Testimonial Examples to Inspire Your First Campaign

Creating an engaging and effective page to showcase your customer testimonials can be hard when starting from scratch. Just like any other marketing tactic, it can be helpful to see examples from industry leaders first. We’ve compiled a list of testimonial examples that can help you design the ideal testimonial page, or showcase your testimonials anywhere they’ll be effective. We’ve updated this post in 2022 to give you more testimonial examples to get inspired and some more information about what makes a great testimonial.

What Are Testimonials?

A testimonial is a customer’s opinion about your business, which may include a story about their experience and a recommendation. A testimonial may be short or long, and may include text, images, video, and any combination thereof. Testimonials show potential customers that your business delivers on its promises, and can help to increase sales and conversions.

How to Write a Great Testimonial

It can sometimes be hard to know what to say about a business, even if a customer feels strongly about it. When you know how to write a great testimonial, you can point your customers in the right direction and give them helpful prompts. Or, if a business asks for your testimonial, you’ll know where to start.

Be Honest

One of the most important parts of a great testimonial is honesty. Businesses that use dishonest or made-up testimonials can end up in legal hot water with the Federal Trade Commission. Moreover, dishonest testimonials don’t do businesses or prospective customers any favors.

Tell Your Experience

Testimonials are helpful for businesses and prospective customers because they explain what a customer might expect from a business. When a testimonial provides details about a customer’s experience, it helps to show what a business is about, what they do, and how they operate. To write a great testimonial, it’s helpful to simply start with a brief explanation about your experience. This might include what you were looking for or a problem you were hoping to solve, what happened, and how your concern or problem was resolved.

Highlight Advantages

As you tell your story and explain the experience you had with a business, it’s also helpful to highlight advantages that the business showed. This might include an exemplary customer service experience, or a product that exceeded your expectations. If you can, be specific. Mention specific people who made your experience great. Talk about specific attributes of a product that made it perform exceptionally well. Mention specific numbers, if possible, such as the number of hours or amount of money you saved.

Types of Testimonials

There are many different types of testimonials. We’ll cover each of these different types in more detail in the testimonial examples section. But, it can be helpful to have an overview, especially if you’re wondering which type of testimonial you should be gathering for your business.

Text: Text-based testimonials only use written words to tell a customer’s story. These types of testimonials are usually easy to gather, but they might not be as impactful as testimonials on video or accompanied by a photo image.
Photo: A photo testimonial is similar to a text-based testimonial, except it includes a photo of the person who provided it. This can lend more credibility to the testimonial.
Video: A video testimonial might include a video shoot set up by the business, or a customer might shoot a video on their smartphone or computer. Video testimonials can be highly impactful and have a high level of credibility, since they’re difficult to fake. Since video content tends to get more views and shares than text, video testimonials may also reach a wider audience.
Combination: Some testimonials use a combination of images, text and/or video. This can help to provide more of a story, give the testimonial more credibility, and showcase many different parts of your business.
Long-Form/Case Study: A case study is more detailed, and may show a customer’s experience with accompanying statistics or specific information. It should include some quotes from the customer, but it may also include narrative provided by the business.
Social Media: When customers provide recommendations or show their experiences on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, they’re providing social media testimonials. These may include many different media types. Social media testimonials also have a lot of potential to reach new customers.

How to Use Testimonials

Just as there are many different types of testimonials, there are also many different ways to use these testimonials. Different types of testimonials will work better in different situations. Here are a few examples of how you might use these testimonials.

Home Page: As customers visit your homepage, testimonials will show them immediately what type of customers you serve and how well you perform.
Product Pages: Testimonials on product pages can help to persuade a customer to make a purchase and increase conversions substantially.
Advertisements: Using testimonials in your advertisements, including everything from social media ads to video ads to TV commercials and more, shows that your customers support the claims that you make.
Marketing Materials: Testimonials in your brochures, email drips, guides, billboards and more will help to increase prospective customers’ trust in you and help them make a purchase.

How to Get Testimonials

Gathering testimonials can be a challenge. Breaking this process down into steps can help you tackle it. Whether you are looking for text testimonials, videos, case studies, or a combination of them, this process can help you get more testimonials.

Landing page: Create a landing page and a form so customers can easily submit their feedback at their leisure. Boast allows you to easily make a landing page and form, and collect all types of text, photo, and video testimonials.
Ask for testimonials: You might ask for testimonials using email requests, text messages, in-person chats, signs in your store, sidebar notifications on your website, social media updates, or a combination of these things.
Display testimonials: It’s helpful to use a service like Boast that will help you display the testimonials you’ve gathered, but you can also display these yourself on your homepage, product pages, or anywhere.

Here are 30 testimonial examples to inspire you:

Text

This is perhaps the most common testimonial example. Text testimonials are a great place to start when cultivating customer praise. Chances are you’re receiving encouraging and positive emails and messages from happy customers already. Set up a landing page and form to gather text testimonials, tell your customers that you’re seeking their input, and you can start gathering text testimonials immediately. Take a look at these text testimonial examples to get inspired for your page or pages.

#1: DreamBox Learning

#2: Planet Fitness

#3: Hard Rock Hotel San Diego

#4: KinderCare Learning Centers

Photo

Adding a photo of the customer leaving the testimonial, or the product or service that they’re raving about will help you create a greater impact on your potential customers. This will make your testimonial more credible, and it can also show potential customers that existing customers are similar to them.

#5: Houzz

#6: Nonprofit HR

#7: Hubspot

#8: Baremetrics

Video

Using video content as your customer testimonial is the most impactful way to get your customer’s positive message across. Potential customers are much more likely to spend time watching and listening to what your customers have to say over simply reading. Video testimonials also give you the ability to show emotion in your marketing. There are many different testimonial examples using video collections, and this number is growing all the time.

#9: Postmates

#10: Chicago Helicopter Experience

#11. Zoom

#12. Slack

#13. Adobe

Combination

Having a combination of text, photo, and video testimonials will help you create a dynamic and engaging feed capable of captivating potential customers. As you grow your customer testimonial feed this is a great opportunity to organize and segment your testimonial content to make it even more impactful for your unique buyer personas.

#14: Web Ascender

#15: Xero

#16: Yesware

#17: Sola Salon Studios

#18: E-Z Up

Long – Articles & Case Studies

Once you’ve had the chance to create a dynamic feed of testimonials for your website, elaborate on those. Supplementing your testimonials with more long format articles and case studies about the success a certain customer had with your company will help you convey even more value. Be data driven with this type of social proof to help solidify your point even further.

#19: Behance

#20: Harvard Business School

#21: Hootsuite

#22: Groove

Logo

Consumers are visual and recognize logos. Placing your customer’s logo surrounding their testimonial will help increase credibility and social proof for your brand.

#23: Brainshark

#24: Kenshoo

#25: Neil Patel

#26: Jobvite

Social Media

A lot of consumers take time to give their favorite companies shout outs on social media. Some businesses repost these testimonials to their own social accounts, and others create a separate web page to display this. Some businesses do both! These testimonial examples showcase both methods.

#27: Salesforce Pardot

#28: Slack

#29 Air BnB

#30 GoPro

These 30 versatile testimonial examples are a great place for you to begin brainstorming for your testimonial campaign. How do you want your customer praise to be shown off on your website and beyond? The most effective way to reach your customers is creating a page that has a combination of each type of testimonial to keep your page dynamic and engaging.