I have some good news and some bad news for you. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The bad news is your website visitors don’t trust you. They don’t know who you are, and today’s consumer has a BS detector that’s on full alert when shopping online. In short, they’re just looking for a reason to discover you’re a shady company trying to rip them off.
Are you ready for the good news? The good news is you can gain the trust of your website visitors. One way to earn their trust is by including testimonials on your landing pages. But you probably already knew that. However, what most people don’t know is that not all testimonials are created equal. Some testimonials just take up space, and others actually work to increase your conversion rate.
How can you get more conversions from your testimonials? Here are some tips to get you started:
Match your testimonials to the subject of the page
Let’s pretend you run a marketing company. On your website, you have landing pages for SEO services, web design, billboard advertisements, brochure design, and so on. Now, on your SEO landing page, you don’t want to have a bunch of testimonials talking about how great your brochure design services are. Your visitors who are looking for SEO services don’t care about that. They want to see testimonials from clients who have benefitted from your SEO services.
Matching your testimonials to the subject of the page helps you target your visitors more accurately. It lets them see that other people just like them have used the particular service or product they’re interested in with much success. It also just makes your landing page have a more unified theme from top to bottom, ensuring you aren’t sending too many messages to new visitors.
Include pictures with your testimonials
Unfortunately, some companies make up their testimonials, and savvy customers know this. So, they won’t automatically take your testimonials at face value. You need to convince visitors your testimonials are legitimate.
By adding a photo of the person providing the testimonial, you show visitors that a real customer wrote this. It puts a face to the words, helping visitors feel a little more connected to the person submitting the testimonial.
Try using video testimonials
According to the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook, video testimonials are the second most trustworthy endorsements, just barely trailing customer reviews. Why are video testimonials trusted by so many consumers? Because you can see the customer; it’s not just a block of text that anyone could easily forge. It’s this visual element that makes video testimonials score much higher than audio testimonials or plain text testimonials.
When using video testimonials on your website, there are a couple things you need to keep in mind. First, don’t use auto-play on your video. It’s annoying, it could conflict with music the person is already listening to, and it causes visitors to instantly look for a way to shut the video off, rather than paying attention to the video’s content. Also, make sure your landing page still loads quickly after you add video to it, as impatient visitors will click “back” if load time is slow.
Add a link in your testimonial
Having the name “John Smith” (or any other name) at the end of a testimonial doesn’t really do much to legitimize the testimonial in the eyes of the consumer. They don’t know John Smith from Adam. However, if you can include a link to John Smith’s website (his company website, blog, social networking profile…or whatever), the visitor can see that John Smith is in fact a real person. Again, this increases the credibility of your testimonials and your company.
Do you use testimonials on your landing pages? Have they helped increase your conversion rate? Let us know in the comments below