We’ve spoken a little bit before about how important it is for you to gain your customers trust. You can check out this blog post for a more general run through of the benefits, but the general point is this: the more your customers trust you, the more likely it is they will buy from you. Today we’re discussing one of the most powerful ways to gain your customer’s trust – testimonials.

Online Reviews

The world of customer reviews is a very important one and something that the big boys of online sales know how to leverage very well. Check these out from Amazon.com for example:

More or less every product that Amazon sell comes complete with one or more customer reviews telling you the buyer what they thought about the product they had bought themselves. Very often a shopping trip to Amazon becomes less about what the company has to say about the product they are selling, but much more about what their previous customers have to say. How many times have you bought from a company purely because the reviews had been great?

Testimonials Are Positive Reviews

A customer testimonial is similar to a review, except this review is not about one of your products – it’s directly recommending your business. The power of gaining testimonials is that they boost your customer’s confidence in the service you offer and the products you supply. Think of it like those Amazon reviews- but this time they are reviewing you. The great thing about testimonials is that you can (to some degree) control how they look. After all – nobody has bad testimonials on their site. So how do we go about getting testimonials?

How To Gain Testimonials For Your Website

Well for established businesses this part is easy – ask your best customers. If you are providing them a great service or product that they keep coming back for they should be happy to provide you with a testimonial. For startups and new businesses getting feedback can be a bit more tricky, after all nobody much has used your business yet. Fortunately there is a not-so-secret trick that works well – free samples. Offering a free sample of a product or service to a friend or associate in return for a review can work wonders. Just remember to ditch any bad comments and concentrate on the positives.

How To Best Present Testimonials On Your Website

So you’ve got your testimonial, how do you maximise it’s power on your website? Well you have to add a little weight to the testimonial to maximise it’s true power. Here are a few things you can do to build trust in the testimonial.

• Use your customers full name alongside the testimonial to add kudos
• Use a photo alongside the name as evidence of the customer as a real person
• Use a social media or website link for the customer to add responsibility
• Use a status indicator (e.g. MD of widgets.com) as evidence of the customer’s position

The best and most effective testimonials will incorporate all of those features to build a package that people take notice of and believe in. Check out this example of a great bank of testimonials from our friends over at www.printcolchester.co.uk

If you provide a service another way to maximise your testimonials is to link them to case studies of the services you have provided. This way you can say “this is the service I have provided, this is how it went, and this is who I made happy”. We’ll talk more about case studies in a future blog post.

Actioning Your Testimonials

If you’ve got a website with us it’s easy to add your testimonials to your existing pages. Just email them over to me at joe@webwalrus.co.uk and I’ll get them added on for you. If you are a WordPress user trying this for yourself a good plugin to help out is Testimonials from Woothemes, although it might need some extra CSS to help out with the formatting. Joomla users might want to give this testimonials plugin a go. Need some help? I’ll try my best to answer any questions in the comments below.

See you next time…

J