A Thrive Ovation Review: Is It the Plugin of Choice for Testimonials?
There are plenty of plugins out there that help you to put testimonials on your website. Here, we take a look at Thrive Ovation to see if it offers everything that you need.
Word of mouth plays crucial role in your business’ success. People trust the opinions of others over your sales copy. If someone can see that your service delivers for others, they’re more likely to buy themselves.
This fact highlights the importance of website testimonials. These snippets from satisfied customers convey the benefits of your service. This gives others a better idea of what they get when they buy from you.
They build trust for your business and show the reader who your customers are. Testimonials can even highlight the various ways that people can use your product or service.
You’re putting faces to the marketing material.
If you have a WordPress website, it’s essential that you use testimonials. They increase your selling power and help you to get leads.
There are plenty of testimonials plugins available for WordPress. The problem doesn’t come from finding the plugin. It comes from finding the right plugin.
Thrive Ovation claims to offer everything that you may need to create testimonials on your WordPress website. In this review, we put it through its paces to see if it delivers on its promises.
Figure 1 – https://thrivethemes.com/ovation/
What is Thrive Ovation?
Thrive Ovation falls under the umbrella of the large Thrive Themes offering.
It aims to make collecting testimonials and publishing them as simple as possible. Thrive Ovation’s creators highlight that their offering automates much of the process.
The plugin gathers testimonials that people create via your website. It then plugs them into a virtual rolodex. It then gives you control over whether those testimonials appear on your website.
The key here is that the plugin claims to centralise your testimonials. Before using it, you may have had testimonials scattered in folders and email inboxes. That means you had to search through those folders and inboxes to find the one that you wanted.
Thrive Ovation markets itself as a timesaver that skips this process. It allows you to jump straight to the testimonials that you need.
It sounds attractive from Thrive’s marketing speak. But as they say themselves, the sales copy only gets customers interested.
It’s the testimonial that clinches the sale.
Let’s break down the plugin’s key features to discover exactly what it has to offer.
The Key Features
We’ve established Thrive’s main goal of automating the testimonial process to make it simpler for you.
To do that, the plugin offers an array of useful features.
Feature #1 – Automated Testimonial Gathering
The testimonial gathering process can become laborious if you don’t have an automated system in place. It usually requires you to email a customer to ask them to put a nice word in about your product. Even if you receive unsolicited testimonials via email, you then have to copy the testimonial and format it for use on your website.
Thrive Ovation offers several methods for automating testimonial gathering.
The first of this is a templated form that you can place anywhere on your website. Ovation offers three standard templates, which you can tweak to your needs. You can add extra boxes and specific questions for people to answer. You can also adjust the size of the form.
It works in much the same way as a contact form. You receive the testimonial automatically and just have to approve or disapprove it for use on the website.
If you have a Thrive Leads licence, you can also integrate this form into the opt-in forms you create using Leads. Typically, you’ll use Thrive Leads to capture details for lead builders, such as newsletters.
When you’ve installed Ovation, you can use Thrive Leads to create forms that capture testimonials instead. You can remove the opt-in section of the forms you create and instead focus the forms on the feedback the customer wants to provide.
You also have the option to manually insert testimonials, so you can still use all the testimonials that clog your inbox.
Each of these methods work seamlessly and make it easy to capture testimonials.
Figure 2 – Leveraging of WordPress Comments
You may maintain a blog or other pages that make use of WordPress comments. Often, your customers will use these comments sections to talk about your service.
Figure 2 – https://thrivethemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/transform_wordpress_testimonials_click.png
With Ovation installed, the process of approving comments remains the same. However, you’ll also notice a new “Save as Testimonial” column with little “+” symbol. Click that and you’re taken to an auto-filled form that contains the comment and the customer’s details. You can make any edits you deem fit and quickly place the comment onto your site as a testimonial.
It’s the speed that makes this feature so useful. In the space of a couple of clicks, you can turn a comment into a useful testimonial that you can place anywhere on the site.
Feature #3 – Turning Social Testimonials into Website Testimonials
No digital marketing strategy is complete without social media pages. It’s likely that a lot of your customers will leave comments on Facebook and the like, rather than on your website. It’s more convenient for them.
Thrive recognises this. That’s why Ovation includes a feature that allows you to create testimonials out of social media comments.
This process isn’t as easy as the other forms of testimonial gathering that Ovation offers. You need to download specific apps for each social media platform that Ovation supports. These include Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Each app comes with a useful instructional video to help you with the setup. After that, gathering the testimonial and making it publishable is as easy as copying and pasting a comment’s URL into a pop-up box.
Feature #4 – Testimonial Management
Ovation offers a range of useful features that allow you to manage your collected testimonials.
Perhaps most important of these is the ability to contact customers to gain approval to use their testimonial. This is useful when you’re leveraging WordPress comments and social media posts. These weren’t originally intended as testimonials. That means you may need permission to use them. Ovation allows you to set up an email that you can send through the plugin to get approval.
As with the forms, you can choose from a range of templates to display each testimonial. When combined with Thrive Architect, placing these testimonials is as simple as dragging them onto the desired area of a page. You’ll use a WordPress shortcode if you’re not using the Page Builder plugin.
You also have the choice of building testimonials statically or dynamically. With the static option, you continue to manually add the testimonials. In dynamic mode, Ovation automatically adds the testimonial once you approve it.
All of this combined makes it easy to manage and display your testimonials. But there’s another useful feature that we haven’t covered yet…
Feature #5 – The Tagging Functionality
Each testimonial comes with the option to add a tag.
This is a particularly useful feature when adding testimonials dynamically.
For example, you may have two testimonial forms on your website. You can tag these as Product1 and Product2. With these tags in place, testimonials relating to each product get automatically added to the relevant page. You just need to use the tag to specify where you want the testimonial placed.
It’s another useful feature that’s easy to implement. Plus, it automates the sorting process to lend your testimonials a sense of order.
The Final Word
Thrive Ovation is one of the most complete testimonial plugins on the market. It automates the testimonial gathering process. And it allows you to gather testimonials from several sources. Plus, it gives you a range of templates and customisation options. These ensure your testimonials display exactly as you want them to.
The ability to pull testimonials from social media is particularly advantageous. This means you can leverage positive feedback on Facebook and other platforms to your website’s advantage.
The plugin is also easy to install and simple to use. When combined with other Thrive plugins, you gain even more customisation options.
You can buy and download the plugin directly from the Thrive Themes website. There, you’ll find simple instructions for installing it.
Current Active Members of our Concierge service don’t need to buy Ovation. As part of your membership, we can install it onto your WordPress website using our agency licence. To get started, just send in a task telling us that you’d like to use Thrive Ovation.
Are you unsure if Automation Agency is the right fit for your business? Chat to our Facebook Messenger chatbot to find out how we can help you.
