How to get testimonials from your doula clients

You've done an amazing job for your doula clients, and you'd like to get some social proof so that potential clients know you're the real deal. In the Inspired Birth Pros community on Facebook, Tamara Santos of Tamara the Birth Doula  asked the following question:

As a doula, how can I encourage clients to post reviews on my fb/yelp page? My clients all said they'd be happy to, and were all very encouraging, but they tend to forget. Obviously, they have a lot on their minds, but if I could just get 1 person to write up a review it would be very helpful!

There were some helpful replies:

From Andrea Graham Gerdes of Complete Joy Birth Services:

Alex Logan Wooten from Compassionate Births commented:

Here's a response from Kelly Johnson of Daughters of His Grace:

And there's one more helpful comment from Andrea Hewitt of East Nashville Doula:

If you need to get yourself set up to collect interviews, besides sending clients to your business' Facebook page, you may want to get your profile set up on Doula Match, Yelp,  Google My Business. When creating a Google and Yelp listing, if you don't have a business address, you can set up a service area to indicate the cities you provide services to.

Here are a couple of additional tips:

1. To make sending out birthday or other greeting cards to your clients easier, consider a service like Postable that will take care of it for you.
2. If you use Gmail for your business, there is a free customer relationship manager called Streak that can help you manage each step of keeping in regular touch with your clients, both during your time working together and after the fact. Create a custom pipeline that guides you through the follow-up process for each client. For example, after the birth, you might decide to send out a maximum of three follow-up messages – #1 is sent right after your final postpartum visit; #2 is sent out three months after the birth, and #3 is sent out six months after the birth. After you send out email #1, you'll change the client's status in Streak to Send Email #2 and create a reminder to send another email in three months. When you have multiple clients, it's great to have a way to view what needs be done by looking at just one list. While it would be great to have a built-in reminder function to let you know when to send another email to a client (that requires a monthly subscription), you can set up email templates and also schedule when to send out emails with the free version.

What helps you to get testimonials from clients? Share it in the comments or come and join the Inspired Birth Pros Community on Facebook and add to the conversation on testimonials.