The Importance of Sharing Customer Success Stories

 As marketers, we are always looking for new ways to attract and entice prospects, lead them down our sales funnel, and hopefully convert them into paying customers. But, we all know that it’s not as easy as it sounds. With the help of customer success stories, you have the opportunity to increase your website visitors, impress prospects, and stand out from your competition. And, if done right, you have a good chance of generating an impressive ROI and driving conversions. Before we go over the importance of sharing customer success stories, let’s go over what a customer success story even is. 

What is a Customer Success Story?

A customer success story can be shown to your prospective customers and current customers to help them get a better understanding of your product. You can build them with text, supporting images and long or short form videos. As the name implies, customer success stories are when your clients share their previous struggles, how they use your product or service on a regular basis, and how you have solved their struggles. Now that you know what a customer success story is, let’s go over why customer success stories are so important for your company.

Prospective Clients vs Current Clients

Believe it or not, customer success stories are beneficial for both your prospective clients and your current clients. To keep both groups happy, it’s important to have a variety of case studies that will be relatable to your target audience. This means interviewing a variety of clients who have different backgrounds, industries, company size, and other key points. Additionally, having clients with a variety of struggles they have faced. As an example, if you have a current client who is coming up on their subscription renewal date, they may be shopping around for different alternatives to ensure they are using the best. If you have a customer success story that discusses how your client switched from your main competitor, and how much happier they are with you, that could encourage your client to renew for another period. 

Building Trust

Building trust with your prospects is essential. Without a trusting relationship, there’s a good chance that they won’t convert. And, if they do convert, they may not stay with your company for as long as you’d like them to. Showing your prospects how others trust and rely on your product is a fantastic way to build confidence. In both your offering and brand. In the article Why Building Brand Trust Is Just As Important As Building Your Brand, by Forbes, the author states that brand trust is vital to a company’s livelihood. Without trust, your company can quickly fall through the cracks and lose out on revenue and growth opportunities.

Provide Content Variety

Not all of your prospects are looking for the same information. Or even the same form of content when they land on your website. Prospects may not want to watch your explainer video, or comb through your website for how-to’s or other information. So, by providing your prospects customer success stories you can increase the chance of them fully understanding what your product does. And how it can help. The more content you have, the more likely your clients will be to find exactly what they are looking for. And ultimately, not leave your website with unanswered questions. In addition, try to build different formats of your success stories to give your website visitors options on how they consume the information. Short form and long form video, as well as text with supporting images are all formats that you can use to build your stories.

Invoke Emotion 

When you are building your customer success stories, you’ll want to start off by explaining how your client struggled before they found you. Then, you will move on to explaining how your client has used your product or service to solve their problem. Provide stats, trends, quotes, and other information to help enforce your points. By telling this story, your prospect can relate to the client featured in your success story. And, they will picture how they’ll use your product on a regular basis. Along with all of the benefits it will bring their company. Since you are invoking emotion like this, ensure you include a call to action to give your prospect the opportunity to convert. 

Competitive Advantage

We all want to be the best. As a company, how you differ and stand out from your competition is how you do so. And, customer success stories are a great way to differentiate from your competition and make your prospect’s lives easier. This is especially true if your competitors only have a few subpar, or don’t have any customer success stories.  Show your prospective customers that you care and support your current customers. They may be more likely to choose your company over your competition.

Social Proof

The concept of social proof is becoming more and more important for companies. By definition, social proof refers to the idea that consumers will copy the actions of others. Because they believe it works if others are doing it. Essentially, by showing how many other companies use your product, it will show your prospects that they will also benefit from your product. As a result, you will be more likely to close a deal by having customer success stories.  

SEO

A strong SEO strategy can help your company not only increase website traffic. But also increase the number of conversions you receive. By having high-quality customer case studies that are optimized with SEO best practices in mind, your webpage can rank organically. With a little keyword research and optimization, your customer success story might even be able to rank on the first page of your targeted search results.

Marketing and Advertising

Aside from web pages, one of my favorite ways to use customer success stories is in marketing and advertising strategies. Remarketing to your previous website visitors is a fantastic way to get in front of prospects that are already interested in your company. By showing your prospects a short video clip or an image of a quote, you can entice your previous website visitors and ensure that your company is not forgotten about. This is especially important to consider, as on average it takes about 8 touchpoints with a prospect before they convert. So, by reminding them how happy they would be with your company and how much easier their life would be, they might be one step closer to converting.

Marketing Analytics

As marketing professionals, we are always looking to prove that our new tactics work with marketing analytics and data. So, you’ll probably be wondering what marketing analytics to watch with your new customer success story initiatives. The marketing analytics that you focus on will depend on your company. But, here are a few of the most common related to your customer success story initiatives. 

Time on Page 

Time on page may seem like a pretty basic marketing analytic, but it’s very important. Any time you introduce new pages to your website, you’ll want to monitor how long each visitor is on the page for. If your prospects are not spending a lot of time on your customer success story page, it’s a good idea to update the page content. Change up your titles to make them more enticing, swap in new pictures, or other updates to the page to keep visitors engaged.

New vs Returning Visitors

With your customer success story webpages, you’ll want to compare your new and returning visitors that are viewing this page. Going back to the idea that prospects take an average of 8 touchpoints before converting, this analytic can help you gauge where the visitor is in your sales funnel. Then, you can make changes to your website when applicable to help entice this prospect to convert. As an example, introducing a live chat software that has specific messages for those returning visitors. 

Exit Rate

The last marketing analytic that you should monitor that can help you optimize your customer success stories and increase conversions is exit rate. Exit rate refers to the percentage of page visitors that leave your website on that page. This metric is important because if your exit rate is high, that means your prospects are not finding what they are looking for. Ensure that you have a strong call to action that will guide them through your website in hopes to get a conversion. By tracking these three metrics, you will be more likely to increase your ROI.

How to Create High-Quality Customer Success Stories

As you can see, there are a ton of ways how your prospects and current customers can benefit from your customer success stories. You may be wondering how you can create high-quality customer success stories and gain all the benefits mentioned above. The easiest way to create customer success stories that are optimized is to leave it to otrillo. With otrillo, all you’ll need to do is enter the questions you’d like to ask your current client, and send them the link to take their personalized questionnaire. We’ll handle the rest!

Once your client submits their survey, our creative team will edit and format their customer success story with our Professional Editing as a Service, or PEaaS. Before you know it, you’ll have a perfectly branded and personalized customer success story to share with your prospects. Join the otrillo waitlist today to be the first to take advantage of our unique service.

Wrapping Up

Customer success stories can benefit your company in a multitude of ways. From building trusting relationships to increasing conversion rates, and everything in between. Creating a customer success story that is optimized for all of the points mentioned above may seem difficult. But, with the help of otrillo, you can leave the hard part to us. Don’t forget to join the otrillo waitlist to gain exclusive access to custom built customer success stories.