When you work in sales long enough, you’ll find that consumers don’t always trust you, the salesperson. Consumers do trust their friends, family, and they tend to read reviews. You realize that you need to find a solution that your prospective customers will trust more than you. Gathering customer testimonials through HubSpot is the solution.
Testimonials are small text, video, or audio reviews that happy customers send to the company that served them well to appear on its website. Feel free to ask happy customers to write a short testimonial for you— at least half will likely say yes.
We know that gathering testimonials through HubSpot is an easy endeavor that will benefit you with more sales. Below, we discuss how you can ask for testimonials via HubSpot and offer you tips for getting a better response to your requests for customer feedback.
Setting Up the HubSpot Service Hub to Ask for Testimonials
Having testimonials on your website is an important way to show your customers they can trust your products and services. In HubSpot, you can set up some automations for gathering testimonials with the Service Hub. You have the choice of just using the native HubSpot tools or adding integrations. The steps below do not require integrations.
Step #1: Create a Survey
You can set up a net-promoter score (NPS) survey by navigating to Service, Feedback Surveys, and Create Survey within the HubSpot Service Hub. An NPS is a metric used to score respondents as promoters, passives, or detractors. Promoters are your happy and loyal customers, which are who you want to write testimonials for you. Most NPS surveys simply ask whether or not the customer would recommend the business to a friend.
Benefits of NPS Surveys
The two key benefits of NPS surveys are to find out overall how satisfied your customers are and evaluate customer loyalty. Other reasons you should employ this method of checking in on customers are to give you a sense of direction for any changes or improvements needed, and it helps you track change over time. As you can see, the benefits of conducting net-promoter score surveys are huge compared to how simple and inexpensive it is to implement.
Step #2: Create a Workflow to Initiate Contact
Under the Automation heading within the survey setup settings, you can create a workflow. Add a contact trigger, such as a completed purchase, to the workflow so an email with the NPS survey would automatically go out at a specified time after the trigger. From the workflow, you can set up a sequence to trigger once the customer completes the survey.
Step #3: Create a Survey To Ask for Testimonials
You’ll need to create a survey to ask for a testimonial. In the Service Hub, click on Service and then Feedback Surveys. Click on Create Survey on the upper right, select Custom Survey, and then click Next. At this point, you have to choose a delivery method— we are using email to ask for a testimonial. However, you can also create a survey that has a shareable link for adding to your call to action (CTA).
Creating an Email Survey
When creating an email survey, you must fill out the information from within the Email settings page. The information you need to fill out is basic things like the survey language, company to/from name, the email address associated with your company, and the email’s subject line. You can use personalization tokens within the email body to make each email feel more personal using the customer’s information, which is part of the automation.
Next, you’ll see the Theme section, where you choose a featured image and a color scheme. You are now ready to write the actual survey. The survey can be as long or as short as you want, but we’ll describe below in the tips section how shorter is better and give you some examples. Ideally, your testimonial survey should be less than three questions.
When creating questions, you can use a “Yes'' or “No” dropdown menu for the initial question asking if you can feature the customer’s response on your website. For feedback questions, you should select Multi-line Text. When finished adding questions, click the Thank You tab to customize a thank you message.
Step #4: Set Up an Email Sequence
Once you finish writing your testimonial survey, you can automate it. Click the Recipients tab and create your criteria. The criteria is the information that triggers HubSpot to send out the email asking for a testimonial, so it’s vital that it goes to the correct customers. Use a workflow to filter out which customers receive a testimonial request.
We recommend that you set your filter for the 9 and 10 NPS survey scores. You can filter NPS scores in a workflow using filter language such as, “last NPS survey rating is known 9/10.” You can then name the workflow and add to it via the plus sign, which adds actions. An action to use in this situation could be to send an email to request a testimonial after a contact trigger, which would be the receipt of a 9 or 10 score in the survey.
Within the workflow, you should assign it to a representative to monitor survey responses. Whoever you assign the task to would be responsible for reading and publishing the testimonials on your website to ensure they meet approval.
Tip #1: Incentives for Testimonials
You can offer incentives for testimonials. However, this can look like a bribe for a good review. You can offer a small gift card through an integration such as Ribbon or offer a discount after the customer sends the testimonial as a thank you gift. If you do not advertise that everyone who sends a testimonial receives a gift, you will receive honest testimonials that customers will trust.
Tip #2: Timing is Everything
Testimonials should come from loyal customers who have been working with you for a few months or more. You do not want to scare new customers off by heckling them for feedback immediately. The ideal customer to ask has purchased from you numerous times and given positive feedback. Additionally, only ask those customers who give you feedback in the nine or ten out of ten range.
Tip #3: Keep It Short
Testimonials do not have to be long. A few sentences will suffice. The same goes for your testimonial survey— short and to the point is best. There are many questions you can ask customers to receive a good response you can use for a testimonial. Good questions focus on how your product or service helped the customer or whether they would recommend you to their friends and family.
Some examples you could use:
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How has our product or service impacted your business?
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How have we exceeded your expectations?
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How would you describe the service you received from us to a friend?
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What are some unexpected benefits of the services we provided to you?
Solutions You Can Trust
If your sales are falling flat or you’re having growing pains, let us take a look to see how we can help you grow. We work with businesses and help them build a strategic plan for the future. If you want a sales strategy that gets results, contact us at Selworthy for a quote today.
