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If you want to build trust in your brand or in what you sell, you need past customers to put in a good word for you. Testimonials are an avenue for customers to give their honest opinions about your product or service.
We’re all prisoners of social proof. If someone says a product is good, we’re more likely to buy. Customer testimonials are also a great way to expand your brand’s reach. When people have positive thing to say about your business, they are more likely to tell their friends and colleagues about you.
For online stores built on WordPress, finding the best plugin to centralize and speed up your review curation process is critical. This guide provides an overview of some of the best WordPress testimonial plugins and how you can make the most out of them.
Why Online Stores Need Testimonials
E-commerce businesses operate to please their customers through their products or services. Attracting customers to your site is one thing, finding out how your products fared is another and you can’t get the latter unless they provide feedback. This feedback is called testimonials or review and it should form a critical aspect in your marketing strategy.
Many customers are getting more interested in the prospect of writing reviews. The Global Web Index revealed that in 2019, almost 50 percent of all internet users posted reviews at least once a month. Testimonials are critical in convincing prospects to buy from you. According to data from Trustpilot, 89 percent of customers worldwide read product reviews before purchasing them.
With customers both eager to read and write testimonials, every e-commerce business needs to have an appropriate section for them. If you have a store hosted on WordPress, there are some interesting tools that you can use to acquire testimonials.
Best WordPress Testimonial Plugins
1. Thrive Ovation
Thrive Ovation tops our list of the best testimonial plugins: It’s one of the tools offered by WordPress production startup Thrive Themes. This plugin makes it easy to collect reviews from customers and showcasing them with ease on your site.
One of the plugin’s greatest strength is its ability to pull reviews from several sources. You can gather feedback from your customers on Facebook and Instagram and plug them into your WordPress site. The plugin works as a plug-and-pay.
The tool puts the feedback curation process on autopilot. You can add the pictures of testimonial authors and their social media profiles with ease.
Thrive Ovation also has several built-in testimonial collection forms that you can add to your site. The forms are designed to collect testimonials regularly from your customers.
Testimonials can be categorized with tags, which helps you file them based on products purchased or topics. Each feedback can be stored with several tags. The Thrive Ovation plugin can be customized to fit with your brand colors thanks to the large number of templates offering. You can even customize colors and display options if you want to personalize the templates more.
One of Thrive Ovation’s best parts is that you can set up your preferred testimonial scheme. So, the platform uses its testimonial collection forms and uses the testimonials gotten to give you a steady stream of testimonials every time. Having a fresh batch can bolster your conversion rates.
Thrive Ovation Pricing
The plugin offers a licensing fee that supports your business for a year. website (or websites) for a year. Thrive Ovation has three licensing packages depending on the number of sites you manage..
- You can purchase a single license for $39
- A five-site license costs $47
- A 15-site license costs $97
Since Thrive Ovation is one of the multitudes of tools offered by Thrive Themes, you can easily purchase a Thrive Membership for $19 per month (billed annually) to enjoy the tool. In this case, you will get Thrive Ovation and the entire product suite from ThriveThemes — the plugin’s developers.
2. Testimonials Widget
Testimonials Widget is a great plugin option for companies with a large number of testimonials and reviews. The plugin allows you to set up different categories for your testimonials. You can use these to make carousels that reveal only the elements you’re looking for.
These carousels can include testimonials that you put together, shortcodes from third-party plugins, and a custom CSS module. If you want, you can use widgets and shortcodes to place individual testimonials to pages too.
Testimonials Widget has a free option and a premium version. The former lets you display static testimonials or rotating testimonials from many. You can then insert these testimonials easily. If you want to display several testimonials for different pages, you can filter them by post IDs, tags, categories, and more.
For the premium version, you get even more options to display your content. Furthermore, the version also comes with excerpts, ratings, caching, and other exciting features.
Testimonials Widget Pricing
The free version of Testimonials Widget is limited in its functionality. The Premium option is priced based on the number of sites to be applied. To get a license for the premium version, you will have to pay $29.99. You pay $59.99 to get a three-site license, while $119.99 and $239.99 will get you a ten-site license and an unlimited license respectively.
3. Testimonials Slider
Developed by RadiusThemes, Testimonials Slider allows you to add testimonials in grids and slider formats. Both options offer tremendous opportunities for online store owners to display customer feedback on their site.
With the Slider layout, ecommerce merchants can display customer reviews as slideshows on the website. This is suitable for stores that want to incorporate testimonials to certain pages in their stores like a product or category page.
The Grid layout works best if you would like to devote an entire page to the testimonials. It fits most website designs, thus fitting the whole page with the testimonials.
Testimonials Slider comes with a smart column calculation and distribution feature that finds the ideal number of columns per page. Based on the widget settings and its positioning on the site, it will automatically choose the number of columns to display on the webpage.
The plugin also adds more substance to your testimonials for credibility. Rather than displaying huge chunks of text, this plugin offers you options to add more details about the author. You can input the author’s social media accounts and URLs with a dedicated icon. This allows new visitors to verify the authors, which adds more trust to your brand.
While this testimonial plugin offers most of the bells and whistles, getting started could be a daunting task for most people. The plugin requires that you generate a shortcode before testimonials can be displayed. So, you will still have to use the shortcode generator even if you want to show one testimonial. Otherwise, none of the testimonials will show when you use the Block Editor.
Testimonials Slider Pricing
Testimonial Slider comes with the following pricing tiers:
- The Lite Plan – The plan is free, and it covers just one website. However, only 200 people can view your testimonials before they disappear.
- The Basic Plan – This plan costs $5 per month. You can use it on an unlimited number of websites, and it supports up to 5,000 views. You also get premium support from Elfsight and free installation service.
- The Pro Plan – On the Pro Plan, you get unlimited websites ac. nd support for up to 50,000 testimonial views. The plan costs $10 per month.
- The Enterprise Plan – Costing $25 per month, the Enterprise Plan covers up to 5 million views on an unlimited number of websites.
4. Testimonial Rotator
Testimonial Rotator is a free plug-in that allows online stores to display reviews with different animations and transition speeds. If you want new testimonials, you merely have to tick a box, and the plugin will display random reviews on the webpage.
This unique plugin lets ecommerce merchants create testimonial custom post types, which can then be assigned to a rotator displayed on the site. That’s not all. You also get a custom CSS box for those with coding knowledge and the ability for customers to assign stars and ratings.
For trust and authenticity, you can include authors’ details to your reviews manually. Testimonial Rotator also allows you to create multiple rotators that are connected to different testimonials. Once created, you can insert rotators on every page with either a shortcode or a widget.
Testimonial Rotator Pricing
The plugin is free to use but the freemium comes with five free testimonial themes. Additional layouts would cost you $19.99.
5. Super Testimonials
Super Testimonials is a simple plugin that comes with five testimonial templates. You can add several extras to each testimonial — including a featured image of the author, a rating, details of the author, and others.
You can assign testimonials into categories with Super Testimonials. The plugin also comes with a shortcode for displaying testimonials in a widget. This feature is in line with the option to add testimonials to a sidebar or embed them into a page.
Super Testimonials works on all devices and platforms.
Super Testimonials Pricing
You can get a free version that is simple to use and offers basic testimonial features. This means limited configuration.
The pro version of the plugin costs $14 per year and it’s loaded. It comes with ten list templates with 30 skins, 20 slider templates with 60 skins, and five grid templates with 15 skins. Super Testimonials’ premium offering also adds over 100 shortcodes and the ability to display testimonials in columns.
How to Effectively Handle Bad Testimonials
Responding to customers when they compliment your business is easy, but what happens when they criticize and judge you unfairly? Negative online reviews come with the territory. No one goes on a winning streak forever. When they do happen, how do you deal with them without causing a mess out of the situation? Here are some tips for handling bad testimonials.
Develop the Right Attitude
You will first need to understand that negative reviews aren’t so bad for your business. They provide a means for you to improve on an area where you’ve been lagging, and they can be useful for your business down the line. So, encourage your customers to leave reviews and embrace both the good and the bad.
Respond Quickly
You should have a culture where you promptly respond to customer feedback, whether good or bad. Be prompt in your response time.
A quick response can also convince the person to give your business a second chance. However, this is only true if you deal with the problem that led to the complaint. Most complaints address pain points and aren’t meant to smear your integrity.
Personalize Your Responses
Remember that you’re dealing with your customers here. Negative reviews usually relate to different aspects of your product or service. They don’t deserve the same response. Customers want to be heard, and they want to know that their opinions matter. Generic responses defeat the purpose of giving reviews in the first place.
Give reviews custom, thoughtful responses. This way, customers are also encouraged to be more honest about their opinions concerning your business.
In the end, no one knows how best to serve your customers than the customers themselves.
Take the Conversation Offline
Depending on the problem, you might be better served if you took the resolution offline instead of leaving a public comment. You can contact the disgruntled customer through their account, email, social media link, or any other contact details available. Get more information about what went wrong and fix things.
If you can help the customer find a resolution, do so – and quickly. If you can’t, apologize and look into other remediation efforts. The point is to make them leave happier than get them to come back.
You Don’t Have to Let This Experience Pass
Many businesses tend to ask reviewers to take down negative testimonials after they help fix the issues they had. However, you don’t necessarily have to do that.
Projecting an overly positive testimonial section tends to rub people off the wrong way.
It’s also not great to filter your reviews. Trustpilot reveals that 62 percent of customers won’t buy from brands that censor reviews.
If someone has a bad experience, you should let the testimonial stand — as long as you responded to them and tried to fix things. This sends a message to prospective customers that you’re human — not a robot. You make mistakes but you’re willing to fix things when you do.
Conclusion
Businesses thrive on testimonials. They’re critical in building trust, and they sends a message to the customers that their grievances are heard and treated. Testimonials are also indicators on areas in your e-commerce business that needs improvement.
If your e-commerce store is hosted on WordPress, any of the plugins listed above will make it easy to curate feedback from your customers on your product and service offering. For building trust and increasing sales conversion, these plugins are necessary
Stay Ahead of the Market with Benzinga Pro!
Want to trade like a pro? Benzinga Pro gives you the edge you need in today's fast-paced markets. Get real-time news, exclusive insights, and powerful tools trusted by professional traders:- Breaking market-moving stories before they hit mainstream media
- Live audio squawk for hands-free market updates
- Advanced stock scanner to spot promising trades
- Expert trade ideas and on-demand support
