If you’ve explored any business websites, you’ve likely noticed sliders and scrolling displays containing customer testimonials. Today’s customers thrive on information and are more likely to purchase a product or subscribe to a service after looking at reviews and reading testimonials.
In fact, one survey by Dimensional Research, a tech market research firm, showed that 90% of customers claim their buying decisions are impacted by positive reviews. If you’re interested in using customer testimonials for SaaS marketing, there are few tactics you should consider and a few rules you should follow.
Customer testimonials are especially useful for marketing to potential customers during the consideration and decision stages of the buyer’s journey. At these stages, a lead may have already invested some time in learning about your SaaS and they are comparing their options and considering a purchase.
You can include testimonials in emails, case studies, product literature, sales collateral, and elsewhere.
Using customer testimonials for SaaS marketing at the top of the funnel is also a great way to build trust with website visitors and establish more credibility. As mentioned above, you can include testimonials on your homepage in the form of sliders or scrolling graphics. You can also intersperse them on pages throughout your website or you can dedicate and an entire page to customer testimonials.
Of course, you have to actually obtain them before using customer testimonials for SaaS marketing. If you’ve enlisted an army of trial users for your SaaS, you’ve already established a working relationship with them.
They're a good place to start. You can obtain customer testimonials from your current customers or any individuals who have used a trial version of your SaaS. That's only if it was clear to the user from the beginning that you intended to do so, of course.
You may be tempted to use any comments from your business pages on social media or from review sites, but there are specific rules about doing so. The U.S. Small Business Administration has posted a set of guidelines that you can refer to for more in-depth information.
Generally, you can’t copy and paste people’s reviews on other sites and present them as part of your own marketing materials. The users themselves have ownership of those comments. Using them would be infringing upon copyright laws.
Plug-ins are available that can link website visitors to third-party review sites or your social media platforms, however. You can also install plug-ins that present social media reviews on your website. These plug-ins also make it clear to visitors where the reviews are coming from so there is no confusion about how they were obtained.
The only downside is that the reviews that come through may not always be positive.