How Do you get Customer Testimonials? – DSP 232

Customer testimonials can have a huge impact on a float center’s marketing. It adds a sense of legitimacy for any small business, after all, who wouldn’t want to hear stories from other who have tried out a service.

Derek and Graham hash out the benefits of having testimonials. Where to get them, third party sites as opposed to personally sourced testimonials, and the different forms that customer experiences can take.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Okay, hello, hello everybody. Once again, we are without an Ashkahn who is busy at work on the Float Conference which is coming right up. And instead we’re joined by Derek Wyatt.

Derek: Hello everybody.

Graham: Who works very hard on the marketing for Float On and does a lot of stuff with Float Tank Solutions as well. And before we get started, quick announcement that the conference that Ashkahn is slaving away on is right around the corner and early bird tickets are coming to a close on July 19th so pick them up while you can. It’s a lot cheaper to grab them now than when they go up to full price. And we pretty much have to put this into the schedule every year for doing the price increase because this is kind of when we have to put in our orders for all the different tote bags and meal plans and hotel rooms and everything like that for final logistics. Yeah, help yourself save some money and help us make sure that we get everything planned.

Derek: And if that was not enough pressure it’s going to be the last Float Conference that Float On is organizing so come on out and join us because we’d really love to see you here in Portland.

Graham: Yeah, it’s true it’s going to be a great last Portland shindig so hopefully see all of you out here. And onto the exciting stuff. Today’s question is, “How do you get customers to give you testimonials?”

Derek: Ask nicely.

Graham: Yeah I guess have a good service is, yeah, run good floats and-

Derek: That’s a good start. That’s even better.

Graham: Don’t be a jerk and they just kind of flow in naturally.

Derek: Not so naturally.

Graham: Thanks for your question. No it’s actually a very active thing and even if you do kind of get passive testimonials coming in you need to kind of ask permission to reuse those on the website anyway so there’s a whole process to it. I guess and before we launch too far into that what do you think is even the importance of getting testimonials? Like how important is it to collect feedback from your customers you end up displaying publicly?

Derek: I mean testimonials, also known as third party validation, says that all the words on your website and everything aren’t just made up by you that actual other people came.

Graham: They’re made up by other people too.

Derek: They’re made up by other people. They actually came, did your service, survived, and lived to tell about it. It’s one of those things when you’re brand new to the concept of floating and you go to someone’s website and you’re looking through it and you see these great stories you can relate to that’s powerful in getting people one step closer into floating.

Graham: Yeah and I think even especially with something that’s kind of as out there as floating, being able to read other people’s responses too, that experience is really useful in convincing first timers to come in. And I wonder so obviously there are sites like Yelp out there, like Google Reviews and those kind-

Derek: Facebook reviews.

Graham: What was that?

Derek: Facebook reviews.

Graham: Yeah Facebook reviews and those kind just collect testimonials passively. So other than those do you still think it’s worthwhile grabbing your own testimonials to be able to put on your website and not just rely on Yelp or what’s your thought on that kind of the privately reeling them in.

Derek: I think you can do it all, right? So people if they feel compelled they are going to leave a review. Having a process in which you reach out to people is very powerful. Because they may not know that there’s a Yelp or a Google and they may not have those accounts to go leave a review. So getting just more stories collected. So like on Float On’s website, there’s a whole page of just testimonials and as we get more we just keep adding them and adding them. So you can literally spend 30, 40 minutes on one page of our website reading everybody’s story. And as they come in, we put them up. And so if you didn’t actively ask so you mentioned the passive ones, if you didn’t actively ask you’re going to probably miss out on a whole lot more stories that would be great website fodder.

Graham: Yeah, yeah definitely. And you can’t always control exactly what order things are displayed in in Yelp. And kind of I guess the way the third party social validation was initially explained to me and the way you kind of want it to work, is like you’re hanging out at a bar with a friend or something or someone you’re just meeting and you’re trying to convince them to do business with you. In the middle of your conversation someone walks up and it’s like, “Oh excuse me, sorry to interrupt the conversation. I just had to say thank you so much for all the help that you gave me in marketing earlier. Thank you so much for whatever you did.” And they walk off and you’re like, “Oh sorry about that, anyway back to our business.” And you keep talking, then someone else walks up and they’re like, “Oh excuse me, sorry I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I just had to say you’re the best and my business wouldn’t be where it is,” etc, etc. So I think there’s this powerful element to having that present on any of your web pages.

Derek: Asking for testimonials is a lot cheaper than paying plants to come in to a bar and shill for you fakely, ya know.

Graham: Yeah, right. Well I do think that would be natural.

Derek: Oh yeah, so many people come up to you in the bar, yeah.

Graham: Yeah. I guess which maybe means you’re an alcoholic or something at that point. Yeah so it is good, they’re just one of the most powerful, psychological marketing tools out there. So in my mind having them on just about every one of your pages or anywhere where it makes sense especially where you’re collecting money from people is a great place to have testimonials.

Derek: And there’s some marketing tests out there that are showing actually you can embed a Facebook review onto your website. Facebook will give you the code to do it and then that’s actually showing to be more trustworthy than just you putting somebody’s words on your website. So if you want to even step up the third party validation you can literally put somebody’s review that’s on your page, embed it on your website and they can like that. They can comment on it right there on your website, even as to the level of trustworthiness engagement.

Graham: Nice, I didn’t realize that.

Derek: Yeah, I was going to start doing that here pretty soon.

Graham: Great, I’m like yeah where’s our tests?

Derek: Yeah we’re getting there. I was reading about it last week I was like, “Huh, got to add that to the list.

Graham: Yeah that’s exciting. And another just pro-tip shout out too that marketing is always this moving target. So don’t assume because something has worked in the past that there’s not areas to improve it or areas where it can develop.

Derek: For sure.

Graham: And I guess we should actually answer this person’s question at some point.

Derek: What was the question again?

Graham: Yeah, can you guys please ramble on about the utility of testimonials I think was, No it said, “How do you get customers to give them to you? How do you actually get the testimonials?

Derek: So one of them is something you set up, the check-ins after somebody floats with us.

Graham: Yeah. And so actually just to back up one step which is there’s kind of two utilities that I find to testimonials. One really is just the social validation, you get to put them on your website. The more the people see that hopefully the more you convince new people to come in. But there’s this secondary part that I think is almost more important in some cases which is getting feedback from your customers to find out how your service is doing.

Even if the testimonial is a negative one and you don’t plan on putting that on your homepage or something, just the act of trying to get that feedback from customers has its own benefit of letting you know where you need to improve and how you’re doing. We really actively try to solicit not just testimonials but feedback in bunch of different ways.

Derek: I’ll even add a third usefulness of testimonials. You’ll actually get to understand how your customers describe your service. So in using their words in your marketing. You know how to describe floating it’s the best you know how you’ve been doing it for eight years and it’s very technical and you’re really close to it. But you, through a testimonial, can gain new insights by how somebody else might describe it. One thing I’ve picked up on is a lot of people like to use the word, “Oh I thought I was claustrophobic and then.” You can actually use that language in your marketing. “You may feel claustrophobic at first but then” and you can kind of get into people’s minds by other people allowing you into their minds that understand the language that will actually breakdown the resistance to get into floating. So there’s tip number three there for you.

Graham: Nice sort of some psychological espionage.

Derek: Yeah. Use their own words against them is what I like to call it.

Graham: For their own good, ultimately, of course.

Derek: Yeah, of course.

Graham: Cool. So-

Derek: How.

Graham: I guess so for the first step is when people get out of a float we really try to catch them before they take off just to see if they feel like starting up a conversation. We won’t corner them and harass them. We don’t even really ask how was your float at this point we just say welcome back. But sometimes, just based off of that, people will strike up a conversation and really get into things. And if you have a good conversation with someone, don’t be afraid to just ask them if you can use that as a testimonial where you’re like, “Hey, do you mind if I email you a little reminder, and if you don’t mind I would love to actually get you to write that down? It’s really useful to have those kinds of things on our website.” And so that’s a great way to get them.

And then like Derek said, we also do an email task I guess for our staff members where every single shift they have to reach out to someone or a couple of people from the last shift they were working and personally check in. So either give them a phone call or shoot them off an email. And just based on that you know them kind of emailing this after the float, a couple of days, email off they’ll get nice testimonials coming in as well.

And then as we’ve talked about before, we also have a 90 day check-in where if someone hasn’t been back to float for three months after any of their floats they’ll get another email basically saying, “Hey, how’s it going? How was your float last time? Did anything go wrong? Did anything go right?” And we’ll get nice feedback based on that.

And all of those are not given typically in like people aren’t expecting you to just plaster that on the website so after you get good feedback from any of those reach outs you also need to reach back to the customer and say, “Hey, that was really great to hear, do you mind if I re-publish this on our website.” Or something like that.

Derek: So we’ve talked about some very straight forward ways to get testimonials just by specifically asking but can you think of any unique ways that aren’t so transactional to get those insights?

Graham: Say  other than like conversations or emails-

Derek: Right.

Graham: Back and forth or something like that. Well we also have our art books out. Some people have big chalkboards, some people have you have panels on the wall, you have whiteboard kind of things. And just you know, it’s amazing what’ll happen if you set out books or a panel for people to write on. The kinds of stuff that people maybe wouldn’t mention to you out loud when they’re coming out of their floats but that they put down to paper are really good. The difficulty there is it’s really hard to track people down to figure out how to ask for permissions lots of times. They don’t put their name on it, you don’t know exactly when it was written. So I always figure if they’re putting it in a public book it’s fine to put it up somewhere else just with an anonymous in a public setting and I feel like that’s a trend.

Derek: If they just put their name down on you might blur the name or crop the name out.

Graham: Yeah as long as those released anonymous. I think those are great too. And those actually are cool because you can take photos of them. Often they’re colorful and have illustrations and you can actually make some good social media content out of it.

Derek: They also offer another way to view testimonials they don’t have to necessarily be on a website. Like people are in the shop, they’re unplugged, they’re offline and now they’re thumbing through this journal hearing more affirming stories of how great floating is.

Graham: Yeah, that’s a really good point. It is sort of just like an offline testimonial generator, in addition to really cool art book as well, yeah.

Derek: The Writer’s Programs, it’s just kind of an extension of extended testimonies.

Graham: Yeah, that’s very true. Getting people in, sometimes there are a little more artistic, it’s not just like, “Hey, go float at this place.” But a lot of them are really powerful poems and stories about how floating has helped people get past their chronic anxiety and yeah learn to be healthier with themselves, with others.

Derek: Talking to loved ones who’ve passed on.

Graham: Yeah, there’s some really cool, profound stuff in there. And yeah I agree, they’re just like long form, even more put together testimonials.

Derek: For sure.

Graham: I will say, we haven’t started this at Float On but it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing, which is starting to send out a “right after they float” survey. And hopefully that’s a sneak peak into some Helm developments too. This will be a feature that eventually pops up in Helm probably sometime in the next half a year or so is after float. Check-in email, which basically just has either “would you recommend this to a friend?”, net promoter score kind of thing or just like a happy face, sad face, how was your float? And if it was good or bad ask the person to write a review afterwards.

And I like that system for two reasons. A, it just make sure that you have a really good finger on the pulse of what your customers are thinking about your business. And B, it intercepts both good and bad reviews. And lets you for the good ones encourage them to post it up to Google or Facebook. If they write a good review and they’re like, “I loved it.” You can be like, “Oh here, we already copied and pasted this into a forum you just have to hit post and you can share it.” Or if they didn’t like it then you can also take that review and say, “Oh, can you tell us more about what you didn’t like?” And they kind of get to get out their anger and frustration in that form without going to Yelp. And they might even think they’re posting to a more of a public review site but you’re kind of intercepting that bad testimonial before it goes public which I thought was a really nice use of that.

Again, something we’ll probably switch to. I do like the idea of every single float really asking people how it went in this email. In a way that we don’t feel comfortable asking right when they’re floaty and just got out of the tank.

Derek: Is there any point that you would probably stop asking that? Let’s say after their 100th float. Do you still keep sending that request or do you think you can tailor that back after their 10th float? Do you think there’s kind of a drop off point where you just stop asking for testimonials where it doesn’t seem, again, so transactional?

Graham: Yeah, definitely after the first couple floats makes a lot of sense to me. And I’m not sure, yeah I’d have to run some experiments. So again, this isn’t something we’ve actually played around with so I could see it being nice after every float because you could have floated 49 times and then your 50th the tank is freezing. And the person at the front counter was rude to you. But hopefully you just write in naturally after your experience.

Derek: Yeah I feel like after your 50th float you’re comfortable enough with the shock you know that was an outlying bad experience.

Graham: Right, yeah exactly. So yeah, I guess instinctively, I feel like the first few times is good to send it out and maybe you don’t need to as much after that. But yeah definitely something to play around as we launch into a system like that.

Derek: Cool, looking forward to see that.

Graham: Yeah, me too.

Derek: Well, of course you do.

Graham: Cool. You got anything else on testimonials?

Derek: No, I think they’re just really important to show that it’s not just you saying it’s great. That even friends like, “Oh, I know that person that said it was great.”

Graham: Yeah get them up there. Make people do the little mental trickery thing, make them think that they thought of the words themselves.

Derek: Yeah.

Graham: Yeah.

Derek: Trickery.

Graham: Sorry, I mean friendly manipulation.

Derek: Yes. Neuro linguistic programming.

Graham: Alright, if anyone has questions of their own, if you, faithful listener, have your own question go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and ship it over our way.

Derek: Yeah.

Graham: Peace out.

Derek: Bye.

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