Business Web Design: Testimonials Add Credibility
Here is the business web design and marketing challenge. The Internet is an impersonal medium. Effective business web marketing means breaking through this barrier in a way that adds the human touch back into the Web. Testimonials are a way of bringing in what others are saying about us. After all, what do people who have actually purchased and used your product or service think about it?
Why testimonials are important
Testimonials are important to customers because they lower the risk of doing business with an unknown company. The first hand testimony of a happy customer is more powerful than pages of facts and figures describing the product or service. These endorsements are important because they tell your prospects and customers how others think of you. Testimonials let visitors that you value your customer opinions and it offers an unbiased recommendation for your product
What makes a good testimonial?
First and foremost they should be genuine and believable. They should be specific and have the person’s full name and if they represent a business, the business name. A link back to their website allows visitors to see who made the comment and it rewards your customer with a valuable link back to their website. Testimonials can be a comment, a review it can be in text, audio or video.
Where to place testimonials?
Should testimonials be on their own page? Or placed around the website? We prefer to put them into a PHP Database program and do both. We will design an area on the home page where testimonial excerpts will rotate every 4-5 seconds and place these onto a testimonials page that is created from this same database. Here are a few examples:
Plastic Injection Molding Company
Software Development Company
Business Networking Groups
Link Popularity Service
Getting Testimonials
Testimonials should convey the biggest result your client achieved by working with you. The more specific you can be… the better. Stay away from vague generalities. They should tell about how a problem was solved, how you made them money or how you made them better.
Make requesting testimonials a part of your quality improvement process. At the end of project or when you ship product, ask for feedback and ask for permission to publish their comments. If the feedback isn’t good, use this as a tool to identify and fix problems. If the feedback is good, then you have a good marketing tool.