opportunity to collect measurable feedback and get testimonials.

Testimonials differ from reviews in the sense that they are, by definition, exclusively positive reviews. 

They are collected from happy customers who endorse the company.

This template starts with an NPS question that measures customer satisfaction. 

After the respondent has given their score, they are led to the next question based on the score.

Those who are not satisfied with your brand, can leave open feedback.

Satisfied customers are asked to leave their positive comment as a public testimonial. 

Permission to use it in marketing is also collected.

3. Video Review Template

Video content like video testimonials are becoming more popular by the minute.

Video testimonial is not a new invention, but this far making them has required quite a bit of effort.

Not anymore!

Trustmary lets you collect remote video testimonials with an easy to use tool.

All you have to do is use the template, formulate your ask, and let the customer record or upload a video.

How does it work?

In order to access these templates, sign up to Trustmary.

It includes a template for simple written and video testimonials.

If you want to collect feedback and make use of multiple templates, use a more advanced plan.

Once that is sorted:

• Navigate to the Forms tab
• Click on Create survey
• Choose the right template and click Create with template
• (Or, Start from scratch)
• If needed, add or edit questions and rules from the left side navigation
• Edit the theme, add your logo, update your privacy policy, and modify other settings
• After finished, click on Collect results
• Choose the method of distribution
• Follow results from the Results tab

See more thorough instructions for creating surveys.

How to Request Reviews

You have three great templates above, but they only get you responses if customers open them in the first place.

It is important to formulate an engaging and timely request.

Without one, your customers will simply ignore your review submission forms.

Style of the Message

We have compiled some message templates for this purpose, and here are the main points:

1. Highlight how little time it will take to leave a review.
2. Tell how much it means to you that you get reviews.
3. Remind them about the importance of customer reviews for new customers.
4. Be personal rather than professional.
5. Back the request with social proof: show that other people are already reviewing you.

Distribution

Choosing the right distribution channel is also important.

Email is the classic way to ask for feedback and reviews. It works, but emails are also easy to ignore and forget. Pro tip: Personalize the email subject line for best results!

SMS causes more urgency in the customer’s mind. 

However, ensure that you have permission to text your customer. Nothing is more annoying than getting unsolicited messages from brands.

QR code works well in events and physical locations. I also recently saw QR code in a TV program.

Website embed targets those moments when the customer is visiting your website. 

There’s not much that the customer knows about at that point, so prepare to get only very superficial feedback.

It can work on a check-out page, though. The customer can give their initial opinions about the experience.

Timing

Timing is everything.

If you ask for feedback too early, the customer does not have anything to say.

If you ask it too late, the customer will not remember.

In both cases, you get nothing.

By designing the right moments and setting up automations, you can maximize the results while saving time yourself.

Showcase Customer Feedback with Stylish Widgets

Once you have collected glowing reviews from happy customers, it’s time to put them into good use.

Trustmary offers lots of testimonial widgets that help you raise your website conversion rate and engage visitors.

All the widgets can be personalized to fit your brand. Change the fonts, colors, text, and hand-pick the best reviews.

Take a look at all Trustmary’s widgets in a separate post. 

Here, we take a look at three of the most popular widgets.

1. The Testimonial Wall

The testimonials wall is a magnificent element for your website that surely captures the attention of the visitors.

Review rows move in opposite directions, creating a dynamic and interactive experience.

You get to showcase lots of testimonials in a relatively small space. 

It is a perfect choice for landing pages!

This widget is best for businesses that have at least 10 reviews.

By choosing different variations of this widget, you can filter reviews based on their source or amount of stars.

2. Wall of Love

Get ready to share the love! ❤️

Wall of love lets you feature all kinds of testimonials, be it text, video, or image.

It makes a great effect and is best suited for a separate testimonials page.

3. Testimonial Carousel

Carousel is one of our most used widgets.

It is elegant and dynamic, but less adventurous than the testimonial wall.

This is also a great choice for landing pages or your front page.

Here’s a real life example from one of our customers:

How does it work?

How can you start creating these beautiful widgets?

First, sign up to Trustmary.

The free Solo plan enables you to use one widget. To create more than one widget, use a more advanced plan like Trustmary Business.

Make sure that you have collected or imported reviews to Trustmary.

Next steps:

• Go to Widgets
• Create new widget
• Choose Highlight reviews
• Browse the widgets and choose the one you want to use
• Edit the title
• Click on the quotation symbol on the left navigation part and pick the reviews that you want to feature
• Personalize the colors and other settings
• Go to Add to website
• Install Trustmary tag using Google Tag Manager (only for the first time)
• Copy the embed code and paste it to your website as HTML
• Make sure that the widget is active

See more thorough instructions for setting up review widgets.

If you want a short-cut for embedding Google reviews to your website, check out our free Google review widget and install it in just three easy steps.

Benefits of Using Trustmary for Collecting Reviews

When you use Trustmary for collecting reviews, you get many benefits compared to having reviews only on review websites.

1. You get all reviews in one place.
2. You can showcase the reviews on your own website with widgets.
3. You can import existing reviews from review websites to Trustmary.
4. When you integrate Trustmary with your CRM, you can move data between the systems.
5. You get to choose from many different templates.
6. You have multiple distribution options.
7. You can personalize your feedback form and review showcase to fit your brand.
8. You can use the reviews as part of your website lead generation forms or pop ups.
9. You can automate the review process.

Let me translate that to you:

• Save time
• Get more sales
• Improve your reputation

Conclusion

This blog introduced three customer review submission form templates and three templates for showcasing reviews.

Additionally, we learned what are the best ways to distribute review forms, and how to ask for reviews.

Lastly, you noticed that using Trustmary for collecting your own reviews has many benefits.

You get to use the reviews on your website and increase website conversions as well as improve the customer experience, among other things.

The best thing is that you can use limited features of Trustmary for free, forever.

Start today and see the benefits for yourself!

Further Reading

• The Ultimate Guide to Gathering and Using Reviews
• Online Reviews: Statistics That Will Blow Your Mind [2022]
• Automate Your Review Gathering Flows with Trustmary
• 14 Best Tools for Showcasing Reviews on A Website

FAQ