Looking to learn how to get course testimonials to grow your online business? We've got you.
One of the most potent forms of marketing for online courses is word-of-mouth referrals.
It doesn’t matter how many adverts you pay for, guest posts you publish or webinars you run, your potential customers want to know what someone else thinks about your online course before they buy.
A good marketer knows that once you’ve hooked a potential customer and they want your product, you need to remove all their excuses or reasons why they won’t buy.
And often their very last objections can be cured with testimonials.
Testimonials are your way of tapping into word-of-mouth marketing by providing a different voice to your own that can step in and whisk away a customer’s concerns just as their purchase anxiety starts to flare up.
But how can you capture such testimonials when you’re just starting out? Well, let’s look at these quick testimonial capture hacks you can deploy to get rave reviews early and send sales through the roof!
Here’s Why Course Testimonials Can Help Grow Your Platform
If you're teaching online, you're probably always trying to get more students. You've worked hard on your course and tried different ways to tell people about it. But there's one simple thing that can really help: asking your students to share what they think about your course. These comments, or testimonials, can be super useful.
Testimonials are like gold for your online course. They're real words from real students that can help you attract more people to sign up. Here's why they're so powerful:
They show your course works. When someone's thinking about taking your course, seeing that others liked it and learned from it can be really convincing. It's way more effective than just you saying how great your course is.
They build trust. Online courses can feel risky because students can't meet you in person.
Basically, testimonials do a lot of your marketing work for you. They prove your course is valuable, build trust, and help turn interested people into actual students. That's why they're so great for growing your platform.
How to Collect Customer Testimonials to Increase Course Sales
1. Save Time and Use a Testimonial Management Plugin
Collecting and managing testimonials is important, but it doesn't have to eat up your time. That's where Thrive Ovation comes in - it's a plugin that makes handling student feedback a breeze.
Thrive Ovation helps with every step of the testimonial process. It lets you create easy-to-use forms for gathering feedback, and can even send out requests automatically at the right times. This means you'll catch students when they're most excited about your course.
One great feature is how it organizes testimonials. You can sort reviews by course topics or student results, making it easy to find the right ones for your marketing.
Showing off testimonials is simple too. Thrive Ovation offers many good-looking templates that you can quickly adjust to fit your style. Whether you want a slideshow of quotes or a grid of success stories, it's got you covered.
The plugin works well with a variety of landing page builders, so you can display testimonials wherever they'll have the most impact. Updating them across your site is as easy as a few clicks. And no coding required.
When you use Thrive Ovation, you'll save time and make your testimonials work harder for you. It turns a tricky job into something simple and automatic. This means you can focus more on teaching and less on managing feedback.
In short, Thrive Ovation helps you make the most of your students' positive experiences without the hassle. It's a smart choice for any course creator who wants to show off student success stories easily and effectively.
2. Create a Testimonial Bonus Incentive
It's natural for people to prioritize their own interests. When you ask for a testimonial, learners might not feel immediately compelled to respond, even if they enjoyed your course.
Often, we hear more from those who've had issues than those who are satisfied. If you haven't received many testimonials yet, don't worry - sometimes silence can be a good sign.
However, there's a way to align your need for testimonials with your students' interests. By offering something of value in return for their feedback, you can create a win-win situation. When students see a benefit in sharing their thoughts, they're often more willing to take the time to share testimonials.
This approach focuses on creating mutual value. It recognizes that your students' time is valuable and shows appreciation for their effort in providing feedback.
One way to make this work is by offering a small reward for testimonials. This could be a discount on an upcoming new course, access to other marketing materials (e.g. a webinar), or even a chance to win a prize in a draw. Just be sure to keep the reward modest and clearly state that you're looking for honest feedback, not just praise.
Another approach is to frame the request in a way that highlights how their testimonial can help others. For example, you might say, "Your experience could really help other students who are considering this course. Would you be willing to share your thoughts to guide them?"
3. Ask Early and Often
Getting great testimonials depends on asking at the right time.
Start with post-course surveys, sent out within a day or two after students finish. Make your survey short but thorough, mixing yes/no questions with open ones that encourage detailed answers. Ask what they learned, how the course helped them, and which parts they liked best. If someone gives really positive feedback, reach out personally to ask if you can use it as a testimonial.
Don't just wait for the end, though. Keep an eye on how students are doing throughout the course. Check forums, webinar chats, and social media regularly. Look for students who talk about their successes, share good ideas, or seem really excited about what they're learning. These are perfect chances for testimonials.
When you see these moments, act fast. Contact the student within a day, mentioning what they said or did that caught your eye. Ask nicely for a testimonial, explaining why their thoughts matter. To make it easier, you can give them a few questions to help shape their response.
And speaking of asking the right questions…
4. Ask The Right Questions, Get Better Testimonials:
The real value of a strong, positive testimonial for potential customers is to hear the perspective of real people who were once in their pre-purchase shoes.
Although it’s nice to hear customers say that your course was ‘great’, it's not a very useful testimonial to help overcome purchase anxiety in potential customers.
The more specific your testimonials are, the more reassuring they will be to people on the cusp of buying your online course.
Have a look at the difference between these two testimonial examples we received for Thrive Suite:
Example Testimonial:
Becoming a Thrive Member is turning out to be one of the best things I've ever done in my blogging life
Joe Garma
Although this testimonial is nice (we definitely appreciate your kind words Joe!), it doesn’t really tell a potential buyer if the product is right for them, does it? This is a lovely compliment, but doesn’t get into specifics.
Now compare that testimonial to this example:
“My biggest struggle was trying to make my website look exactly how I wanted it to look both on desktop and on mobile.
Thrive architect has changed everything for me. What used to take a week only takes a day or two now and the finished product looks better and loads faster.
I would recommend a Thrive Membership, because it includes everything you need to build a conversion focused website. You have the visual editor (Thrive Architect), all the lead-generation plugins, the support forums for customization issues, and the entire methodology in Thrive University and their blog and youtube channels. With the one membership you can learn how to build your site from start to finish even with limited background in design or marketing.”
Robert Seitzberg
Do you see the difference? The second one is extremely specific, and takes the reader on a journey.
So how do you encourage your customers to leave testimonials like this? You have to ask them specific questions.
Customers are not marketers. They don’t know what your marketing hurdles are and what they could do to best help you, so they think a testimonial is merely stating that a product is great. But you need better than great for your marketing... you need specific. The way to do that is to prompt them with the right questions.
And here’s some good news for you: we built Thrive Ovation with exactly that strategy in mind.
How To Ask The Right Testimonial Questions:
Step 1: Outline a few questions that, when listed one after the other, tell a complete story of a student’s journey with your course. The arc of that story should start by asking what your customer’s problem was before taking your course, and end by asking how the course helped them to overcome that problem.
Step 2: Place your list of questions on your Testimonial Capture page. If you’re using Thrive Ovation, then under the 'Form Settings' you can simply click the plus sign to add each new question to the testimonial capture form. You can add as many as you like!
Thrive Ovation allows you to set Testimonial questions and placeholders
Step 3: Provide some placeholder text in the answer box to help students leave a testimonial quote that will make sense to future readers without having read the actual question.
For example, you don’t want students to write ambiguous answers like “It was just what I needed." You want them to write something clear for any reader like “The Online Photography masterclass was just what I needed”.
This is how the student facing form will look:
Thrive Ovation's testimonial forms fields, with questions and placeholder text
The result? Your capture form will prompt students to write answers to each question, creating a more complete testimonial. Don’t worry if they write too much, you can always trim it down.
Do It Even Better!
We have a free online video course at Thrive University all about how to Harness the Power of Testimonials. Sign up for the course now to learn additional strategies around how to make your testimonials even more compelling.
5. Set Customer Expectations with Launch-Discounts:
I’m sure you’ve seen launch-discounts before. It's when a product is heavily discounted from it’s normal price for a short period after it launches.
In a product-launch funnel, launch discounts are a great marketing strategy to create buzz, collect your first set of customers, and gauge the market response to your offer.
But providing a launch-discount is also an opportunity to ask for more in lieu of the full price. By positioning your course launch as a special beta program, you can easily ask students to fill out and return a product survey once they’ve completed the course.
The trick here is to set their expectations up front when the customer is still considering the purchase. Agreeing to complete a survey in a few weeks time in exchange for a substantial discount seems like a great deal, and also justifies why you are offering your course at a lower price.
Making this request explicitly clear to students opens the door for you to reach out at a later date and ask for sales boosting reviews, testimonials or feedback.
How To Trade Discounts for Testimonials:
Step 1: Set a normal price for your online course. Make sure you communicate what that full price is in all of your marketing content.
Step 2: Slash that normal price in half for the first 72 hours that your course is live (or however long you want your launch-discount to run for), and make clear mention on your sales page that this is a beta-launch discount.
Step 3: Use a Scarcity Countdown plugin like Thrive Ultimatum to shut down your discount offer once the timer reaches zero.
Step 4: Include this in your copy: “For the next 72 hours, you can join this program at the 50% off launch-discount simply by agreeing to fill out a feedback survey upon course completion and permitting us to use your answers in our marketing”.
Trade a launch-discount for a testimonial later
Step 5: Remind your students about this agreement again after they purchase. Once they have moved through your course, reach out to them and ask that they follow through on the request to fill out your Survey.
‘Survey’ is the secret word here. It’s both an opportunity to gain feedback and get testimonials if your customers have had an experience worth sharing.
6. Collect Client Testimonials From Social Media Platforms
Your students are likely talking about your course on social media. This is a great chance to find honest testimonials without much extra work.
Keep an eye on your course hashtags and mentions on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Students often post about what they're learning or how they're using your course. These natural posts can make for great testimonials.
When you see positive comments, ask the student if you can use their words as social proof. Most will be happy to agree. Just explain how you plan to use their comment.
Don't forget to check any private groups or forums for your course. You might find detailed feedback about your course content there that you can screenshot and use later. Always ask before using comments from these spaces.
You could use social listening tools to catch mentions of your course that you might miss otherwise.
Social media testimonials often come with photos or videos of students using what they've learned. These can be great to share on your course page or in ads.
Do You Need Permission To Copy From Social Media?
The law is a little bit hazy on this one, but best practice is to always seek permission. Yes, the original commenter owns the copyright to their own tweet or facebook post.
Fortunately, if they're willing to write a positive testimonial on social media where anyone can see it, they probably won't mind giving you permission to display it on your site. Reply to their comment thanking them for the kind words, and ask if they'd mind if you shared it on your site.
7. Ask for a Review After A Student Passes an Assessment
Timing is key when asking for testimonials, and one often-overlooked opportunity is right after a student passes an assessment. This moment is perfect for gathering feedback. When a student successfully completes a quiz, exam, or project, they're likely feeling accomplished and positive about their learning experience.
Set up an automated message, or testimonial capture page, that goes out to students immediately after they pass an assessment. Congratulate them on their achievement, then politely ask if they'd be willing to share their thoughts on the course so far. You might say something like, "Congratulations on passing the module quiz! We'd love to hear how the course is helping you. Would you mind taking a moment to share your experience?"
If you have Thrive Apprentice, you can easily keep track of who passes an assessment. Once a student does so, reach out to them via direct message or email and ask them to leave a review of your course.
This approach catches students at a high point in their learning journey. They've just proven to themselves that they're making progress, which often translates into enthusiasm and gratitude. Their feedback at this stage can be particularly valuable, as it's likely to highlight specific ways the course has helped them gain new skills or knowledge.
8. Record Your Video Calls with Customers
Although written testimonials are super valuable, having a few video testimonials can really help potential customers pull that purchase trigger.
From a visitor’s perspective, video testimonials are incredibly honest and an opportunity to hear someone who was in their position speaking openly about their experience with your product.
But likely, your students won’t often go to the effort of setting up a camera, microphone and lighting to shoot a high-quality video just for you! So your job is to make the logistics of all that as easy as possible for them.
And doing all that is as easy as… having a conversation.
Requesting a Zoom or Google Meet ‘feedback call’ with successful students is pretty simple. Just ask them if they would be willing to chat with you about their experience after completing the course.
And because online courses can sometimes feel a little impersonal, it’s actually a cool opportunity for students to speak directly with the course creator. Don't discount that... if they enjoyed your course, it will be valuable to them.
Fortunately, services like Zoom and Google Meet now make it very simple to record those video chats.
Now, let me be clear that you should never record a call without getting permission first. But if you follow the steps above to create bonus incentives or discounts for students in exchange for their video testimonial, you’re bound to have some eager volunteers.
Video Testimonials Don't Have To Be Fancy
Note that your video testimonials don't need to be high production quality endeavors. A video recorded from a built-in laptop camera + microphone is perfectly acceptable to display as a testimonial or customer case study on your website.
9. Create a Follow-Up Email Sequence and Automate the Collection Process
Let's be real, manually chasing down testimonials isn't exactly a party. But, it doesn't have to be that way! Automate the process with a well-timed email sequence, and watch the glowing feedback roll in effortlessly.
Think of it like this: design a series of emails that hit your students' inboxes at key moments.
Right after they finish the course is a perfect time to capture those initial reactions and big takeaways. A week or so later, check in on how they're applying their newfound knowledge. And maybe a month out, see if they're already experiencing long-term impacts on their skills or careers.
Most course platforms and email marketing tools make this super easy. You can trigger emails based on specific actions (like completing a module) or set them on a timer. Just plug in your personalized messages, hit "send," and watch the magic happen.
Oh, and speaking of personalized, ditch those generic templates. Use your students' names and reference specific parts of the course they enjoyed. And when it comes to asking for the testimonial itself, make it crystal clear and ridiculously easy.
Provide a direct link to a survey (or embed the form in your email), encourage a quick reply, or point them to your favorite review platform.
10. Add a Reviews Feed to Your Landing Pages
You've gathered a collection of student testimonials – now it's time to put them to work! Featuring them prominently on your course landing page through a dynamic reviews feed is one of the best ways to boost your credibility and convince potential students to sign up.
Start by selecting a range of your strongest testimonials. Choose reviews that highlight different strengths of your course, from content quality and teaching style to the positive impact it's had on students' lives and careers. Aim for a mix of short, attention-grabbing quotes and more detailed success stories.
If you’re using Thrive Architect to build your landing pages (which you 100% should be doing) and also have Thrive Ovation – you can easily set this up.
In Thrive Architect, look for the “Display Testimonials” element in the left sidebar.
Next, choose one of our stunning testimonial templates to display your glowing reviews.
In the next screen, you’ll get to choose how to display your testimonials. You can choose the “Dynamic List” to let an assortment of testimonials display at random, based on the tags you’ve used to categorize them.
Or, you can choose the “Specific testimonials” option to display a select set of reviews – like your most positive ones.
You can also add a Google Reviews feed to your homepage, sales page, or other landing pages to build even more trust (use this guide to learn how).
Pro tip
Be strategic about the placement of your testimonials. Place the most impactful quotes near the top of the page or close to your call-to-action buttons. The longer, more detailed stories work better further down the page where people are already engaged and want to learn more.
Don't forget to keep your feed updated!
Regularly adding your latest and most relevant testimonials shows potential students that your course continues to deliver value.
Next Steps: Optimize Your Courses to Get Better Reviews
Now that you understand the importance of testimonials and how to collect them, it's time to focus on the root cause: the quality of your course. After all, the best way to get great reviews is to deliver an outstanding learning experience.
Start by reviewing your current content. Are there areas that students consistently struggle with? Could certain sections be explained more clearly? Use the feedback you've already received to identify weak spots and make improvements.
Here are a few free resources you can use to improve your content and funnels to sell more online courses:
- How to Create an Online Course Sales Page that Converts (+Templates)
- How to Optimize Your Course Sales Funnel (Complete Guide)
- The Ultimate Online Course Launch Checklist: Everything You Need to Know
Now It’s Your Turn To Grow Your Testimonial Library
Testimonials are a massive conversion-boosting necessity for Online Course creators.
And because the best time to trade discounts for feedback is during your initial course launch, make sure you prioritize getting such testimonials early. It may be the deciding factor in the ultimate success of your product.
Once you have a library of valuable testimonials, you can then use them in multiple locations across your website. Place them on your sales page, ‘about’ page, homepage, and even include them in your email marketing and social media campaigns.
If you haven’t created a testimonial management strategy for your online business yet, you need one ASAP. Fortunately, that’s exactly why we built Thrive Ovation to help you.
So, what are you waiting for?
thank you, Bradley, this is the BEST post I’ve ever read on collecting testimonials, I had no idea about these very simple but powerful strategies and the flexibility of the thrive ovation plug-in, great stuff
You’re welcome, Ramesh! Yes- Thrive Ovation is more flexible than you might think
Hi Brad,
did you already built in the possibility for users to upload their own image from desktop?
TC
Absolutely. When users fill out a testimonial form, they have the option to upload a picture. But we also know that people are lazy, so once they enter their email address, Thrive Ovation will automatically see if there is a Gravatar associated with their email address and import that. It works like magic! But they can override it by uploading their own image if they’d prefer
It’s great to see you can now import social media testimonials into Thrive Ovation!
Wonderful, isn’t it?
Great post! Thanks for this.
You’re welcome 🙂
Thanks Brad for this post.
Would love to have the possibility of embedding videos in Thrive Ovation.
Denis
I agree, that would be good! Thanks for your comment, Denis
Home run. Great content. Thanks Brad.
You’re welcome, Mark
Great point about asking specific questions to create great testimonials. Too often I see generic testimonials that do not really tell you anything about the benefits. Specific testimonials helps customers envision how your course can help them reach their goals.
Right? When I first read a testimonial that was prompted by specific questions, I remember thinking “A customer willingly wrote all of that?! How?” It’s just so much more useful
Can I buy you dinner!?!?!?!
I implemented this and also sent the survey email to all of my existing customers yesterday…and the response rate was THROUGH THE ROOF!
Now I need to take a few hours to sort through all of the survey results – and that, my friend, is a great problem to have.
Ovation makes it so easy. I do wish I could view results in a new tab. When I try that, it takes me to a screen with the same list. A pop-up view on the list page would also be helpful to eliminate the people who left one-word replies, that sort of thing.
Anyway, thanks again for this!
I found the option to view the complete testimonial in the lists so that sped up the review process!
Hah! If you swing past Australia, let me know!
This is great to hear, Chris. We write these blog articles to try and help people improve their businesses, but hearing that you immediately implemented it and saw results? That’s the best outcome we could hope for!
I saw your other comment too, that you found the option to view the complete testimonials. Ovation is great! Thanks for your comment, Chris, and for letting us know that it’s working for you
Thank you, Brad. Nice advice. I need some of those to be used on my Teachable courses.
Hey Luis, I’m curious about your set up. So you have a wordpress site for marketing purposes, with a wordpress Sales Page, and then the course hosted on Teachable, is that right? How is that working for you?
We’re using Teachable too, even though Thrive Themes is *awesome*, the key was not having to do support for the course infrastructure and focusing on delivery of the course; sometimes entrepreneurs in small biz have to delegate. Also, the built in affiliate referral program in Teachable was key, b/c it allowed us to nix Clickbank (or similar) from our infra plan.
By the way Bradley, this article is one of the most valuable and useful we’ve read (reading this several times); all Thrive articles and univ and knowledge base are impeccable, but this article we found particularly timely and useful. THANKS!
You’re welcome, Lisa. I’m just happy to hear that our articles are helpful. Teachable + Thrive Themes seems to be a common setup that we’re seeing. May I ask: with your set up, are you using Teachable for your Sales Page, or are you using Thrive Architect that links to a teachable ‘buy now’ button?
We’re doing both, Thrive for the long form sales landing page that links to Teachable, and there will be a Teachable sales page for those who are already on teachable. So the funnel would start with the opt-in/lead magnet to auto responder (we use Drip.com) with Thrive Quizzes to warm up the leads, then to webinar, then to Thrive Architect sales page, to the course on Teachable.
Thanks for sharing that, Lisa! That’s looks like a fantastic funnel, very well thought out. And I’m pleased to see Thrive getting used the way we want it to 🙂
Is it possible to combine this with rich snippets in Google?
Not quite. Testimonials are a bit different to reviews. If you want a Star rating to appear in Google, you need to use a Rich Snippets plugin and set it at the page level. We’ve written about a recommended plugin for that right here. Hope that helps, Albert!
Hey guys, regarding social media testimonials… It’d be great to have Youtube connectivity as well. A lot of folks leave great testimonials in videos that helped them achieve something 😉
This is interesting idea, Alex. I’ll bring it to the team and see.
Great. Two more feature that’d be very interesting:
#1 – we received a lot of spontaneous feedback by email. Having a way to import them in TO by just forwarding the email to a specific address would save a lot of time.
#2 – Batch import / export via CSV or other format. Batch import could help with migrating content to TO from various sources and for first time users. Batch export could be used for archiving purposes or sending the data to other tools such as CRM tools per ex
Thanks for sharing this post.
I don’t have the Import From Facebook/Twitter link in Ovation. How do I turn that on?
It should be there, no need to turn it on. To find it, Open Thrive Ovation from your WordPress menu. At the top you’ll find a ‘capture testimonials’ drop down option. Click it and the fourth option should be ‘Import from Social Media’. If it’s still not there, head over to Support and they’ll find a solution.
Having built the testimonial capture page – and having designed a series of questions to provide excellent testimonials – and providing example answers… How can we (upon completion) access this data easily? Is it exportable? Use Case: How might an instructor with 200 students leverage the collected info once entered into Thrive Ovation via said page, without having to copy/paste into CRM, spreadsheet, etc? Can these testimonials be printed or exported to PDF?
Thank You!
Once you’ve gathered testimonials, you’ll find them all listed inside your Ovation dashboard, and you can filter them by tag. The best thing I can recommend is to start tagging testimonials as soon as they come in. Tags aren’t seen on the front end but will help you manage short-lists for your to review, find and display them. You can also filter by untagged to see which ones might need a tag.
As for exporting, you raise a good point. There is no way to currently auto-export them in a list. This is the first time I’ve seen this request, but it’s a good one I agree with. I’ll take it to the team as a feature suggestion.
Thanks for your comment, Lisa!
Thanks! Once more people start integrating what you taught in this article, someone in their sales org will ask them how they can leverage all that data to close sales and deliver customers what they’re asking for in the surveys.
Update: To do a survey and get that info into our CRM (hubspot), Hubspot has a solution – $400/mo. for that (pro level service they call it)
If you had an export feature in Ovation, you’d save a business like mine $4800/yr – and I’d give you a testimonial to that effect 🙂
That’s a very convincing argument, and I’ve taken it to the team. Perhaps we’ll be asking for that testimonial from you sometime.
Is there any way to link the testimonial form with an auto responder sequence? I want them to get a bonus video ‘plus’ be added to a special mailing list (through Mailchimp).
Not yet, but that’s a good idea. I’ve been thinking of the application of something like this. Some emailing marketing services allow you to track page visits. I’m not sure if Mailchimp can, but if it does, you could trigger an automation once a visitor arrives at the Testimonial Thank You page.
Thanks for a great post, Bradley. I’ve used Thrive for the last 2 years, but I haven’t tapped into Ovation or Testimonial features.
You laid out how easy to use these tools are, and now I’m getting started using them!
Thanks again.
You’re welcome, Matt. Ovation is especially good when you create a set-and-forget testimonial collection system. Hope you like it!