Why customers testimonials are so important in helping to convert visitors to your website into new customers.
Do testimonials from previous customers on your website, really matter for converting new visitors into customers? The short answer is yes as we explore below.
Customer testimonials are an essential part of building up your on-line business. They can help greatly with the conversion rate of visitors to your business website to customers. This is because they add legitimacy to your website and make people more willing to buy from you.
A lot of people don't realise how hard it can be to persuade someone to open their wallet for the first time on an unknown website or to buy from an unknown trades person. Testimonials can help you with this. They make people feel more comfortable making a purchase if they know that other people have made the same purchase for similar reasons and have been happy with their purchase. This is part of herd mentality and the reason all the worlds biggest on-line companies, such as Amazon and E bay have based their whole platforms around customer reviews.
It can be tempting to companies to write fake testimonials for their website but most of the time this will backfire. Shoppers are getting to be quite good at telling when someone has written a fake review or testimonial - the language used in fake reviews tends to follow a similar pattern, and over-emphasise things that the average shopper would not talk about. Real testimonials will not only be more relatable and believable, they're a good way of getting some word of mouth advertising from the people that have used your services.
Customer testimonials add content to your site, and they help you to look more valuable and more believable to those who are exploring it for the first time. They, along with reviews and 'trust ratings' can help to show that your site has value and that you are a reliable supplier of the service that you are selling.
You can get testimonials from your existing customers quite easily, just talk to them and ask if they'd be willing to write a few words about their experience with your company. You should find that they are eager to do so, and that the stories that they share will add life to your site and help people to see themselves in the position of buyer. Parents, couples, single people, retirees, whoever it is, they will seem far more real and far more trustworthy to a new buyer than you, the salesman, saying that your product or service is useful to them.
You can always let people submit testimonials through a third party service such as Trust Pilot if you wish. A lot of internet maketing companies now use Google reviews on their own website, either copying images and placing them on the website or using interactive plugins. The plugins allow customers to click through to the official site to see more reviews, like Brand That Name have on their homepage.
Registering for third party reviews sites is an easy way of getting reviews but, self-maintained ones can be useful for you as well and will allow you to curate them a little more carefully. It helps with avoiding spam or issues where a competitor attempts to submit fake reviews with the search engines or with your review provider.
There are usually ways to get around those issues, but it can still make sense to try to keep control of your content in the short term so that you don't end up having your ratings destroyed by one or two malicious fake reviews before you have a decent collection of ratings built up from regular customers.
So, regardless of how you get reviews of your services on your website, you have seen above that it makes good business sense to use them.