Welcome to the Thrive Ovation review, another one in the series where we are analyzing the 9 plugins included in the Thrive Suite membership.
This plugin will allow you to create a system to capture clients’ testimonials on autopilot, which will be very useful for building your social proof around your products and services, and thus, increase your conversions and sales.
Thrive Ovation, pricing
As commented on other reviews, the plugins from Thrive have different ways of purchasing: standalone, or as a pack with other plugins and themes (pack known as “Thrive Suite“)
- The standalone Thrive Ovation plugin costs $47 per year. And will allow you to install the plugin on 1 site. If you don’t renew your license, you’ll still be able to use the plugin, but you won’t receive more updates after the license expires.
- Note: This standalone purchase also gives you access to the Thrive Automator plugin.
- On the other hand, joining the Thrive Suite Membership will cost you $299 per year, but you’ll be able to use Thrive Ovation on up to 5 sites, plus other additional 7 plugins and the theme builder we mentioned on the Thrive Suite Review.
The bottom line is that usually it’s worth it to join the membership, as you’ll get much more value (9 plugins instead of 2, plus the theme builder and some other perks)
Availability
Thrive Ovation works on any WordPress.org site (self-managed, remember that this is totally different from WordPress.com, where the plugin is not available).
This plugin is able to gather testimonials using forms that you can add to your posts and pages with Shortcodes (in addition to other tools that you will see below), so you can use it with any WordPress template, as displaying your testimonials is something that can also be achieved through shortcodes, which are available on the Gutenberg WordPress editor.
Features, how does Thrive Ovation work?
Once you’ve installed Thrive Ovation on your WordPress, you’ll be able to access its dashboard from the WordPress admin panel.
This is where you’ll see all the testimonials you’ve gathered.
There are powerful filters here, to quickly locate for instance rejected testimonials, or those awaiting your review.
This is due to the fact that with this plugin you’ll be able to display a “placeholder for testimonials” where only those “ready for display” are shown, that’s why you need a reviewing/approval/rejected step.
Capturing testimonials
There are two ways of capturing testimonials on your website: manually, and automatically.
Capturing testimonials manually
Let’s say a client wrote you an email telling you how happy he is with your product or service.
After asking him for permission, you could add his testimonial to Thrive Ovation using the “Add New” button.
Let’s say a client wrote you an email telling you how happy he is with your product or service.
After asking him for permission, you could add his testimonial to Thrive Ovation using the “Add New” button.
This will make a new popup window appear, where you’ll be able to replicate the comment you’ve just received.
Only the name and the testimonial itself are mandatory fields, but the more info you add, the better for your social proof.
- Important: tags are very useful for organizing your reviews. For instance, if you have several products, you can use one tag for each of them, so in the future, you only show the testimonials related to that product on its sales page.
- Note: as you manually add the testimonial, it will appear as “ready for display”, although you can change that status from the dashboard.
There is another way of importing testimonials to your WordPress site, and this is, doing it from social media (Twitter).
Using this option, you’ll find a box where paste a Tweet URL, so the content (the tweet itself, the picture, and the Twitter handle) is imported automatically as a new testimonial.
You’ll need a Twitter developer account for that (it’s free), so unless you get several testimonials via Twitter, I don’t think this step is worth it, as the procedure as you have seen, is still a bit manual.
Auto capture testimonials
The best way of capturing testimonials is “set and forget” a form that handles this for you.
This is something you can do with a Shortcode, or with Thrive Leads or Thrive Architect if you use those plugins from the suite.
The last two methods are almost identical, as all you have to do is add the “Capture Testimonials” block either to your pages/posts (Thrive Architect), or to your “sign-up” forms (Thrive Leads)
The Shortcode method is the one you’ll have to use if you don’t use the previous mention plugins, as you’ll get a classic code like the following, that you will be able to embed in any page or post.
[tvo_shortcode id=1881]In both cases, you’ll be able to configure your forms in detail:
- Deciding which fields are mandatory, or which ones do you want to show
- Asking additional questions
- Colors, and tags
- Personalizing the success message after submission, or redirecting the user to another URL after it. Useful for offering a gift after an honest review.
Displaying testimonials
As you can see, it’s very easy to automatically capture testimonials with Thrive Ovation, as you can create a specific page for this purpose, and redirect clients there through, for instance, autoresponders.
Displaying your gathered testimonial is even easier, as you just have to pick one of the two options: Thrive Architect block, or use shortcode.
In any case, you’ll have a wide variety of professional testimonial templates to choose from, something that will make them stand out from the rest of the content.
You’ll have two options when showing your testimonials:
- Pick the testimonials manually: so you’ll end up with static content.
- Or set display rules using tags: so the testimonials will automatically be updated if more reviews are added.
Thrive Ovation honest opinion, is it worth it?
As happened with Thrive Comments, Thrive Ovation is another nice-to-have plugin.
But in this case, recommending it is even more delicate, as I think this is only useful if you are already selling a product or service through your website, and even so, you’ll need to proactively ask for testimonials in order to get them.
If your monetization strategy is to display ads and/or promote affiliate products, there is no point in having Thrive Ovation.
One feature I miss a lot is the ability to let the user just rate using stars, and then being able to show an average rating, something very useful for instance for online courses.
I don’t recommend Thrive Ovation as a standalone purchase, as I don’t feel is powerful enough for that price, however, if you are already on the Thrive Suite membership, it could be worth spending ~half-hour setting your testimonial gathering system if you don’t have any at this point.
Thrive Ovation alternatives
If you don’t want to use Thrive Ovation, I recommend you to use Site Reviews instead.
It’s very powerful and free, and the premium add-ons are affordable.
What’s your favorite WordPress testimonial management plugin?
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