How To Build Your Reputation With Testimonials And User Reviews
Are you stuck in a cycle of doing what you’ve always done to attract and retain customers, and getting the exact same results? As most business owners know, that finding effective ways of generating new customers can be extremely difficult. Just trying to keep your business afloat takes up a lot of time, money and energy, and sometimes this can feel like it’s just not worth the effort.
In today’s digital economy, ignoring what your clients may be saying online about your business could be a costly mistake!
Don’t ignore what your clients may be saying online about your business!
You may also be doing your business a great disservice if you don’t publish the positive things your clients are saying about your services or products. User reviews, testimonials, and case studies are effective ways of helping you market your products and services online and should be an integral part of your content.
In this article, we’ll show you how to improve your visitor-to-sales conversions with captivating client testimonials.
Testimonials And Customer Reviews
Phineas Taylor P.T. Barnum, legendary businessman and showman, is often quoted as having stated that “Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd.”
P.T. Barnum obviously understood the power of “social proof”. Social proof-based content is a powerful and effective way of getting your business promoted. Genuine reviews from your existing clients are far more persuasive for attracting new customers than anything you can say about your own products or services.
There is clearly a source of untapped business growth potential that most businesses just aren’t utilizing, or utilizing correctly … consumer reviews and testimonials!
Testimonials and reviews are fantastic for building credibility for your products or services.
Studies conducted by marketing research firms all point to the same conclusion: user reviews and testimonials help reduce doubts potential customers may have about buying products, help with product selection and increases conversions of visitors into sales.
Here are just some of the stats available to support this:
- According to research findings by eVoc Insights, a company that researches and measures user experience, “In general, 63% of users indicate they are more likely to purchase from a web site if it has ratings and consumer reviews.”
- According to Reevoo.com, user reviews can result in an average 18% uplift in sales and 50 or more user reviews per product can translate into a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.
- Website visitors who interact with both reviews and customer questions and answers are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting and spend 11% more than visitors who don’t interact with user-generated content (UGC). (Bazaarvoice, Conversation Index, Q2 2011).
- Customer reviews are significantly more trusted (nearly 12 times more) than descriptions that come from manufacturers, according to a survey of US internet users by online video review site EXPO. (eMarketer, February 2010).
(Source: eConsultancy.com)
Adding Client Testimonials And Reviews – Managing Online Reputation
Clearly, you should be adding testimonials and reviews from happy clients to your website.
Consumer reviews and testimonials, however, can work both ways and affect your business both positive and negative ways.
People may not be saying bad things about your business, products or services directly to you, but they could post disparaging remarks on a discussion thread about a bad encounter they’ve just had with you or your business and this could be costing you business.
This is where online reputation management becomes important to your business success.
Misconceptions about managing your reputation online, such as being too complicated or too time-consuming (or the belief that you just don’t need it) could be seriously hurting your business without you even realizing it.
See this article to learn more about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management:
Improving Your Conversions With User Testimonials – Useful Tips
User reviews, testimonials, and case studies are persuasive ways of helping you promote and market your products and services online and should be included as part of your content marketing. When you include responses from users in your content, you:
- Show other users exactly what problems and pains your products and services can help to solve for them and how easily this can be done.
- Help visitors identify their objections and address these.
- Help prospects connect with their motivations and aspirations and this facilitates moving them closer to a buying decision.
Here are some tips on improving your conversions with awesome testimonials:
- Don’t over edit: Try to use the actual words used by your customers as much as you can. Leaving grammatical errors and misspelled words in the content helps to keep it ‘real’.
- Use photos: Marketing studies show that using images of people’s faces draws the attention of visitors on a web page. Adding photos of your clients next to their testimonials and reviews can help your visitors and potential prospects take notice of your content.
- Tell a story: Stories are much more effective and memorable than simply providing statistical facts. The ability to present a customer’s horror story and how your solution came to the rescue will make a longer-lasting impression on those reading your content than presenting generic statements about how “excellent” your support was and giving “two thumbs up” service recommendations that everyone has heard a “million times” before.
- Keep it in context: It’s good to add testimonials in your web content where it makes the most sense to place them, and where you believe these can most effectively help to sell your point. Think about the impact you will have on your visitor’s perception by adding a testimonial about what a “bargain” price your solution retails for before posting service pricing information, or testimonials about problems you’ve helped your clients solve before talking about the benefits of your products, or testimonials where clients are truly thrilled about your customer service when offering a risk-free guarantee or providing content that helps readers overcome their objections.
- Quantify the information: Which of the following statements do you think is more powerful… “XYZ solution was directly responsible for helping us grow our revenue by $67,228 during the previous fiscal year,” or “XYZ solution definitely helped us grow our sales?” If possible, publish testimonials containing quantifiable results, like how much your solution helped to increase their market share or reduce their costs by in specific percentages or amounts, how many hours of work they have saved, how many new leads or new clients they were able to generate, what kind of things are they able to do or experience now that they couldn’t do before, etc.
- Vary the client testimonials on your site: Although this can be somewhat difficult if you are just starting out or have very few clients, it’s best to avoid displaying the same testimonial repeatedly throughout your site’s pages. Depending on your business, you could try to obtain more testimonials by offering limited review copies of your product, or a special launch discount for clients in exchange for an honest review and permission to publish it if you decide to use it.
- Appeal to your target audience: As every infomercial featuring a celebrity endorsement, subject expert or “busy mom” knows, if you know who your ideal customer is, providing testimonials from people who your prospects aspire to become is an extremely powerful motivator and influencer. People want to see and buy from “better versions” of themselves, so make sure to include testimonials that appeal directly to your ideal customers.
- Reprint testimonials across different platforms. If you get fantastic feedback on your Facebook page praising your business, send them a message asking permission to reprint the comment or post on your blog.
- Don’t use fake client testimonials. Your potential customers need to see that the testimonials displayed on your site are genuine. Don’t compromise your credibility with a false testimonial.
How To Get Testimonials From Clients
Just Ask
If you have just completed a service for someone, or a customer says they are really happy with your product or service, ask them for a testimonial.
Follow these useful guidelines for requesting testimonials from your clients:
- Contact customers after a specific period of time, e.g. 30 days with an email reminder for a testimonial if you did not obtain one after completing your service.
- Add a text box for entering testimonials in client surveys.
- Take out your phone next time you visit a client or hand over a completed project and if they are delighted with your services, ask them if they wouldn’t mind recording a very short video testimonial/feedback interview. While recording your video, explain to viewers what you have done for the client and try to capture their positive reactions and responses.
- Make it easy and write the testimonial for them. If clients send you a positive email thanking you for a great job that contains snippets of useful testimonial material interspersed with the rest of their message, grab the juiciest sections (only use what they have given you – never put words into their mouth), and use these to create a testimonial, then contact your client and ask them for permission to quote them on your site. Explain that you have already prepared something to save them time and invite them to change what you have written however they see fit before replying with their approval.
Offer To Publish A Link To Their Site Wherever You Quote Their Testimonial
Offer to publish a link to their website in exchange for their testimonial. This is a great incentive to get clients to provide a testimonial. It also makes the implicit statement to visitors that your testimonials are not fake and can be verified.
Include Testimonial Requests In Your Auto Responder/Newsletter Messages
If you have a subscriber list, include a request for a testimonial in one of your newsletter mailouts. Preferably, this should be timed to reach subscribers just after your customers have had a chance to use your products or services. Use words like “I need your help” in the subject of your email and make the point of your email or message specifically about asking users for honest feedback, a testimonial, or a review of your services.
Use LinkedIn
The LinkedIn “Recommendations” feature allows you to obtain testimonials that become part of your account. With LinkedIn, the process for requesting and providing recommendations is simple and user-friendly and the person providing the recommendation gets a link to their profile. If you get a positive recommendation on LinkedIn, ask for permission to reprint it on your website (and offer to add a link back to their website or profile in exchange).
Create A Testimonials Section On Your Site
Create a “Testimonials” page and place a “more customer testimonials …” link pointing to your main testimonials page throughout your content sections.
Practical Tip: You can measure the effectiveness of testimonials by how long visitors remain on the section of your pages or posts where you have added the testimonial content. A great tool for measuring what visitors are doing on your pages are “heatmaps”.
We have written an article about adding heatmaps to your site to monitor visitor behaviour here:
Testimonial Plugins For WordPress
If your site or blog is powered by WordPress, you can use a plugin to display testimonials. Some plugins also allow you to add a form to your pages where users can submit testimonials.
Once your testimonial plugin is installed and set up (with instructions for using the testimonials submission form – if available), you can then send users to your “Testimonials” page.
Below are a few useful plugins you can check out:
Easy Testimonials
Easy Testimonials is an easy-to-use free plugin that lets you add testimonials to your sidebar as a widget, or embed testimonials into a Page or Post using a shortcode. Easy Testimonials also lets you add a list of all testimonials or output a random testimonial, and include images with testimonials, which is great for adding a photo of the testimonial author, their business logo, etc.
Easy Testimonials also provides a “pro” version with additional features and technical support.
To download and use this plugin, go here:
Testimonials Widget
Testimonials Widget is a free plugin that lets you randomly slide or list selected portfolios, quotes, reviews, or text with images or videos on your pages and posts. You can insert customer testimonials via a shortcode, theme functions, or widgets with category and tag selections and have multiple display options such as random or specific ordering.
The plugin offers a range of additional features via a premium version, including built-in options for better search engine results and developer support.
To learn more about using the plugin, visit this site:
Testimonials WordPress Plugin
This is a premium plugin that offers plenty of great features right out of the box, including:
- Responsive design that resizes to display correctly on any device or browser.
- Options to display your testimonials in a widget or as slideshows, sliders, list layout, grid layout, etc. via a shortcode
- Styling options (display image on top, bottom, or side of testimonials, display testimonial in a speech bubble, customize font and background colors, font types and more.
To download and use the plugin, visit this site:
To learn how to add testimonials in WordPress, see the tutorial below:
In Summary …
User reviews and client testimonials are powerful sources of content that can help your business in terms of adding credibility, building authority, improving online reputation, and growing your sales funnel. Always ask for testimonials, reviews, and feedback from existing customers or clients, and publish positive content about your business on your site.
Resources
For additional resources on creating engaging clients testimonials read the articles below:
- Ecommerce Consumer Reviews: Why You Need Them And How To Use Them
- How To Create Captivating Customer Testimonials
- 5 Tips For Knockout Testimonials
- Make Customer Testimonials Meaningful
- 7 Simple But Powerful Customer Testimonial Examples You Can Steal
- Your 5-Minute Guide To Writing an Amazing LinkedIn Recommendation
- How To Get Great LinkedIn Recommendations
We also recommend subscribing to our Free Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive a comprehensive series of training emails with actionable information and practical tips that will show you how to drive more traffic to your site, save money creating useful content for your site visitors and grow your business online using content marketing strategies. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also 100% FREE!
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