Visitors Into Customers Series 3: Testimonials Or Die…In Business

For many of us, referrals are the lifeblood of our business. Local businesses aren’t Coca-Cola – we have limited marketing budgets and mouths to feed. Getting clients ecstatic with your work so that they share with their friends is incredibly important to keeping food on your table.

Online, referrals work in a different sort of way. Yes, you can have a customer share your business with their friend on Facebook or through email, but another very useful way to have someone “refer” you is to use a testimonial from them on your website.

With this review in place, when a stranger arrives to your site, they are right away able to see that other clients are happy with your service, and why.

Testimonials work because they provide credibility for you and your business, the best testimonials helping to conquer common objections about your business (ie. “I thought it was going to be too expensive, but it turned out that Accountant X saved me hundreds of dollars because he was so experienced and efficient!”)

What Does A Stranger’s Opinion Mean To Me?

Yes we’ve all heard the hokey “as seen on TV” testimonials of some “real user”, and they’re largely unconvincing for us as we know it’s just some paid actor.

How do you make sure that visitors to your site don’t perceive your testimonials as “hokey”, but instead see them as a credible source of information?

You do this by providing testimonials that are:

  1. real

  2. detailed

  3. personal

You can’t make this type of testimonial up. That’s why it’s always good to get your current clients to write about how happy they are with your service.

But then, we run into a problem. We go and ask all our clients to leave us a nice review, and they promise “oh yes I’ll do that for sure”, and then…

…they never do it.

You see, a customer runs into a big problem when they need to write something nice: writer’s block. you see, most customers aren’t like you or I, who can come up with something special to say off the top of our head. They need some momentum to get going.

And that’s where questions come in, to help your happy customer’s mind start thinking.

6 Questions To Ask Your Clients For Rich Testimonials

Ask your customers these 6 questions, and you’ll start getting rich, specific, and engaging testimonials in no time at all.

  1. What was the obstacle that would have prevented you from buying this product/service?

  2. What did you find as a result of buying this product/service?

  3. What specific feature did you like about this product/service?

  4. What would be 3 other benefits of this product/service?

  5. Would you recommend this product/service? Why?

  6. Is there anything you would like to add?

Now, once you receive your answers from your customers (you can email them these questions, if it’s easier for you) you’ll probably want to edit them a little bit. Ask them to answer with full sentences so that you can do less editing.

You’ll want to remove the most generic parts of the testimonial, because sometimes a customer gets stuck on a question and just gives a “swath” answer; they don’t have an answer so they just make something up that’s generic and boring.

Take care in editing the reply, as you don’t want to change the meaning of what your customer has said – you just need to condense it down to 2-5 sentences so that you can easily display it on your website. You can keep some of them very long if you feel it’s appropriate too.

By the way, these questions were first developed by Sean D’souza from Psychotactics.com. He’s also written an entire little book about testimonials.

Where To Put These Testimonials

Once you have your testimonials in hand (these are worth thousands of dollars), you can start putting them on your site.

Place testimonials in some, or all of these places, such as:

  • your home page

  • a “Testimonials/Reviews” page

  • on your purchase page

  • on a specific product page

  • on your contact page

  • in a right-hand sidebar

  • on your Facebook/Twitter page

Use testimonials to bolster your credibility, and add a “multiplier” effect to the rest of your online sales efforts.

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Here's a sample testimonial that we wrote for a sign company, so you can see what one might look like in action.
Here’s a sample testimonial that we wrote for a sign company, so you can see what one might look like in action.

On a barely related note: you can also ask clients to review you on Google+ Local, where more reviews help increase your business’s ranking on Google.

Next week we’ll be discussing one of the most exciting online strategies for increasing your sales and leads: A/B split testing. That might be an unfamiliar term right now, but we can help you get over your temporary ignorance. Read next week’s article and feel your knowledge gap disappear!

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Visitors Into Customers Series 2: Display A Prominent “Click-To-Call” Phone Number

“Most of our customers call; they don’t email us”.

If that’s you, then displaying a phone number in a very visible location is important. Beyond that, you’ll also want to make sure the phone number is “click-to-call”.

What’s click-to-call?

When a potential customer is on your site on their mobile phone, they can simply touch your phone number on their screen, and their phone will prompt them to automatically “call you”. It removes the dialing process entirely so you’re just a click away.

The click-to-call link is very easy to make, just send the following HTML to your webmaster (with your phone number in it):

<a href=”tel:+18006669999″>1(800)666-9999</a>

If someone on their desktop computer clicks the link, they’ll just be directed to call you via Skype or another calling app. On a tablet (iPad), they will be prompted to add the number in their contacts book.

Breaking The Mobile Web has a great article about the click-to-call code if you need some more information about it.

Where Should You Put Your Phone Number?

Everywhere!

Put your phone number in any place that makes sense, the most obvious being the top right corner of your screen (and right at the top on mobile devices).

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Desktop Version
Desktop Version

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Mobile Version
Mobile Version

More ideas: you could put a call button after each article on your website, and even just spaced throughout your content or eCommerce store. You’ll want your web developer to spend some time designing new buttons to grab attention.

If you have a fair amount of traffic (over 100 unique visitors/day) you might even consider some A/B split testing on your buttons to see which ones get the most calls. We’ll cover A/B split testing in part 4 of this series.

Call up your webmaster today and get some phone numbers on your business’s website![/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Visitors Into Customers Series 1: Use A “Call-To-Action” On Your Website

You have a beautiful new website, and you’re running some ads or an SEO campaign to bring new visitors to your site.

Now what?

Imagine a bakery that’s full of people, but no one buys anything. They just walk in, take a peek around, and then leave. If that was your business, what would you do? I can guarantee you’d at least think “why isn’t anyone buying anything?

It would be perfectly natural to think that, yet sometimes we don’t have the same thought process about our website:

Why isn’t anyone buying?” Or possibly “how can I get more people to buy?”.

Given this question, we’ve decided to introduce a new series called “Visitors Into Customers”. We’ll be giving you a new idea every week that you can apply to your business’s website. It’s not a huge job, and most tasks can be done in under an hour (bar week #4, which has one of our most important tips).

We’ll provide examples and tools that you can apply yourself, or get your webmaster to do for you. Let’s start with tip #1:

Use A “Call-To-Action” (CTA) Throughout Your Website

Also known as “telling your visitors what to do”, a CTA is short, and it contains your “Most Wanted Response” (MWR).

Most-wanted response definition: the action you most want visitors to take that is most valuable to you. Common MWRs for a small business are to get a visitor to:

  • call you
  • fill out a contact form
  • make a purchase online
  • fill out a form for a free quote
  • book an appointment online

Your MWR is valuable to you; it usually represents a lead or a sale.

It may seem shallow and possibly even cynical, but simply saying “Call Us Today!” will dramatically increase the likelihood of a visitor calling you, instead of just leaving your website.

You have two action steps now:

  1. Decide on a most-wanted response
  2. Turn that MWR into a call-to-action, and put it throughout your website

Examples Of A Call-To-Action

Let’s say you decide that your MWR is for a visitor to email you. You’ll want to place some prominent buttons around your website, “calling” your visitors to take action. Here’s an example:

call-to-action-email-1

You’ll also want to put a “contact” link in your navigation.

One successful idea is to put a call-to-action at the end of your articles whenever appropriate. For example, a local mechanic in Chilliwack puts this button at the end of his articles:

call-to-action-email-2

Because they’ve already been reading his content, and are sold on his credibility (because he answered all of their questions), providing a CTA at this time is very effective.

Where can you put a call-to-action on your website? If your site is built on WordPress, you should be able to find shortcodes that make creating buttons a snap. If not, you can always use Button Optimizer to make your own custom CTA buttons.

And in our very own “call-to-action” style…

…create your website’s call-to-action now!

How Does Google Work? (Part 3)

What To Write About

If you were to write a book on your business, what would the chapters be? Heck, you might even consider visiting Amazon.com and looking through the chapters of their books based on your industry – you might find some great ideas right there!

After that, you might consider keeping a notepad handy and writing down questions that your customers ask you. Maybe you can answer those questions on your website in the form of an article?

Regardless of your ideas, it’s very useful to try out a keyword research tool to find out what people are searching for online.

Wordtracker is a useful keyword research tool. Just type in a keyword related to the article you’re considering, and you should be able to find the demand (and competition) for related topics. They have a monthly subscription that you might consider if you’ll be writing a fair amount of content for your website, but if you just need it for a few articles the free limited tool may be useful to you.

If you hire an SEO company to help you with your optimization, they should have keyword research tools available to do that type of research for you.

Regardless of what route you take, remember the golden rule of ranking online:

Information, information, information!

Let’s Remember

To recap on this series:

  • Google is in the business of providing the best information to its visitors. It’s where they make their bread & butter.
  • On the web, it’s “information, information, information” not “location, location, location”.
  • If you want to be found by Google, you need to provide great information that answers customer’s questions.
  • Do keyword research to find out what information in your niche is “in-demand”. Feel free to sprinkle a few of these keywords throughout your articles to help give Google cues to what the content is about.
  • The best person to write content for your website…is you! An optimal solution is to hire a writer who can interview you and get the best information from you directly. If not you, they can interview one of your expert employees.
  • Make a content plan for what you want to write about on your website. Not sure how to do this? Pretend your site is a book – what would the “chapters” be?

Once you start getting a steady flow of content to your website, don’t be surprised when the visitors start to naturally flow in. As long as your site has a professional design to go along with the expert content, you should be converting customers very quickly.

After you’ve got them hooked in, what are you going to do with those customers? In order to keep them engaged with you, you may want to consider starting a mailing list (newsletter) if you don’t have one already. It’s an incredibly effective tool to sell your products and services.

Stay tuned as we cover mailing lists on a future post.