Who is this guide for?

As a founder, you'll have heard of the power of customer testimonials and reviews to help grow your business through marketing and sales. This fluff-free guide will teach you how to collect, manage, and share your SaaS testimonials.

It's a long read, but make it to the end and you'll have a comprehensive understanding of testimonials and how to use them effectively in your SaaS business.

What is a SaaS testimonial?

A SaaS testimonial is when a customer of your SaaS shares their positive experience of your product.

Traditionally this is in the form of text or video testimonial. SaaS testimonials are used by your marketing, sales and founders to support your business goals.

Why collect SaaS testimonials?

First, testimonials are proven to increase conversion - turning more visitors into customers.

In fact, over 80% of SaaS landing pages contain testimonials. This is the most common marketing use case of testimonials. But there are more...

How else can testimonials help me SaaS?

• Get more site visits - sharing images of testimonials on your social channels can drive awareness and traffic to your landing page or demo page

• Turn more visitors into customers - using testimonials on your landing page and sign up page can help turn more visitors into customers

• Turn more demo page visitors into requests - using testimonials on your demo page can turn more demo page visitors into booked demos

• Close more deals - sending relevant testimonials  in your sales cycle can help you close more deals

SaaS testimonials: what makes a good testimonial?

What makes a good SaaS testimonial? Here's some things you will want to consider.

• Does it include the person's name?

• Does it include the person's job title?

• Is there a picture of the person who is giving the testimonial?

• Does is include the company name?

• Is there a company logo?

• Is it from a person like the person viewing the testimonial ie the person you want to convince?

• Does it focus on their pain before and life after using your product?

• Is it written in first person?

• Does it feel authentic?

• Does it avoid buzzwords?

• Does it include stats or specific outcomes to evidence or support claims?

• Is the language distinct?

• Does it show what tool or process the person switched tool

• Is it short and concise - a testimonial is not case study!

• Is it talking about what matters? What does the person you are trying to convince really care about

Use this testimonial checklist to ensure you're following best practice.

Remember you may be able to edit your client testimonials to improve them. Some before and after examples follow later in this blog.

How to collect SaaS testimonials

There are lots of different ways to collect test SaaS testimonials, from the simple to the more complex. Here's some ideas you can try. Later on we'll discuss collecting video testimonials.

Send an email

Email your customer and ask them to reply with a testimonial

Send a form

Send your customer a form to complete. This will allow you to collect all the information you need, and ask the best testimonial questions. You can create a testimonial form in seconds in Senja. You can share your form link in an email, on your social channels, or over Whatsapp.

Here's how you create a testimonial form in Senja

1. Sign up for a free account

2. Customise your form

3. Collect the link

Ring your customer

It's retro, but try picking up the phone and asking your customer for a testimonial. This will get it done quickly - if they pick up.

Add a link to your website footer, or post on socials

As mentioned, if you have a testimonial collection form you can share the link everywhere. Try sharing the link:

• In your customer community

• In your chatbot

• On your social channels

• In your email footer

• In your website footer

• Over email

• Over a messaging service like Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger

Embed your form

You can also embed your form into a website or blog page, or other place like a 'thank you' page, to collect testimonials in your own page without using a link.

It's not just about how collect testimonials. You need to ask for a testimonial at the right time for the customer, read on to find out more...

When to collect SaaS testimonials

To collect testimonials, you should consider when you collect them, not just where. We asked 15 makers their top tip for when to collect SaaS testimonials. This is what they said.

How to manage your SaaS testimonials

Most founders aren't properly managing their testimonials. At best they may have a central document where team members paste testimonials.

More realistically, testimonials are all over the place - emails, Whatsapp, written down, and posted on websites like Google, Reddit and LinkedIn.

Want to manage your testimonials in one place?

Here's more advice on managing your testimonials.

How to share your SaaS testimonials

Embed your SaaS testimonials

You should embed your SaaS testimonials on pages on your website where you want your visitor or customer to act. Create testimonial widgets and add them to your pricing, landing and upgrade pages.

Create a testimonial page

Create a testimonial page also known as a Wall of Love. Curate your best customer testimonials, as well as public reviews. But make sure you avoid these common testimonial page mistakes.

Turn your testimonials into testimonial images

Testimonial images are ideal to share on social channels and emails to help you create awareness and build trust. For an example, you could use a testimonial image in your launch email. Here's some testimonial image templates you can use.

How to edit a SaaS testimonial [before and after]

The good thing about SaaS testimonials is that they are an authentic endorsement from your existing client. However the client isn't always able to articulate your product benefits clearly or concisely. With some editing we can ensure to highlight the things that matter most.

SaaS video testimonials

In this section I'll take you through the collection of video testimonials. Collecting videos testimonials is much more complex than collecting text testimonials. Read on for my insights into collecting and using video testimonials effectively in your SaaS business.

What is a video testimonial?

A video testimonial is when your customer speaks about their positive experience of your product on video. These are more complex to collect than text testimonials, but next up I'll show you the common techniques used to collect a video testimonial.

How to collect video testimonials

• Hire an agency to plan and coordinate

• Ask your client to record on iPhone, upload the video and send it to you

• Use a testimonial tool like Senja so your customer can record the video testimonial in their browser without hassle

SaaS testimonial questions: what should I ask

Note! Don't just ask your customer for a testimonial. Give them specific questions that guide them, and help support the answers you want.

Whether you're collecting video or text testimonials, the questions you ask your customer have a big impact on what types of responses you get. Here's some suggestions for your testimonial questions to get you powerful responses.

You do want to be directive, but at the same time you want to make space for the customer to use their own language and share their own insights - as this can uncover things you may not have considered.

Who are you? First up, collect the person's full name, email, job title and company. You might not need all of this but you will want a record of it.

Milestone or tag line. Has the customer or their company achieved something of note that is worth adding to the testimonial. Examples: Host of X podcast, author of X book, or Over X followers on Twitter.

Assets. Next up you will want to collect a company logo, and a picture of the person to include in your testimonial visual.

Common testimonial questions

• What do you like about our product?

• Why did you start using our product? What were you experiencing?

• What is life like after implementing our product? What's changed? [you can also ask them to expand on this, see Unique questions below]

• Would you recommend us to a colleague or friend?

Unique questions

There are some unique testimonial formats that require you to ask specific questions. Here are some questions you might consider:

• What tool or service did you switch from?

• What specific outcome have you seen since implementing our product? This should be a quantification: a stat or number that demonstrates the outcome eg 20% increase in deals closed, 100 hours development time saved a month

• What do you think about X? Ask the person to comment on a specific part of your product or service. This could be your pricing, customer service, or functions within your product. Collecting these testimonials allows you to use them when a new lead has a relevant question or objection.

How to display or embed SaaS testimonials [on your website]

There are many ways you can display your testimonials on your landing page or other parts of your website. The most common are to use screengrabs, design or pick an element in your landing page builder, or to embed from a testimonial tool.

• Screengrab

• Design or pick an element

• Embed from a testimonial tool

How to test if your testimonials are working?

We use testimonials to increase conversion and close deals. But are they actually working? There is a large amount of research that demonstrates that testimonials are extremely effective, but are the ways to find out if they are working for you? Yes, you can test.

If you want to test the effectiveness you should most likely use a technique called AB testing. This means showing 1/2 of your visitors a page with testimonials (group A) and 1/2 of your visitors a page without testimonials (group B).

Example SaaS testimonials

Let's see what I've been talking about. I want to share some examples of testimonials from leading SaaS pages, so you can learn about the different ways businesses display testimonials.

Basecamp's landing page testimonials

Basecamp uses testimonials as a form of social proof in two key places on their landing page. The first is at the top of the page, in the Hero element, and further down the page there is a dedicated text-based testimonial section.

Placement: Hero

Placement: testimonials section

Stripe's landing page testimonials

There are no testimonials on the Stripe landing page, but logos of their well-known customers are highlighted directly under the Hero.

Geckoboard's landing page testimonials

Geckoboard highlights testimonials twice on their landing page, as well as client logos. They have a larger featured testimonial and a grid of three, as seen below:

Canny.io's landing page testimonials

Canny features 3 testimonials, all with a name, photo, job title and company. This is supported with a link to more-detailed case studies.

Typeform's landing page testimonials

Typeform's testimonial placement is at the bottom of their landing page, and includes multiple testimonials side-by-side. Clicking them loads more testimonials to the left or right.

Ahrefs's landing page testimonials

Uniquely Ahrefs allows visitors to view testimonials by job title. This helps the visitor find customers with the same use case as them.

Geneva's landing page testimonials

Geneva is using a wall-of-love style mosaic of testimonials on their landing page. An icon signals where the testimonial was sourced - for example Twitter, or Slack.

Getsitecontrol's sign up page testimonials

Getsitecontrol uses reviews and ratings on their sign up page to increase conversion. Remember, social proof can be used at critical conversion points throughout your website, not just your landing page.

Bird Eats Bug landing page testimonials

Bird Eats Bug does something unique with their testimonials, highlighting what tool the new customer migrated from. This is a great way to encourage conversion when people are in the comparison page of the buying funnel.

SaaS testimonials: bad examples [and how to fix them]

Not all testimonials are created equal. Here's some examples of testimonials on SaaS landing pages that don't follow my rules for a good testimonial. The aim here isn't to name and shame, and I also don't have data for the performance of these pages.

Instead I want to point out opportunities to increase the impact, clarity and persuasiveness of the testimonials.

Start collecting video and text testimonials free 💜

Want to increase conversion on your landing page, demo page or sign up page? Sign up to Senja totally free and collect, manage and share your testimonials without hassle or code.