Add a healthy dose of credibility to your business website by sprinkling testimonials from your best customers around the pages. Testimonials are short statements praising your business, ideally with the customer’s name, town or company, and image attached.
Unlike good reviews, which are happy windfalls, you work with your clients to intentionally create these statements to reinforce the business objectives of your website. Client testimonials show website visitors from your target audiences that you serve people like them, get their problems, and have proven solutions.
Here are some effective ways to use testimonials on your site.
Build a customer testimonials page
If you only do one thing, line up your testimonials on a single page and add a “testimonials” tab to your site navigation. A simple design is fine. Here’s a nice example from stationery shop Paper & Poste, with each testimonial paired with an image of the clients’ wedding invitation.
Add testimonials at decision points around the site
A marketing experiment found that adding a few testimonial quotes to a page increased signups of a web form by one-third. Position endorsements of a specific product or service on a related page and see if your results pop. Another catchy use (pictured above) from the Quick Sprout site: a testimonial that looks like an ad.
Make a testimonial the focus of your home page
If you have a willing client, and a good photographer, consider blowing out a testimonial and making it the main welcoming image of your site. You can see that on the home page for Infusionsoft. It’s a great message about your commitment to customers (and theirs to you). Also, it’s what Google did for its Analytics product home page – and they must know something.
Post a video testimonial
Seeing a customer on-screen makes his or her statement even more credible. You can hire a videographer for a more professional look but customers who shoot their own video testimonials on a webcam or with a smart-phone make it look even more authentic. Speaking of authenticity, we don’t recommend hiring a five-buck video endorser or a Muppet lookalike.
When a testimonial grows up it becomes a case study or client success story
Interview a client and create a page on your site about how your company solved a problem. Writing a case study is easier than it might sound: three sections with a little text for each, “Problem”, “Solution”, “Results”. Here’s a simple example from KISSmetrics.
Testimonial image from Quick Sprout
The Guide to Winning
More Business Online
We’ll show you how to land more customers with a better website and online presence in this free ebook.
