Marketing with Outlook: A System to get Testimonials

Testimonials from real customers are powerful. Here’s a small article about why they are useful and how you can use Outlook to get feedback from your own customers to help with your sales.

Testimonials build trust, credibility and a sense of security for the prospective customers when they visit your site.

When a customer who has not had the pleasure of working with you before comes to your website… all marketing messages directly from you will be viewed with some suspicion… after all you have a vested interest in selling your product.

But… testimonials from existing happy customers are different… it’s no longer just you saying how good you are… it’s other people (who have nothing to gain from the sale) saying how your product or service has helped them.

I personally find that it makes me feel safer to buy from business with happy customers.

You need a system to ask for testimonials

Here’s what I recommend…

1. Ask for testimonials as soon after the sales as is reasonable but…give the customer sufficient time to actually use the product first.
2. Do not assume that all customers are happy. Some customers may actually be having problems so ask for their feedback as well. This may help you improve your offerings and you can always ask again once you have helped solve their problems.
3. If you’re requesting for testimonials using email, make sure that you PERSONALIZE the email with at least the customer’s name and the name of the product purchased. We all know that people use automation tools but it still is much nicer to receive an email which speaks specifically to us.

Using Outlook to Request for Testimonials

Depending on the number of sales you make, you may be able to write and send each email individually. Personally I think that testimonial requests can be done once a week.

1. Maintain an Excel file with a list of sales. At the minimum the spreadsheet should contain the customer’s name, email address and product purchased
2. Create a prewritten email that you will use to request for testimonials. The advantage of a prewritten template is that the quality of your request is not dependant on how you feel or how much time you have.
3. Use a product like EmailMerge for Outlook to create and send out your testimonial requests. Email Merge PRO will work directly with your Excel spreadsheet and send personalized individually addressed emails to each person.

Finally… here’s the template that we use to request for testimonials

I hope you find this post useful to getting great feedback from your customers. If you have a lot of customers, download a trial version of Email Merge PRO for Outlook from our website today.