Want to get more conversions from your website? Testimonials help to overcome objections; it is a good way to persuade website visitors. One of the best for bloggers, creators, and business owners systems I’ve stumbled on is Thrive Ovation.
Table of Contents:
What is Thrive Ovation
Thrive Ovation is a testimonial management plugin for WordPress created and developed by Thrive Themes. It helps to gather, sort, and display social proof on the website for existing visitors to make the next step looking from the marketing perspective.
Thrive ovation features
Gather testimonials anywhere on your website by adding special forms with custom questions. When the person fills out the form the profile image can be pulled from the email address if it is linked with gravatar or can be uploaded by pulling from Facebook or Google account by clicking appropriate buttons. This simplifies the process as you don’t need to upload an image as a file.
Every testimonial submitted via a form first will be under review until you approve it. This will prevent non-rich-content answers from being displayed.
Function to ask for permission to display a testimonial from a particular person.
Ability to tag every testimonial so the next time you decide to display it to be most relevant to the visitor. Even after years when you forget which is which.
Keep information locally on your website without third parties.
You don’t need to embed posts from social media, which slows down the WordPress loading speed.
Works as social proof- let’s be honest, people are more likely to go when there is an existing audience rather than taking a risk and being the first one.
You can display comments as testimonials if you use the Thrive Comments plugin.
When to ask for feedback?
It depends on your business model or what is the reason behind it. Sure enough, you don’t want to ask for a review too early or too late. Let’s say you offer access to a free mini-course. And the course is a 30 minutes video series on how to solve a particular issue.
In this case don’t ask for testimonials straight away someone just gained access to the course, but rather let the person watch it till the end. Then after 3-4 hours, you could send an email asking for a testimonial on their experience. Everyone is busy these days, so if nothing happens repeat the process the next day.
Testimonials and feedback email template
The email could look like this:
Hello, {First name},
Do you have a minute? We want your opinion about {your product/service name}. We know you’re busy, so we’ll keep this extremely short. Please, click the link below to tell us what you think - there are only 3 questions.
{your link to the testimonial gathering page}
We truly appreciate your feedback and review responses individually. We’ll use this information to improve our service/product that we provide.
Thank you
{My name} from {my website name}
P.s. Be ready, not everyone will be kind and leave you an honest review, some will not take any action at all. In this scenario, you could incentify a person by offering some sort of relative bonus as a reward.
Why do testimonials matter?
Let’s think about what’s happening when a new visitor opens your landing page or sales page.
He or she is not sure if they should trust the seller and whether this will solve a problem they have.
This is where testimonials become handy, working as proof from an already existing customer. Which tells exactly: they have been in the same situation as a prospect and a specific problem is solved.
E.g. Provided service had awesome results or a product is as good as described and etc.
Thrive Ovation Pricing
| Product name | Thrive Ovation |
| Price a year | $49 |
| Trial | No (30 days money-back guarantee) |
| Websites used on | 1 |
| Updates | Unlimited |
| Support | Yes, 24/7 unlimited |
| Access to Thrive University | Yes |
Is it worth it?
Pros:
Easy to use out of the box.
Loads of templates to match your website design on how testimonials look.
Once set, the system of getting testimonials will work automatically.
Cons:
There could be more platforms included for importing data via API or by connecting specific accounts.
p.s. This might happen in the future as the product is constantly updated.
How to install Thrive Ovation plugin
After making a purchase go to the Thrive themes website and download the Thrive product manager plugin.
Install and activate the plugin.
You will be prompted to connect to thrive themes accounts.
When fully activated you will be able to install the Thrive Ovation plugin.
There are two main ways to display testimonials:
If you use Thrive suite via Thrive architect (recommended).
If you use Thrive Ovation on its own you can use shortcodes.
How to add testimonials with Thrive Ovation?
There are several ways to do that:
- Add them manually
- From social media
- Via special capture forms on your site
- Using Thrive comments
How did Testimonial “boom” started?
Back in 1995 Amazon started and implemented a reviews & testimonials system for every customer. When a customer purchases a product several days later they get an email asking to tell if the product was as good as described. Many people started conversations, discussing and asking questions.
Another “whale” is eBay, which system worked exactly the same- even now, everyone is looking at how many reviews and stars the seller got before making a purchase to this day.
Websites like TripAdvisor and Trustpilot are based completely on testimonials and reviews getting loads of attention. Companies try to provide the best service and user experience to get as many positive reviews as possible.
Looking at those big companies and projects everyone understands the power of what other people say about your business, services, products. It is important to have a real customer experience written somewhere because it will make an impact.
Want to dive deeper?- Check out how Marie Forleo uses testimonials for B-School to build trust and to boost sales.
People who leave reviews can be sorted in 3 categories:
- 5-4 stars – Real fans, and whatever you publish or sell they will be glad to see and purchase.
- 2-3 stars – These are people who think about your product, service or publication “it’s okay” or “It’s good enough”. Most often this audience does not leave any review at all.
- 1 star – Absolute haters, means the product or service was not as expected, the client might be upset and feel tricked in some way, overall bad experience.
Wrapping up
Thrive Ovation was first launched in 2016 and developed during all those years to meet all necessary website building requirements and to give the best experience for both: website administrators and website visitors. If you have a website built using WordPress and want to gather testimonials- this plugin is what you are looking for.
