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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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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