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 customers, only to get the exact same disappointing results? Most business owners don’t need to be told that finding effective ways of generating new business can be difficult and confusing. Just trying to survive in business requires a lot of time, money and energy, and sometimes this can feel like it’s just not worth the effort.
In today’s digital, mobile and social media-driven economy, it’s foolish to ignore the significance of what potential customers are doing online, especially if they are posting comments about your business.
Don’t ignore what your customers may be saying online about your business!
You could be doing your business a disservice if you don’t publish the positive things your clients are saying about your products and services. User reviews, testimonials, and case studies are powerful ways of helping you market your products and services online and should be used in your content.
In this article, you’ll discover how to improve your conversions with powerful client testimonials.
Consumer Reviews And Testimonials
P.T. Barnum, the great, legendary showman and successful promoter, once stated that “Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd.”
P.T. Barnum obviously understood the power of “social proof”. Using social proof as content is a powerful way of getting your business promoted effectively. Quoting genuine reviews and testimonials directly from existing clients is satisfied users are far more persuasive when it comes to drawing new customers than anything you can say about your own products or services.
There is an untapped source of business growth potential that most businesses just aren’t utilizing, or utilizing correctly … consumer reviews and testimonials!
Customer reviews and customer testimonials are fantastic for building credibility for your products and services.
Studies conducted by many leading research firms all lead to the same inevitable conclusion: adding customer testimonials and consumer reviews to your site helps decrease doubts potential customers may have about buying your products or services, helps users select products and increases sales conversions.
Below are just some of the findings available to support this:
- According to research by eVoc Insights, an organization that researches and measures user experience, “In general, 63% of users indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has ratings and user reviews.”
- According to Reevoo.com, user reviews can produce an average 18% uplift in sales and 50 or more user reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.
- Site visitors who interact with both customer 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 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).
(The figures above were sourced from eConsultancy.com)
Adding Client Reviews And Testimonials – Online Reputation Management
You should be adding positive reviews from happy clients who have experienced positive results with your business to your website.
Reviews and customer testimonials, however, are like double-edged swords; they can impact your business both in a positive as well as negative manner.
People may not be saying bad things about your business, products or services directly to you, but they could post damaging words on Facebook about a bad encounter they’ve just had with one of your sales or customer support representatives and this could be doing far more damage to your business than all the good work you’ve been putting into building it.
This is where online reputation management becomes a vitally important aspect of your business success.
Misconceptions about managing your reputation online, such as the process being too complicated or too time-consuming (or the belief that you really don’t need to worry about it) may be causing damage to your business without you even being aware of this.
See this article to learn more about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective user review management:
How To Create Testimonials – Useful Tips
Testimonials, user reviews, and case studies are effective when it comes to helping you market and promote your products and services online and should be included as part of your content. When you quote responses from users in your content, you:
- Show prospects exactly with similar problems and pains what your products and services can do for them.
- Help visitors identify their objections and address these.
- Help potential customers connect with their motivations and facilitate moving them closer to a buying decision.
Below are some useful tips on improving your conversions with captivating testimonials:
- Avoid over-editing: You should try using your customer’s actual words as much as you can. Leave grammatical or spelling errors in the content. This helps keep your testimonials ‘real’.
- Use photos of real people: Images of people’s faces draw the most attention 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.
- Use the power of storytelling: Stories are so much more powerful and captivating than providing mere facts and statistics. Being able to present a customer’s horror story and how your solution came to the rescue will make a more lasting impression on those reading your content than using generic statements about how “excellent” your service was and giving “two thumbs up” product recommendations that all of us have 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 can create on your visitor’s mind if you were to insert a testimonial about what a “bargain” price your solution sells for before posting your service pricing information, or testimonials about problems you’ve helped your clients solve before presenting the benefits of your products, or testimonials where customers are genuinely thrilled about your support before offering guarantees or addressing objections.
- Quantify your information: Which of the following statements do you think your prospects would find more powerful… “XYZ solution was directly responsible for increasing our net profit by $70,902 during the last fiscal year,” or “XYZ software has helped us grow our business?” If possible, ask clients to specify quantifiable results when submitting testimonials, like how much your solution helped to increase their market share or reduce their costs by in specific percentages or amounts, how many hours 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 testimonials on your site: Although this can be somewhat difficult if you are just starting out and don’t have many clients, try to avoid using the same testimonial everywhere on your website. Depending on the type of business you run, you could try to obtain more testimonials by offering limited review copies of your product, or a special discount for existing clients in exchange for an honest review and permission to publish it if you choose 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 a very powerful motivator and influencer. People want to see and buy from “better versions” of themselves, so make sure to include testimonials targeted to your ideal customers.
- Reprint content across different platforms. If someone posts a great comment on your Facebook wall praising your commitment to customer satisfaction, contact them privately asking for their permission to reprint the comment or post on your site.
- Never use fake testimonials. Many people can see through sites that employ copywriters to create their content. Outsourcing content is fine, but prospective customers need to see that the testimonials published on your site are genuine. Don’t compromise your integrity or reputation with false testimonials.
How To Get Testimonials
Ask
Getting a testimonial from a satisfied customer can be as simple as just asking for it.
Follow these useful guidelines for requesting testimonials:
- Make a point of contacting clients after 90 days with an email reminder for a testimonial if you have not obtained one immediately after completing a service.
- Add a text box for entering testimonials in all your client surveys.
- Take out your phone when you next visit clients or hand over a completed job and if they are delighted with the results, ask them if they wouldn’t mind recording a very quick video testimonial/feedback interview. When recording the video, describe to your viewers what you have done for the client and capture their positive reactions and feedback.
- Make it easy for them. Whenever clients send you a positive email thanking you for a great service 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 – don’t put words into their mouth), and use these to create a testimonial, then contact the client and ask them for permission to quote them on your site. Explain that you have done this to help them save time and let them know they are completely free to change what you have written however they like before replying with their approval.
Offer To Publish A Link Back To Their Site Wherever You Publish Their Testimonial
Offer to publish a link back to their site in exchange for their testimonial. This is often enough of an incentive to get clients to provide you with a testimonial. It also makes the implicit statement to visitors that your testimonials are not fake and can be verified.
Add Testimonial Requests To Your Auto Responder/Newsletter Messages
If you have a list of subscribers, include a request for a testimonial in a scheduled newsletter broadcast. Preferably, this should be done after your customers have had a chance to experience your products. Use words like “I need a quick favor” in the subject of your email and make the point of your email or message specifically about asking users to provide honest feedback, a testimonial, or a product review.
Use LinkedIn
The LinkedIn “Recommendations” feature lets you request testimonials for your account. With LinkedIn, the process for requesting and providing recommendations is quite simple and user-friendly and the person who provides the recommendation gets a link to their profile. If you get a recommendation on LinkedIn, ask their permission to reprint it on your website (tip: offer to publish a link back to their website in exchange).
Create A Client Testimonials Section
Create a “Testimonials” page and place a “more customer testimonials …” link to your main testimonials page whenever you have displayed blocks of testimonials on your site.
Tip: You can measure how useful testimonials are by how long visitors remain on the section of your pages or posts where you have added your testimonial content. ”Heatmapping” technology is a great way to observing what visitors are doing on your pages.
We have written an article about a heatmap analytics technology you can add to your site to track visitor behaviour here:
Using WordPress Plugins
If you use WordPress, you can use a plugin to add, edit and display testimonials. Some plugins also let you add a form to your pages inviting users to submit testimonials.
Once your plugin is installed and set up (remember to provide simple instructions for adding testimonials via the submission form – if available), you then refer customers to your “Testimonials” section.
Check out the plugins below:
Easy Testimonials
Easy Testimonials is a free plugin that lets you add testimonials to your sidebar as a widget, or embed them into a Page or Post using a shortcode. The Easy Testimonials plugin also lets you insert a list of all testimonials or output a random testimonial, and include an image with each testimonial, which is great for adding a photo of the testimonial author, their logo, etc.
The Easy Testimonials plugin also can be upgraded to a “pro” version that has additional features and developer support.
To download the plugin, visit this site:
Testimonials Widget
Testimonials Widget is a free plugin that lets you randomly slide or list selected portfolios, quotes, reviews, or text with videos or images on your pages and posts. You can insert testimonials using a shortcode, theme functions, or widgets with category and tag selections and specify different display options such as random or specific ordering.
Testimonials Widget makes plenty more features available via a premium version, including built-in options for improved search engine results and plugin support.
To download and use the plugin, go here:
Testimonials WordPress Plugin
This is a premium plugin that provides plenty of great features right out of the box, including:
- Responsive design that resizes for correct display on any device or browser.
- Display your testimonials in a widget or as sliders, slideshows, list layout, grid layout, etc. via a shortcode
- Styling options (display image on top, bottom, or side of testimonials, display testimonials in a speech bubble, customize font and background colors, font types and more.
Visit this site for more information about using the plugin:
To learn how to add testimonials in WordPress, see the tutorial below:
In Summary …
Testimonials and customer reviews are great sources of content that help your business in terms of adding credibility, building authority, improving online reputation, and growing your sales funnel. Always ask for feedback, reviews, and testimonials from existing customers or clients, and publish positive content about your business on your web site.
Additional Info
For additional resources about creating engaging testimonials see these articles:
- 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 regular training emails with easy-to-digest information and practical tips that will show exactly how to drive more traffic to your website or blog, save money creating useful content that will add value to your visitors and grow your business online using content marketing. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also completely FREE!
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