Customer Testimonials for Long Term Success and Legal Compliance in Your Online Business

Adding social proof, or customer testimonials, is an important part of the marketing strategy for online business owners. Whether you are an online course creator, coach, membership site or done for you service provider, collecting praise from your customers is an important component of building out your customer base. A collection of positive customer testimonials lets your future customers know that others have met with success with your products and services and that you are a legitimate and trustworthy online business. Using testimonials on your website, in your advertising and in your social media posts helps build trust and authority for your business. But equally important to building trust is collecting and using customer testimonials legally. Both U.S. federal law and state law have rules about collecting and using customer testimonials in your online business. By staying within the guardrails of legal compliance you’ll automatically reap the added benefit of building trust and confidence with your customers.

To be legally compliant, testimonials must be truthful and not misleading. The origin of the word “testimonial” traces to evidence or witness. Today, the word “testimonial” nearly always refers to a statement giving praise or endorsement to a product or service. There are several components to the requirement that testimonials must be truthful and not misleading, and to ensure compliance you’ll need to set up good systems both to collect and use your testimonials. In this blog, we’ll address the various legal issues that you’ll need to be mindful of in building out your testimonial library and also discuss some best practices to collect them. 

Obtain Permission from Your Customers to Use Their Testimonials

Starting on the customer side, you’ll want to ensure that you have your customer's consent to use their testimonial. Your terms and conditions for your online course, coaching program, membership or custom services should inform your customers that you can use their statements in your business and marketing materials. While this is a good first step, you’ll build more trust and confidence with your customers if you reach out specifically to them to obtain their consent to use their testimonial and associate their name and picture with it. You could do this through an email exchange with your customer or by setting up a form to collect testimonials and photos and videos from your customers. 

When connecting with your customers to obtain their consent to use their testimonial, you’ll want to be transparent with them about how you might use their testimonial and identify some other parameters for how you might use, or not use, their testimonial. You’ll also want to get some assurances from your customer that they are sharing genuine details based on their use of your product or service. A short testimonial release acknowledged by your customer helps ensure you’ve obtained permission from your customers and verified their statement. 

Verify the Truthfulness of Testimonials 

Your testimonials need to represent your actual customer experiences in order not to be misleading or false. If someone is sharing their opinion about how your product or service resulted in a transformation for them, this is usually fine as long as you verify they are your customer. If, however, the testimonial makes specific claims or references specific results or outcomes, you’ll want to have some reasonable supporting evidence to substantiate these claims, along with a statement from the customer that they are sharing truthful information. You won’t necessarily be able to verify things like income claims, but does the statement made by your customer seem correct and reasonable given what you know about this customer? While some customers may think they are doing you a favor by making big claims about your products and service, exaggerated and untrue claims can harm your reputation and expose your business to legal liability. From a practical perspective, you don’t need to overthink this requirement, but take a step back and evaluate the testimonial, and if it appears to have exaggerated claims it may not be the best choice to use it in your marketing.  

Don’t Modify or Take Testimonials Out of Context

Correcting a spelling mistake or a simple grammatical error is usually fine, but only if doing so doesn't change the context or meaning of the testimonial. Often, the testimonial appears more authentic with those simple typos or corrections made by your smartphone because it thought it knew what you were trying to say. Any changes you make to the testimonial must ensure that the testimonial is communicating the information as intended by the person who authored the testimonial. You’ll need to connect any testimonials given with the product or service actually used by the customer. If your customer took a certain course from you, it would be misleading to use their testimonial with a different course if doing so makes it look like the testimonial speaks to that second course.  To keep testimonials in context, if you want to use a testimonial for one course to help promote a different course, use this testimonial to speak to working with you or your business in general so that you are not implying that the testimonial relates to a course or product not used by that customer. Remember that testimonials are about both legal compliance and building trust with your customers. If customers discover you’ve used testimonials from one course to promote a different course, this will quickly erode their trust in you and your business. 

Testimonial Must be Real

Creating false testimonials or using testimonials posted on the site or social media of another business creates legal exposure for you and breaches the trust of your customers. Especially when you are early in your business and customer feedback is slow to come in, it may be tempting to create testimonials or acquire them from another source, but resist this temptation. Creating a legally legitimate and trustworthy business sets your online business up for long term success. Downloading a testimonial from another site also violates intellectual property rules. If you discover a testimonial or statement about your or your business on another website, provide a link to it from your website so your potential customers can see it. 

Special Rules for Endorsements

Sometimes a testimonial comes from an employee, affiliate or person related to you. If the person giving the testimonial has a financial or personal connection to you or your business, you’ll need to disclose this. These disclosures must be made in a prominent manner and be easy to find. On social media, using #paid, #sponsored, #ad or similar words can help identify an endorsement relationship.

Use a Testimonial Release with Your Customers 

An easy way to ensure you’re checking off all the boxes in your testimonial gathering strategy is to use a testimonial release that explains how you might use the testimonial and obtains a broad range of permissions from your customer. By using a collection form, you can link your testimonial release to the form and require your customers to click a box indicating their acceptance of the release terms.  If you’re exchanging emails with your customer that will result in a testimonial, you can provide a link to the release and confirm in the email that by submitting the testimonial they are agreeing to the terms of the release. Set up a good record keeping system in your business to track your testimonials. You’ll want to keep a record of the consent you obtained from your customer as well as the product or service about which the customer gave the testimonial. You’ll need these organized business records of your testimonials and consent you obtained from your customers, in case any questions arise in the future from your customers or regulatory agencies. 

Summary: Let Your Customers Words Sing Your Praises

By taking steps to obtain permission, verifying accuracy, presenting authentic and unmodified testimonials and disclosing any special relationships you’ll be well on your way to building out a solid testimonial library and marketing strategy for your business. You’ll be able to post these testimonials on your website and use them in your marketing materials knowing that you have dealt honestly and transparently with your customers while at the same time taken steps to ensure your legal compliance. Both the federal government through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state governments through privacy laws and consumer protection statutes have the ability to regulate how testimonials are used and bring actions against businesses that don’t comply. Individual customers who believe they have been damaged by your actions may also have a private right of action against your business. Setting up a few simple processes helps your business stay out of legal hot water and helps contribute to the long-term success of your business. 

If you’re looking for a concise and written in plain-English testimonial release, be sure to check out the Template Shop on The Step Up Network LLC website. Using this testimonial release is one way you can easily and quickly Step Up Your Legal™ in your online business. Build your business with bricks, not straw or sticks.