As we all know, it’s easy for marketers to brag about how great their product or service is. Writing compelling copy, shooting enticing photos, or even producing glamorous videos are all tactics we use to draw attention to our brands.
While all of these strategies can be successful, there really is no better way to gain trust and prove the validity of your brand like customer testimonials.
Testimonials take the spotlight away from the seller, and shine it on the customer. Your customer was once in the shopper’s shoes, debating what product to choose, comparing prices, reading marketing message after marketing message. Once the potential new buyer hears from someone they can actually relate to—someone who isn’t being paid to say these wonderful things—then their trust deepens, and their chances of purchasing rises.
For these reasons, it is absolutely critical for businesses to display customer testimonials on their websites. There are many ways you can use testimonials—for example, on landing pages and in emails—but there’s no better way to feature client quotes than on your very own beautiful customer testimonial page.
I went hunting for examples of the best customer testimonial pages I could find. These 11 companies show how powerful customer testimonials can be, and how to make the most of them. If you’re just getting started with a customer testimonial page, these examples should provide you with plenty of inspiration.
#1: ZenDesk
Talk about a beautiful customer testimonial page. ZenDesk, a help desk software, literally provides tools for customer service. How could they do this without showcasing their happy customers?
ZenDesk’s testimonial page is beautifully laid out AND functional, with a silent customer video playing on loop to serve as the banner, a menu to filter testimonials by location, company size, industry, and use case, and lastly thumbnails linking to the full customer stories for a variety of big-name brands. This is a clean and concise way to showcase their happy customers, and help prospects gain the assurance they need before investing.
#2: ChowNow
ChowNow’s customer testimonial page is another beauty. Its simple design focuses on videos and standout quotes from customers. This approach is clean, straightforward, and skimmable—not bogged down with big blocks of text that can be overwhelming and easy to skip.
ChowNow clearly invested in sending a video crew out to their customer restaurant locations to produce these high-quality video testimonials, but I’d bet it was well-worth the investment. Video may be the best way to display happy customers because it allows the viewer to connect on an emotional level that can be harder to convey via text alone.
Note, too, how the featured quotes mention why customers chose ChowNow over competitors and call out specific numbers and metrics (“increased our sales 20-25%”).
#3: Startup Institute
Startup Institute used their business model to create a unique and compelling way to display their customer testimonials as “Love Letters.”
Startup Institute is a career accelerator that allows professionals to learn new skills, take their careers in a different direction, and pursue a career they are passionate about. Naturally they receive praise from the students that have completed the program.
Whether it’s a student raving that they have landed their dream job or just a message of appreciation, these letters are truly authentic testimonials. This page is a creative and thoughtful way of sharing customer testimonials.
#4: Bizzabo
Bizzabo is a company that provides tools to help professional event planning and execution, and their customers are very happy folks! The thing I love about their customer testimonial page is that it provides a variety of content formats.
For instance, the top of the page shares short and concise tweets from customers; as you scroll you’ll then see a customer service rating, a series of case studies, and then a video customer testimonial. The layout is like a choose-your-own-adventure giving the potential customer options on how they prefer to digest these stories.
#5: Steve & Kate’s Camp
Steve & Kate’s camp runs summer camps for children across the U.S. The unique thing about Steve & Kate’s camp is that their entire website is essentially a series of customer testimonials.
For example, visit their homepage, and watch the video. Doesn’t that make you want to go to camp? Or at the very least send your kids to that camp?
As you can see, certain businesses don’t even need a dedicated page, but they can let their website speak to customers with emotion-provoking videos. Sending a child to summer camp can be a very nerve-racking thing for a parent, but by using the power of video testimonials across their website a sense of trust is gained.
#6: Hootsuite
Hootsuite, a social media management platform, has another great example of a customer testimonial page that really demonstrates how their product can work for anybody. They start off by sharing a video mashup featuring several of their customers, and as you scroll down the page, you’ll see case studies in three sections separated by goals or needs—brand building, speed/efficiency, and reporting capabilities.
Lastly, there’s an area to check out case studies specific to your industry. Something for everyone!
#7: Booker
Booker provides software that helps retailers manage their stores. This company leverages their customers to tell the story of what makes their software great, making this page a focal point of their website’s main navigation.
#8: HubSpot
HubSpot is another software company, providing inbound marketing and sales tools that help grow your business. Their software can get quite pricy if your company is relying on it for things like email marketing campaigns and lead generation, but the investment is worth it for many customers as you see from their customer testimonial pages.
The first page you land on features thumbnails with company logos and the main outcomes they saw from using HubSpot. What I love most about this page is the ability to filter by industry, company size, challenges, location, etc. to discover the stories most in-line with your own business and needs.
There’s also a separate testimonials page featuring quotes and photos of happy customers. So HubSpot gets it both ways – there’s the brand recognition of the corporate logos, plus the human connection of seeing other customers as real people.
#9: Codecademy
Learning how to code can seem like a very intimidating thing, especially if your experience is far away from the technical world. Codecademy’s mission is to break that barrier, and teach newbies how to learn new coding skills online.
Their customer testimonial page is a powerful way of explaining this mission, and they have a number of students who were willing to share their stories. They use the power of video to tell a story about how Codecademy helped an individual change his career completely by gaining these new skills. The page then documents plenty of others who had similar success stories—click on a story and you’ll see a longer interview with the student about how and why they got into coding. This method of using their customers as advocates helps break the intimidation barrier for those hesitant to sign up for a coding course.
Codecademy also uses the copy on this page to subtly remind visitors that they can learn to code from anywhere: “Learner stories from around the world.”
#10: Squarespace
Did you know that Squarespace powers millions of websites across hundreds of industries? Well, if you head over their customer testimonial page you can get all the details and more.
Since their business is website building, their customer testimonial is not what you typically think of (i.e., a quote or a longer text-based story). Rather, Squarespace uses this page to share a host of real website examples from some of the most glamorous brands that use their site builder, showing proof of concept and providing design inspiration.
The page feels sleek and particularly helpful for those looking to see if Squarespace will meet their needs.
#11: Shopify
Lastly, we have Shopify’s “Success Stories” page. At first glance it looks a lot like other testimonial page examples we’ve seen, but it has one cool new idea: There’s a prominent call to action that asks Shopify customers to share their own stories!
What a creative way to crowdsource more customer testimonials!
9 Tips for Creating a Great Customer Testimonial Page
Based on all these great examples, here are some tips and ideas you can use when designing and building your own testimonials page:
- Use the highest-quality photos and video you can manage (send out a crew if you can!)
- Make your customers look good (not just your own business and your product)
- Ask your customers to share concrete numbers that demonstrate the ways you helped their business
- Give visitors to your page the ability to filter testimonials or case studies by industry, company size, and location so they can find the stories that are most relevant to them
- Try out different formats – tweets and other social media posts can be testimonials! (Just get permission)
- Make it easy for more customers to submit a testimonial
- Don’t forget to use testimonials across your site where you want to drive conversions – including the home page
- Don’t just use quotes; show examples of your product in action
- Display a mixture of familiar logos and real customer faces
About the Author:
Margot is a Customer Success Manager at Wistia. She loves all things digital, and spends her free time running, traveling, and cooking. Follow her on:
Twitter: @ChappyMargot
Google+: +Margot da Cunha