One of the most important things in making your website’s conversion rate successful is to build credibility with your future customers.
Social Proof is the best way to accomplish that. A key element of Social Proof for most businesses is their customer testimonials.
Testimonials are far more important for small companies or local service companies since they don’t have the big brand recognition or the PR budget to promote their success in other reliable ways. Having satisfied clients is crucial and supreme.
If you are not quite sure how to write credible testimonials you are at the right place.
How to write testimonials?
To make your writing successful, you should take into consideration answering some questions that will help you create credible testimonials.
- What was the issue that your customer has come across?
- How did you solve it?
- In what way/form/shape your solution was authentic?
- How was your customer’s experience?
- What is the conclusion you want to share with others?
After considering these questions, think about how you’ll gather information.
We will give you some valuable tips:
Build trust with your customers.
Talk to your loyal customers who will be willing to help your company.
Your text should be related to a specific subject.
For example, you can just say:
“We have collaborated with them, everything went according to plan, and we have achieved great results.”.
This is not even close to the testimonial in which you use the person’s name, title, and company.
By doing that, the testimonial becomes personal again. Adding the company’s logo is also effective.
Here is a more specific example, our W3Lab example:
“We are more than satisfied how Stefan and his assistant Dino did Google Adds. We wanted to do the campaign for the summer season since our business has a decline of 40% in that period, but in cooperation with W3Lab, we achieved the same revenue as in other months! They increased our market by 40%!”.
This example becomes more precise and personal since it gives a real situation that has happened and we have real information and numbers about it.
In short, every testimonial should be like this.
Be short and precise.
Keep customer’s attention by giving precise and concise information.
Think outside the box.
Being unique is the essence of credibility. Be special and factual.
Be visually attractive.
Use images, videos, and social media that will help you shape the story you’re trying to tell. Thus, you’ll be more convincible and visually appealing.
Information about the person who wrote a testimonial
To make testimonials credible, it is essential to use your customer’s name.
Connecting your customer’s name with the testimonial will result in the willingness of your future customers to put a name to the story the testimonial is telling.
Talk to the customer who will write the testimonial and ask for consent to include the following:
Basic information: The client’s first and last name and their company’s information, for example, the company’s logo.
A photo of your client: As we mentioned before, a real photo will make your testimonial more personal therefore more credible.
Precise information: Focusing on a certain subject makes the testimonial more authentic and it will help much more with search engine optimization.
List of solved issues: Giving concrete examples will build trust with your customers and they will be familiar with your way of operating and work ethic. The list will help you promote yourself, and it will be a promise to your customers that you can answer their needs.
Display your work: A testimonial that portrays the essence of your work, for example, noting a patient in a severe medical situation that got your help – will speak volumes about you and your power to help your customers.
To encourage feedback, set up a section on your website. You can use an email address, Facebook, Linked In, or Google+ Review page.
Pro-tip: Maybe is a better solution to link the profile of a person on LinkedIn instead of linking your company’s site. Testimonials become more credible and personal if your customers can directly see information about the person – where he/she works and what is his/her experience.
Make sure that the person is active on LinkedIn. If not, there is no point in taking this move.
Add a photo of the customer
Just the text without photos might be boring.
Posting photos will certainly draw more attention to your testimonials.
If you aren’t sure what photo to post, instead of using a stock image, it would be better to post a photo of the customer who wrote the testimonial.
Thus, your testimonial visually grabs customers, and they are considered more personal. It would be clear that your testimonial isn’t fabricated.
Readers can research and make sure that the reviewer exists.
The photo should look professional, but only to the extent that they don’t look like they were taken ten years ago or on a flip phone.
Make sure that the photo is clean and neat.
That would be enough because if the photo looks like it was taken by a professional, the photo automatically becomes suspicious. Customers will think that it is rather a stock image or downloaded from the internet.
Add a video of the customer
If your customers are willing to buy your product or service, they want proof that what they are buying is good. The thing is, they don’t want to hear it from you, they want to hear it from your previous customers.
This is the moment when customer testimonial videos come on the scene. They help you to convert potential customers into real customers without being too pushy.
Whether you have already a video marketing strategy or you are a beginner, video is an important step in convincing your customers to take action.
With testimonials videos, you can show successful experiences of previous customers that will encourage new ones to make a purchase and choose you. Furthermore, a video testimonial will increase the conversion of your site.
Instead of a photo, you can post a video that a customer made with a front phone camera. The quality of a video should be average because that way your testimonial will be more authentic and personal.
Besides the video, you should add testimonials in text format, just like with the photo. If the video is too long, therefore, and the text, then you should highlight only the most important things, and leave the rest for customers to watch.
It would be great if you add subtitles below the video because quite often people watch other people’s videos on public transportation or in a public place but they aren’t able to hear.
Adding subtitles will take you only 30 minutes, but also they can mean much more profit, we are talking about thousands.
Examples of great testimonials
The following examples show testimonials well done.
Video testimonials
Customer reaction does the selling part and the realistic moment makes the video authentic. If this testimonial doesn’t pique your interest in the Magic Flask, we don’t know what would!
Codecademy displays students’ testimonials in video format that portrays how students got into coding.
Testimonials with good pictures and text
As you can see, the picture doesn’t look like it is a stock photo. Our valued customers have addressed one of our team members with a name.
The entire testimonial ticks all the boxes from our list at the beginning of this blog post.
Startup Institute displays their customer testimonials as “Love Letters”. This is one of the interesting ways you can do it too.
Conclusion:
Testimonials are powerful and of limitless use. They become more personal by adding photos and videos.
When making a video testimonial, keep in mind that the core of any great testimonial video is an engaging and devoted customer who has an amazing story to tell in front of the camera.
If you have more suggestions on how to make credible testimonials, please share them with us.
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