EPISODE 44 OF WHAT WOULD THEY DO? THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PODCAST FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS
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Shelley Hitz, founder of Christian Book Academy and Retention Lab Incubator member, submitted a brilliant question: “What should I actually do with all the member testimonials I’ve collected?” This bite-sized episode breaks down exactly how to repurpose, categorize, and embed testimonials across your funnel, from the first touchpoint to retention and affiliate advocacy.
Whether you’ve got a few nice words or full-blown case studies, this episode gives you a strategic framework to finally make your testimonials work harder.
What we cover:
How to start now even if all you’ve got is a spreadsheet full of snippets
Why not all testimonials are created equal (and which ones to use where)
How to categorize feedback by funnel stage and format
Strategic ways to plug testimonials into your sales, onboarding, and retention workflows
Creative use cases you might not have thought of: like email takeovers, milestone trackers, and lead magnets built on member wins
Soundbites:
Shelley Hitz: “You can also match the testimonials people have given you to the stage of your customer journey, which we so often forget because people on various stages of the customer journey need to hear different messages from you.”
Shelley Hitz: “Short wins and short snippets, are perfect for you to use in PS’s in your emails, for example, in bullet point lists on your sales page in your launch emails, something like, you know, 10 quick reasons why people love our membership.”
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Episode Transcript:
Nadine Nethery (00:00)
Hey, hey, and welcome back to another episode. In today’s episode, we are going to answer a Retention Lab.
Member question, Shelley Hitz is the founder of Christian Book Academy and she sent in a VIP fast track question to be answered on the podcast. Her question is all around testimonials and how to use them cleverly. I’ll read out her question quickly. So I’m collecting a lot of testimonials and wins from my members via Airtable, but I’m not sure what to do with them all. They aren’t screenshots, so can’t be easily added to a sales page.
Some of them are super short and quick wins and others are longer forms they fill out like when they publish their book. I’m wondering about turning some of them into case studies for my blog, podcast, Facebook ads, email, et cetera. I would love your strategic ideas. So in today’s bite-sized episode, I am going to explore some things that came to mind for me and share my approach to case studies with you to really
maximise even the tiniest of snippets and the most beautiful of case study testimonials. And we’re going to explore how you can use them in a meaningful, strategic and effective way across your entire customer journey. So just to set the scene before we start, I feel often business owners consider collecting testimonials like that tick
in the box. That’s their job done. They have a database of testimonials and they never revisit them. So I love that Shelley actually wants to maximise all the goodness she’s collected and gathered. And the key here really isn’t quantity it’s about
working out how you can embed the snippets that you have, the quality ones in the right context in your customer journey.
So before you start the process of repurposing testimonials and feedback it really all starts with segmenting the stories before your repurpose. There are different spots on the customer journey and different use cases for testimonials.
Short statements are perfect for you to use in PS’s in your emails, for example, in bullet point lists on your sales page in your launch emails, something like, you know, 10 quick reasons why people love our membership. Medium length statements are perfect to feature in your onboarding sequence, for example,
where you’re bringing people to the idea of your membership or your course, your service, in your abandoned cart, pop-ups or sequences, and then long form testimonials, so more in-depth testimonials are perfect for evergreen blog case studies or even podcast interviews. So if you have a podcast, totally invite
your member, your student, your customer onto the podcast to share with your audience what they’ve gained from working with you. You can also consider a private case study podcast that you can totally use as a lead magnet or as a tool in your evergreen sale sequence in a very similar way if you don’t have your own
public podcast. So that’s a strategy I share in my Client Cast Formula course, which I’ve linked up in the show notes for you to check out if you are curious to repurpose those longer testimonials in a more trust building and a more genuine way as well. So quick tip here in general for your testimonials, always make sure you tag them by category, by length.
to help you work through your Airtable database in Shelley’s case here, or however you sort and store your testimonials. know, category can be quick win, transformation, you know, referral, repeat purchase. It can be tangible wins, really work out what category system works for you, and then run with that. You can also match the testimonials
⁓ and the snippets that people have given you to the stage of your customer journey, which we so often forget because people on various stages of the customer journey need to hear different messages from you. So for top of funnel here, people new to your world, they potentially just signed up to a freebie. These people need identity based wins and need to hear identity based transformations. So what people felt when they found you.
we come to middle of the funnel, so these people are potentially bit more familiar with you, they know about the offer that you’re promoting, in this instance progress based wins are perfect. Things like, you know, I didn’t think I had time to write my book but with Shelley’s assistance I actually made consistent gradual process. So that is speaking to the possibility.
that it’s actually possible for them as well to have this guidance and to make consistent progress. When it comes to bottom of the funnel, so that is when people are so close to hitting that buy now button, but for whatever reason they haven’t yet, that’s where you want those, tangible wins, the tangible outcomes and the final results from working with you. So things like, I actually finally published my book inside the Christian Book Academy, or I
made my investment back with the first 10 book sales, something like that. So tangible wins that showcase the tangible impact of working with you, of buying your course of joining your membership, of working with you one-on-one. So I would absolutely have a look at your customer journey for products that you have testimonials for, and then ⁓ map three to five customer touch points where you can
plug in a win and a statement from a customer that answers a likely objection people have at that stage. you know, top of the funnel, really shifting that feeling, that belief about themselves, middle of the funnel progress. So showing, the progress-based wins and then bottom of the funnel, the tangible outcomes to help people click that buy now button.
I also want to point out here that not all testimonials need to feature in your marketing. Some are nice, but some definitely don’t shift people’s beliefs about themselves and make people buy into your product. So definitely have a look at ⁓ the most impactful ones, flag them and add them to a pipeline because we’re all busy. So I have testimonials from clients that I still have not
used in my marketing, but they are in a pipeline for me to get to when I have time in my workflow. Flag them as, you know, blog posts, as potential guests for your podcast, as perfect to feature in, for example, a lead magnet. So you could come up with a lead magnet.
for your membership, three mini case studies from our most successful members where you just highlight three different angles of members, three different objections they potentially had, and then share those case studies to shift people’s beliefs. And you can also definitely add them into your Evergreen sales sequences. Meet our members and potentially even let one of your members share their story as an email takeover.
So rather than you quoting them, you can invite them to write directly to your list to make it even more impactful. The good thing with testimonials is they’re not limited to helping you make more sales. They can also help you boost your retention. So in your membership, for example, you can capture feedback wins on a regular basis and then,
publicly celebrate member milestones, obviously with permission, but you can remind your other members who potentially, for whatever reason, aren’t taking as much action as they would like of the impact of actually doing the thing, actually following along. You can also create a hall of fame or a milestone tracker, for example, inside your membership portal where you add, you know,
milestones that have been achieved by your members and you can totally use those testimonials to remind members of how far they’ve come. So you can stack up for example their intake form against a testimonial or feedback that they’ve given you three months down the track and then send them an email, send them a message saying you know when you joined this was your biggest problem and three months in you just told me that you’ve mastered what you were struggling with.
So it’s really about helping people see the progress they’re making. You can also use testimonials to spark the idea to become an affiliate for your brand. So if someone shares an awesome testimonial with you, you can absolutely open the conversation and invite them to join your affiliate program. Would you be open to becoming an affiliate and helping others in your network
experience that same level of success. So testimonials are super powerful on multiple levels in your business and it’s just a matter of being strategic about it. So as you receive new testimonials, new feedback, absolutely use that tagging system, potentially even identify where in the funnel they fit in and then see how you can embed them in your automations, in your funnels and keep
adding to them. I personally have mentioned it on the podcast before as I get a new testimonial, if it’s a standout one, I actually add it to my to-do list to refresh my evergreen sequences or to have fresh pop-ups on my sales page to share these awesome customer client member wins with my audience and show what’s possible by working with me.
So to wrap things up, I would love you to have a look at your own testimonial database, whatever that looks like. I know Shelley has Airtable, whether it’s a Google sheet whatever that might be, have a look through that database and pick five testimonials, five snippets of feedback. Start categorizing it. Look at where in your funnel they can fit in and then decide which brand touch point you’re going to
use them for. And if you’re now going they all are not quite screenshots even in a spreadsheet you can totally turn them into screenshots or you can use them in old traditional ⁓ quotation marks. So hopefully today has been helpful for you. If you also have a listener question there is a form to submit on the podcast page.
And if you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with your community. Hit subscribe, hit like, and thank you so much for tuning in. If you’re listening live, hopefully you have the best
holidays and I will shift programming for the coming weeks to super bite-sized reflective episodes to help you set the scene and set the foundations for your 2026. Thanks so much for tuning in and see you next week.
