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There’s nothing more validating than people telling you how much they love your app. Well, money. Money is pretty validating. But aside from that. The good vibes don’t have to stop with you, though. You can take positive feedback and turn it into free marketing material. And that’s as good as money. One of the most powerful ways to acquire new customers is for existing customers to tell people how great your product is. Continue reading to discover ways to identify good testimonial material and maximize its effectiveness in attracting new users.
Identify Existing Testimonial Material
App Store Reviews
Positive App Store reviews likely have quote-worthy comments you’d like to share with the rest of the world. The users writing these reviews are already promoters, and their messages are likely already influencing new users to try your app. You can take this existing content and repurpose it for other media, such as your website or email newsletter.
Online Product Reviews
Personal blogs, tech news sites, and other third-party outlets that write up product reviews are another good source for testimonials. Copying a line or two from existing articles and referencing the blog or news outlet who hosted the review can bring more authority to a testimonial than a quote from the average user.
Social Media Posts
Follow mentions of your products on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to see what people are saying. You may find great recommendations written by your promoters. Worst-case scenario, you may find feedback from unhappy users that can help you identify previously unrecognized problems. You then have an opportunity to turn things around for those users while improving your product.
Ask Your Users for Testimonials
Prompt for Positive App Store Reviews
You should encourage users to post positive App Store reviews to maintain high ratings. A majority of users will look at App Store ratings and reviews before downloading a new app. Therefore, it is important to get as many promoters as possible to write an App Store review. Additionally, these positive reviews will give you excellent new material to share as user testimonials. If you don’t like the exact phrasing used in a review, you can always reach out to users with a slightly modified version of their review and ask if it’d be okay to use your version in other marketing channels.
Add In-App Feedback
Prevent negative App Store reviews by capturing unhappy users’ feedback within your app. Critic and similar in-app customer feedback solutions let you control how users discuss your app. This is a very effective way to get valuable, actionable information from potentially unhappy customers without impacting App Store ratings. However, you should still direct happy users to write a positive App Store review. In-app feedback is great for giving you a task list of changes you can make to eventually turn unhappy users into happy promoters.
Product Review Sites
You can also solicit feedback from product review sites by offering a free copy of your product to a professional reviewer or journalist. If your product has a news-worthy aspect or is relevant to a general theme of a product review site, many writers will gladly write a review in exchange for free merchandise. These are not guaranteed to be 100% positive, but you will likely find several quote-worthy lines that can be repurposed as testimonials elsewhere. Additionally, the reach of the product review site may extend beyond your typical digital audience, giving you a new and relatively cheap marketing channel.
Share Posts From Social Media
Once you have a social media following, use your audience to ask what people like about your product and what features they love most. Guided questions can give you positive social media posts that can then be turned into effective testimonials. Share the best posts with the rest of your audience and thank your reviewers for their kind words.
Ways to Share Positive Feedback
Once you have all of this great promotional material, you can make us of it across several online channels. For example, long-form testimonials can turn into case studies on your website. Shorter testimonials are great to quote on product landing pages. If you have an email newsletter, include a testimonial in each email to describe differentiating features or interesting use cases.
Social media sharing has a powerful viral effect. If you can tag the user who provided a rave review, they will likely re-share your post with their audience, increasing your reach to everyone who follows them. When delivered well, a single post can give you exposure to hundreds or thousands of potential users.
You can even place customer reviews strategically within your product. When you ask new users to write an App Store review, showing them an example review that you like can help frame their thoughts for what to write. Also, if your app has a social aspect, showing reviews written by a user’s friends has a powerful network effect. You may use friends’ reviews to encourage a user to leave a review of their own, or to upsell them to a premium service that was purchased by their friends.
Maximizing the Impact of Positive Feedback
Share Names and Faces
Testimonials are most effective when accompanied by the name and face of the person who gave the testimonial. This humanizes what is said and comes across as more genuine than the testimonial alone. Of course, you should always ask the reviewer for permission to share their information. If the reviewer works for a well-respected company or has a fancy job title, including their title and employer can give their words more weight.
Show Star Ratings
Star ratings, if you have them, are nice to include with testimonials. The graphic will draw attention and effectively summarizes the entire testimonial. However, if you use star ratings, showing a five-star rating on every single testimonial looks unrealistic. Consider whether you’re willing to put a few 4- or 4.5-star ratings on a page before showing star ratings with your testimonials. You certainly want to show off your best reviews, but showing an always-perfect rating is not much better than showing no rating at all.
Emphasize Positive Emotional Words
Look at the descriptions people use when they write about your product. Are they thrilled? Do they think your app is unbelievably beautiful? Perhaps they’re relieved that your product solves their biggest problems. Some may simply say they love your customer support. Emphasize these powerful words when writing your testimonials. Underlines, color variations, or bold fonts used in moderation will draw attention to what you want people to remember about your product.
Improve Your Product with Critic Feedback
Critic asks customers for feedback within your app. Once you collect feedback from your users, address their concerns by improving existing functionality or adding new features. Then you can then ask for feedback on your improvements and solicit users for testimonials. Additionally, you can take positive feedback collected in Critic and turn it into a testimonial for your digital marketing campaign. Sign up for Critic today and attract new users by maximizing the impact of customer feedback.