About a month ago we launched our all-in-on testimonial plugin: Thrive Ovation and since then we've been listening to your feedback and comments about how we could improve it.
Today we're thrilled to show you 4 new features we added to Thrive Ovation.
More...
One of the most important aspects of getting good testimonials is asking the right questions and making it as easy as possible for your customers to give you a meaningful answer to those questions.
That's why the first element we focused on improving is the testimonial capture page.​
1. Question Placeholders: Get More In-Depth Testimonials
Being in front of a blank answer field can be daunting. Prompting your visitors with the beginning of the answer might be all they need to give you a glowing testimonial.
That's why you can now add placeholder text in the answer field of the testimonial capture form.
For each question you can prompt them with a possible beginning for their answer or an example of an answer.
2. Remove Image Field: Protect Your Visitor's Privacy in Sensitive Niches
Having images on your testimonials has been proven to increase their credibility but some industries still struggle with stigmas and people are reluctant to give pictures.
To avoid scaring away these people, we made the image field optional.
If you know your customers would never testify with their picture, using the capture form without asking for a photo will help you get more testimonials.
3. Success URL: Delight Your Customers With a Warm Thank You Message
Up until now you could already display a personalized thank you-message after you received a testimonial but we took it to a whole new level.
The redirect to URL feature allows you to show any page after someone submits their testimonial.
This opens up a whole new field of possibilities!
You could show a video thank you message, offer a bonus or a special promotion code, etc. Your imagination is the limit.
These 3 new features are the improvements on the testimonial capture form, but there is one more that I want to show you:
4. Custom Placeholder Image: Say No to the Anonymous Grey Guy
I'm sure you know who I'm talking about here... The grey guy that's used as a placeholder when a testimonial has no image.
In the Thrive Ovation settings, you now have the possibility to replace this placeholder image by something that fits your brand.
Our designers created this image, feel free to save it and use it on your own website!
All of these features are available right now, in the latest version of Thrive Ovation. If you're a user, you can start the update directly from your plugins list.
More To Come...
As you might have noticed by now, we never stop improving our products and Thrive Ovation is no exception!
Features that we're releasing (very) soon include:
- Testimonial templates without images
- A clone option for testimonials
- More advanced filter options
- ...
What do you think? Do you like these new features? Are there other things we could do to improve the plugin? Let us know in the comments below!
Thank you!
You’re welcome Ulfried
You guys are seriously awesome. Amazing improvements!
Glad you like the improvements David!
Great! But please let the User Upload his own picture in the capture Page. So he doesnt need gravatar.
Thanks!
Hi Alex, the reason we chose Gravatar (and uploading an image from Facebook or Google+) is because allowing users to upload a picture would mean a possible security breach and we do not want to jeopardize your website security!
Hi Hanna. I am curious.
How is it a security breach.. I know you can put stuff in a jpg, but since image upload is possible in som any other ways, I think it may be possible to handle this?
A brand my choose to upload a logo ie. Would that not be better than the dummy image?
Hi Henrik,
As soon as you allow visitors to upload stuff to your website it becomes a weak point in the security of your website.
We do not want our plugin to be responsible for this.
If you want to upload a logo for a certain testimonial you can do that from the edit function of the testimonial.
Hi Hanne
Love this plug-in but an issue I’ve found with the option of allowing people to use their Facebook image doesn’t really work due to browsers automatically preventing pop-ups.
I’ve raised this with your support team here and they said they can’t see a way around this except for adding text above the Thrive Testimonial capture form saying something like “Your browser might block the pop-up when trying to load your Facebook image.”
(support topic had been closed)
Any ideas to get around this?
Cheers, Mark
No. I think our support team gave a good alternative.
You are just awesome!
I have a directory website, with listings from my neighbourhoud. Thrive Ovation would be amazing on my website, if I could track somehow what’s the page where the testimonial came from. It’s important for me to know that the Pizza place on main street was great and not the one on third street.
Being able to change the default image was one thing that I really wanted to be able to do. Thank you for continuing to listen to your customers and giving them what they WANT! Thrive Themes ROCKS! xx
Hi Megan, happy we could provide you with the feature you needed!
These are very useful updates, thank you for the great work! Thrive Ovation is one of the best plugins, we’ve collected a lot if testimonials with it.
We’re stoked to hear that Tibor
Well done!
It is just thing kind is attention-to-detail tweaking that makes you stand head and shoulders above the rest.
Thank You
Thanks Trevor!
Great stuff! One thing that I’m missing in the plugin is the ability to add logos as the image for a testimonial.
I have a lot of testimonials where I prefer to have a logo of the reviewer’s company rather than his or her own picture. Being able to include a logo in the testimonial somehow would be great.
Hi Michiel,
You can go into the testimonial and edit the image, this would allow you to upload the logo.
Like I told to Alex, having visitors upload an image onto your website would be a potential security breach.
Hope this helps you to do what you want 🙂
How do you entice people to leave a testimonial? I don’t understand where to put the ovation plugin and how to get people there.
Hi Kim,
Thrive Ovation is an all-in-one testimonial plugin that allows you to add capture pages anywhere on your website and manage the testimonials that you get through those capture pages. Or you can simply convert social testimonials or WordPress comments into testimonials.
The first step in getting conversion boosting testimonials would be to set up a capture page on a new page on your website. The next step is to ask your customers to leave a testimonial and send them to that page.
If you need more help, we’ve created a complete 3 video mini-course all about how to get and use testimonials on your website. You can find it here
Awesome!
Thrive continues to impress me as an Agency License holder!
Thanks!
Glad to hear that Harvey!
Just got all my old testimonials loaded into Ovation and up on my site. Great! Loving the plugin-in! Two things I found myself wanting still are:
1) The ability to create a Full and a Short Version of the Testimonial. People tend to write me a lot and I want to share the long version in certain places, but then also a ‘just the most juicy bits’ version in other/most places. I’d LOVE to be able to submit BOTH the Full and Short versions of the testimonial to a client for their revision acceptance and then be able to select in my Templates which version I want to be shown where.
2) I’d like the carousel / gallery view to have the option to auto-rotate at a customizable interval.
I’ve longed to have this too!
+1 for taking action on those old testimonials Dylan!
1) That’s one of the reasons why we’re adding the clone testimonial option to the plugin in a near future. This will allow you to copy the long testimonial, edit it and submit for review without losing the original testimonial.
2) Thanks for the suggestion
Curious why there is no Activecampaign email integration?
Hi Mike,
Ovation integrates with email delivery services such as Postmark or Mandrill because we need it to be able to deliver an email to the customer who left a testimonial (Eg. to ask for approval).
Active Campaign (and others such as Aweber, Mailchimp, etc.) are email marketing services. They can not be used to send transactional emails to one person (as is the case here for a testimonial approval email).
That’s the reason why there is no integration with Email Marketing Services in Thrive Ovation.
Hi Hanne,
Why can email marketing services (like active campaign) not be used to send transactional emails? I think technically they can..?
Technically, they can, but offering it as a service to customers is very different from email marketing. I imagine it’s like running a whole separate business, which is as complex but often less lucrative than email marketing services.
These are brilliant changes… I was using Review Trust before but now I’m changing to Thrive Ovation. Great stuff guys, thanks!
Thanks Graeme
Yes, yes, yes, and yes!!! You guys really are amazing. I’m always directing people your way. I really appreciate the work you all put into improving the Thrive products.
I will actually be using Ovation to collect stories . . . not testimonials. I’m intending to capture stories abut career path confusion from site visitors. Then they will be edited and short phrases displayed so other visitors can see they are not alone in facing this problem.
We’ll see how it works. Launching soon!!!!
That’s a nice way to use the product Jay! Let us know how it goes
Good updates. I would really love the ability for a person to upload their own image. Most of our customers don’t have a WP/Gravatar account, so I end up going and finding an image off a social profile.
Hi Chett,
In addition to Gravatar, you can allow people to upload from Facebook or Google+, I think this would fix your problem 🙂
As for allowing people to upload an image, this would be a weak spot in the security of your website (allowing people to upload stuff to your website) so this is not something we’ll add to the plugin.
Thank you! Brilliant plugin.
Request: please allow us to manage (rename, delete) tags! We really need this!
Hi Holden,
Thanks for the suggestion. You’re right, that would be helpful 🙂
Great work!
Thanks Marshall
Definitely what was needed. I will now add to my pages.
Thanks David
Is there any way to adjust the size of testimonials? In some of my landing pages, some testimonials are too large and looks ugly though the design is good.
Hi Reona,
We’re working on some more “compact” templates for testimonials. I hope these will solve your problem.
MERCI ! You guys rock. I love using Thrive themes and I particularly enjoy your training. Keep the good work!
Thanks Alain
Nice job again guys! Will there be a feature that allows the reviews to be posted to a Facebook page as well? I’m currently using a plugin that is posting the reviews on both my site and my fanpage.
Hi Victor,
This is not something that we’re currently planning on implementing.
Thank you very much for the information, Hanne !
You’re welcome Rosa 🙂
It would also be great to use any autoresponder after someone makes a testimonial, so i can send him specific emails.
Hi Alexander,
I understand why you would like to do that but I would suggest you ask people to opt-in.
You could add an opt-in form on the thank you page.
Adding people to a list because they left a testimonial is not very legal.
Hanne, thank you for the update. I love it!
Glad to hear that Irena 🙂
Cooool ! Thanks Hanne ! :)) I didn’t try it yet, but it’s now in my to-do list 😀 Just a quick question… If we turn on the picture, but the person doesn’t want to add a pic’.. The person can still write without the picture ? cheers*
Hi Sandra, yes no problem they can submit a testimonial without picture even when the image field is shown! Also I really encourage you to try it… you’ll get good testimonials for sure!
Please add Google star rating rich snippet feature in Thrive Ovation so our customers can give us ratings.
Hi Leon,
This is a testimonial plugin, testimonials and reviews are two different things with two different purposes.
We’ll most likely not add review features to Thrive Ovation.
Nevertheless, please give us the option to include a star rating on the input form, and an option to display stars on the ‘testimonials’. I doubt it is practical to plug it in to google’s rating system, but having stars on our own website is preferable. (re: amazon.com).
I build all my testimonial & suggestion capture pages with the Thrive Ovations component of Content Builder. The plugin is great, but is still missing one essential feature. Because testimonials and client suggestions are worth their weight in gold, it’s not just polite, but also expedient to immediately thank those who take the time to submit. Currently, there is no way for me to be alerted that a new testimonial has been submitted (unless I stay logged in to each website’s Ovation dashboard indefinitely). The solution is simple: Please add a new trigger to Notifications Manager, namely the clicking of the “Submit” button in a Thrive Ovations testimonial capture page.
After setting this as my Trigger and setting a templated email to myself as the Action, I’d receive an email notification every time a new testimonial form is submitted. After logging into the Ovations dashboard, I could then read the submission and respond to that specific testimonial or suggestion immediately.
I love that suggestion! Thanks for sharing your method to do it!
Hi Stan, this is available now.
You can learn all about it in this post
Hi Hanne. I love your blog articles and videos. Keep them coming. Quick question: how do we know that a new testimonial has been captured using the Ovation testimonial capture element without logging into the dashboard and checking each day?
Hi Steve,
We just added the possibility to have an email notification when a new testimonial is submitted 🙂
You can check out this article to get full instructions!
Hey,
with this plugin, can I make a survey form? I am looking to make a survey form which also includes a testimonial entry. Thanks
When are you going to, first do a few more blog posts about Thrive Ovation?
I’m new to thrive themes and not many blog posts to read about it.
I am starting a new blog and thought I would start collecting testimonials to use later.
And how about some templates for the testimonial capture form?
Cheers, Adam
Hi Adam,
Happy you’re enjoying Ovation and collecting testimonials immediately is a good idea! At the moment we don’t have extra templates on the roadmap.