Powerfully customer-centric Denver company talks more about how user feedback gets the Red Carpet treatment...
If you haven't already, be sure to read my 2-part article on how you can turn your customers into "zillion-dollar" sales copywriters:
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Testimonials (Part 1): These six filters help you select your best customer quotes
Testimonials (Part 2): Six steps add marketing strength to your customer quotes
I developed that article around two 6-point checklists that power the efforts of Sonlight Curriculum®, a Denver-based publisher of one of the world's leading literature-rich K-12 homeschool programs.
While I wrote my drafts, I had the chance to do some Q&A with Laura Lee Ellis, staff copywriter for Sonlight's marketing team. At first, I thought I might integrate this interview with the checklists. On second thought, I realized it's better to give you that how-to material as compact take-away content. But I didn't want to leave Laura Lee's answers to my questions on the cutting-room floor...
DCCE grills Denver copywriter Laura Lee Ellis on her company's invested approach to customer testimonials
DCCE: "What makes Sonlight's customer testimonials so valuable to your team?"
LLE: "Our customer quotes add life to our marketing. Each testimonial shows the heart of Sonlight reflected back to us... and to other potential customers.
"A customer who has tried our product has more credibility than we could ever purport. In an age where product reviews and blog opinions reign supreme in consumer decision-making, everyone is looking to the customer who has tried the product to help them make their buying decision and shape their opinions.
"In a sense, these quotes tell 'the Sonlight story.' Through them, we see themes of kids who love to learn, families who enjoy quality time together, excellent educational and a hunger for good literature. This feedback helps shape our identity."
DCCE: "What methods for gathering new quotes have you found work best for your company?"
LLE: "One of the best ways to gather lots of good quotes is to tie our quotes to our annual photo contest—we encourage people to share their Sonlight story through images and words. We also have a place on our online forums for people to share humorous or touching 'Sonlight Moments' that often make great quotes.
"Also, we always look for gems in customer feedback to our emails, from our curriculum consultants who talk to people on convention floors, and from letters of thanks to our president. And we regularly find good quotes through our product reviews at Sonlight's website."
DCCE: "What tools or methods does Sonlight use to manage all this high-value content?"
LLE: "Right now, we use a specially developed website that helps us score and sort quotes and photos. We are still working on the best way to manage all of this information!
"We make sure we always have at least one person who can manage and be familiar with the type of content we are gathering and disseminate it for particular marketing efforts. We have an indexed system (in the newest stages) to file and find quotes by particular subjects, themes and products so we can pull them for specific promotional efforts."
DCCE: "How does your team measure effectiveness of, and response to, the testimonials you publish?"
LLE: "Good question! Currently, for instance, we split-test certain pages on our website. That is, for equal numbers of visitors we randomly load a page with or without customer photos and testimonials. We can also run multiple split tests on much of our other marketing, from magazine ads to email newsletters. This lets us gauge the effectiveness of any variable in the content, including a testimonial."
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