Testimonials (Part 1): These six filters help you select your best customer quotes

The best ad copy, the most compelling case for your business or product, is copy you can never write. No matter how hard you try. 

You've got to let your customer tell her own story.

About three years ago, I met a Denver area entrepreneur whose attention to—and work with—his customers' feedback bests all I've ever seen...

John Holzmann and his wife Sarita own and operate Sonlight Curriculum®, a K-12 homeschool publisher and retailer based in Littleton, Colorado. After years of writing Sonlight's annual catalog and other marketing content himself, John began to pass the work to a growing in-house team. His standards for advertising and editorial writing are exceptionally high, by most anyone's measure. But if Sonlight's customers are a treasure to the Holzmanns (and they certainly are), then those homeschool parents' praises for their curriculum are treated as pure gold. 

Give every customer every opportunity to give you feedback.

Happy customers are like "zillion-dollar" sales reps, hiding all around you in plain sight. The right words from one enthusiastic, loyal buyer can outsell your most hot-shot campaign from now 'til the bell rings. So why not get her talking about you as much as you can!

Following Sonlight's lead, you can use customer support surveys, user forums, product review website widgets, feedback postcards—whatever it takes. Test new methods regularly, and keep using everything that works. Then, once a customer rewards your efforts with a fresh, warm quote...

Don't print a word of it. Why? 

Give each story a chance to stand out from the crowd.

Your robust feedback system has another big payoff even before you use a single response: namely, you get more responses to choose from. Gather new comments until you've got a batch you can review quickly. Sonlight's marketing team recently designed a new process that includes a monthly review and 3-point scoring system, to rank new quotes by relative strength.

When you rank incoming quotes, your goal is to give further attention only to the entries with greatest potential. Develop and manage this review as a routine task and you'll always have a strong arsenal of customer testimonials, ready for all your marketing collateral. 

Next, identify the very best quotes based on a standard.

I've worked closely and intensely with strong quote pools for 14+ years. Tens of thousands of customer comments later, the best quotes all reliably share a few common elements which, without the first edit, lifted them above all the "fluff and filler" remarks. As John Holzmann worked to hand over the daily copywriting responsibilities at Sonlight Curriculum, he spent considerable energy to teach his crew these keys which he held most critical...

Six requirements for a top-ranked customer testimonial:

(listed here in order of importance) 

1. Benefits: What tangible good has the customer experienced as a result of using your product or dealing with your company? Watch for users who saved money, saved time, avoided costly repairs, scored high praise from others. Look for quotes that answer this question.
2. Specific: What happened that caused those benefits for that customer? All benefit statements should "tell the story," and include supporting evidence. If you're familiar with classic F.A.B. (feature, advantage, benefit) marketing copy, this is the feature/advantage part. But that's another article.
3. Replicable: Answer the reader's question, "What's in it for me?" Look for real, relevant experiences that make your reader imagine (and say to herself) a wistful, "Yes, I want that outcome for myself." Or (even better) a confident, "Hey, I could do that, too!"
4. Emotional: Closely related to "replicable." Hunt for quotes that help your reader feel all of the fear, anxiety, guilt and tension... turned to joy, peace, relief, gratitude and confidence the writer is trying to express. Don't worry if the emotion is not crystal-clear yet. Find the spark.
5. Credible: On one hand, skip the "honeymoon" user who loves your product after just a few days or weeks—no one is impressed. At a minimum, get feedback from users who respond after their "money-back guarantee" or returns period has expired; better yet to get strong testimony from a customer who has used the product fully and returned to buy again. On the other hand, you'll want to temper the strongest (superlative) statements if they are beyond "what I imagine I can replicate." Bottom line: your reader must believe.
6. Purity: Think furnace-fired gold and silver versus raw "dross," or unrefined ore. Very few original quotes from customers will get right to the heart of the message. You can always edit out the "filler," and save your reader from having to wade through clutter. Clutter is anything that doesn't count toward fulfilling one of the other five requirements above.

That sixth criteria can be, flexibly, part of your selection process or the editing phase. In part two of this article, I explore the other 6-step guide Sonlight's copywriters use when they edit feedback from customers for use in marketing collateral. With this guide, they carefully boost their best original quotes into seriously engaging customer testimonials that sell their homeschool curriculum to a conscientious family audience around the world.

You can jump straight to part two right here:

Testimonials (Part 2): Six steps add marketing strength to your customer quotes