Cover photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash
Customer testimonials are important to us for both marketing and social validation. We feature them all over our website and we have a dedicated Wall of Love for all of the awesome things our customers have said about us.
Many founders don't ask for them because they are scared to ask their customers for feedback, but customers often want to help.
Starting simple
When we built and launched Leave Me Alone we received an incredible positive response including a lot of love on Twitter! After the launch madness died down we realised that we could make use of the all of these lovely tweets. Inspired by Baremetrics Wall of Love we put together the first version of our very own Wall of Love!
This was a really good start and people started asking how we built this page. It was very simple, we just used the Twitter embed code for the tweets. However, there were several downsides to this approach.
The main issue was that because embedded tweets are loaded from Twitter when someone visits the page, they are not available to search engines which meant we were losing out on potential SEO benefits. We also experienced issues with the tweets taking a long time to show or appearing on the page without their styles which looked terrible!
We wanted the testimonials to be more customisable, match our brand, and for our customers to be able to specify how their information would be displayed rather than using their name and avatar from Twitter.
Asking for a testimonial
We wanted to make it as simple as possible to write a testimonial for Leave Me Alone. Gathering testimonials is not easy, it takes time and follow ups to get people to provide feedback.
The first thing we needed was a short and sweet message that we could send to our customers. If you use Intercom or another chat CRM then this could be automated but we are sending these out manually at the moment.
We have tried and failed with this kind of thing in the past because we were overthinking what to say. We are getting responses with this message because the request is genuine. We really are so grateful to every single one of our customers and if they have a few minutes to write us a testimonial it helps us so, so much.
Saving the responses
We could have asked people to reply via email but we knew that would become difficult to manage. We use a form to collect the responses because it makes it super easy to gather all of the required information and makes it clear what we are asking for.
We use Airtable for this which is hands-down the best tool for the job. You could use a spreadsheet but Airtable is like Google Sheets on crack - seriously, it's great. It provides us with a hosted form for customers to complete and the response goes straight into a table. We already use Airtable for other things at Leave Me Alone - bug reports, feedback, to track news coverage, and to record our expenses.
We ask for some basic information (name, company, and an avatar) and one or two sentences. We also ask for the main reason they used Leave Me Alone which we don't use anywhere right now but is valuable information for us!
We are asking for them to write about how we have helped, which prompts them to think and write about something specific. This is much better than "write us a testimonial" since that results in lower quality and non-specific responses.
Airtable even has this gallery feature to preview the responses, but we tend to use the spreadsheet view most of the time.
We found that Baremetrics also used Airtable at some point for their testimonials (maybe they still do!) and they have created this Airtable template called "base" which you can copy to start collecting testimonials for your product straight away. This is a preview of the form which customers will use.
The final result
Once we had enough testimonials we replaced the Tweets and styled them to match our branding. It looks much more professional and cleaner than our previous tweets solution.
It's unlikely that visitors are going to read all of the testimonials, so we took inspiration from Baremetrics (again) and made it so they load in a different order each time. This way every single one of our amazing customers get a chance to be at the top!
You can check out our new Wall of Love here!
We are incredibly happy with our new Wall of Love. We hope you agree that it looks much better, and we now have super organised way of collecting and managing our testimonials for the future!
We hope you enjoyed this post and hope you feel inspired to create a Wall of Love for yourself. Even if you aren’t ready to display them yet it is never too soon to start collecting social proof! Let us know if you have any comments or questions.
Also, we would love to see your Walls of Love so please share them with us on Twitter!
