Ways to get more out of your real estate testimonials

Whether you're keeping your real estate testimonials on LinkedIn or your personal website or are more old-school and have them filed away in letters, cards and emails for a rainy day, these best practices will help you maximize and leverage their potential.

Here's how:

Make testimonials part of your email marketing strategy

When you send out email blasts about upcoming or current listings, make sure to include real estate testimonials in your emails. You can do this by regularly highlighting one or more of your former clients in a “Customer Spotlight” section.

For example, set up a biweekly or monthly email campaign that has a quote from a past client, their photo and a brief explanation of how you helped them. If you want to get fancy, target seller testimonials to the potential sellers in your database and buyer testimonials to the potential buyers in your database. This segmentation will help ensure you're not bombarding your prospects with messages that don’t relate to them.

Dedicate a page on your website to real estate testimonials

Create an eye-catching and unique landing page that is solely used for exhibiting testimonials. This can be like the “Customer Spotlight” email campaign, using their testimonial, their photo and how you helped them.

Of course, if you want to step it up a notch, make this page searchable by the type of transaction so buyers can find buyer testimonials, sellers can find seller testimonials, and so on.

Promote real estate testimonials on social media

In addition to having a website page dedicated to testimonials, you should also actively share these kind words on your social media platforms. Use marketing automation tools to schedule tweets, status updates and other posts that link to your testimonials page. When you share these types of posts on social media, clients may share it with their friends—thus extending your reach.

You can also leverage social media by asking your happy clients to post a positive review about the experience they had working with you on Facebook, Google+ and the many other sites that allow online reviews.

One other note about social media: Consider video. A video testimonial can be far more compelling than a written one. Consider taking your GoPro to the closing and recording your client's feedback while they are still beaming with excitement. Or for the especially tech-savvy, how about streaming live on Facebook?

Add a mention to your email signature

Underneath your email signature, add a link to your website’s testimonial page. It could say something like, “Learn what my clients think of me” or “Check out my latest reviews.” If you are like most people, you probably send out quite a few emails each week. That can mean a lot of eyeballs on your testimonials.

Don’t forget national search sites

Finally, don’t forget to add your real estate testimonials to your agent profile on national search sites such as Zillow and realtor.com^®. There are thousands of potential buyers searching on these sites for homes and agents, and agent profiles are often ranked by their activity and reviews in search results.

Be sure you’re taking advantage of these channels. A robust profile could mean all the difference when a potential lead is thinking about contacting you.