How Customer Testimonials Can Help Your Business

In your business, you’re almost always looking for ways to increase your brand reputation and awareness. Perhaps you pour considerable time and money into various advertising schemes in the hope of attracting new customers and driving more conversions that have an impact.

However, there’s no marketing tactic that’s quite as effective as word of mouth (WOM), and if you can harness that power through customer testimonials, you may be able to take your business to visionary heights. Customer testimonials are one of the most powerful forms of word-of-mouth marketing.

WOM has been touted as the most effective form of marketing for conversions. Studies show that 84 percent of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from others, and 74 percent use it as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions.

Though people are most likely to trust the words of friends and family, they’re not that much less prone to accept the recommendations of strangers. Research from Nielson reveals that 88 percent of people will trust online reviews, which makes customer testimonials on your website paramount to conversion in some instances.

The Benefits of Customer Testimonials

In short, customer testimonials can be incredibly fruitful for your firm in closing sales and raising profits. Here are several of the biggest perks of using them on your website.

• Increased Credibility: When you use customer testimonials, you show new and old consumers that your brand continues to add value. Testimonials can make your company appear to be a thought leader in your industry, perhaps even make that really happen, as well as promise a positive experience for anyone who visits.

• Lead Generation: As stated above, testimonials create WOM marketing, which can lead to easy conversions. They almost sell your products and services on their own.

• Customer Retention: Testimonials serve as a reminder to existing customers of why they continue to do business with you. They also indicate that you invest in your customers by featuring their own words on your website, which encourages them and their associates to continue to do business with you.

Incorporating Testimonials on Your Website

Many prospective customers will automatically search for reviews and testimonials about products and services, and that often entails visits to third-party sites to get the information they seek. These extra steps can lead to customer abandonment, however, because they get bored or diverted when a site includes better reviews of other products.

Providing testimonials on your own website is an excellent way to minimize the risk of customer abandonment. It removes some of the interim steps that shoppers might take to get all information they want before they make a purchasing decision.

A great example of a company that provides solid customer testimonials can be found on the DialPad website. DialPad sells an intuitive communication platform for other businesses, and the firm relies on the reviews of its customers to encourage the purchasing process.

Under the Resources tab, you can find a variety of customer stories that relate the benefits of their wise investment in DialPad. The page is easy to access and undoubtedly increases retention of DialPad’s customers.

How to Get Great Customer Testimonials

However, you mustn’t write customer testimonials yourself. You should solicit great testimonials from your actual customers. They need to be raw, honest, and totally voluntary if they’re going to help you accomplish your goals.

Customers may sometimes offer a testimonial without any prompting, but more often, companies have to rely on a few gentle tactics to solicit quality reviews from their customers. Here are some ways to do that:

• Ask Point Blank: Often, customers haven’t posted testimonials to your page not because they don’t want to, but because they didn’t think of it. If you simply ask them to, your customers might repay you with substantive reviews that will drive conversions.

• Mine the Mentions of Your Brand: Peruse social media for brand mentions and the comments that accompany them. If you find one that highlights some of the attributes of your company in a reasonably honest and accurate way, put it on your site. It’s not necessary for you to ask customers before using words they posted publicly, but it’s a good practice to do so.

• Use Listing Services: Google, Yelp, and other listing services allow customers to rate and review companies that have registered with the service. Create a profile on any of these sites so customers have access to reviews. Then you can select the most useful testimonials for your site.

• Allow Rating On Site: It’s fine to use a third-party review system, but it can be more convenient for your customers to leave ratings and reviews directly on your website. That way, visitors can easily gain access to reviews that will influence their purchasing decisions.

The more testimonials you land, the better off your site will be. These kinds of reviews are miracle workers for generating leads and bringing more attention to your site. If you haven’t managed to incorporate such messages into your site design, you really should, as soon as possible.