4 Tips to Improve Your Landing Page Testimonials
Landing page testimonials are considered an essential element for almost every campaign, yet far too often, it’s one that we as marketers get wrong. While we understand that getting testimonials for a landing page is important, we often miss the crucial details that make it so that people will actually believe what those testimonials say.
And that is ultimately what makes all the difference.
With that in mind, if you really want to get quality results from your landing page testimonials, there are a few key practices that you absolutely must follow.
1. Get specific
Think about those times when you look up a restaurant or other business online. More often than not, you’ll check out their Google or Facebook reviews to get an idea of whether the place is any good. Now ask yourself: which reviews do you give the most value to?
It’s probably not the reviews that merely say, “I liked it. It was good.” You’re looking for specific information! You want details! And so do your customers who visit your landing page. Quite simply, a vague, non-specific testimonial won’t build trust or spark much interest in your brand.
Because of this, when asking for testimonials from your existing customers, it is essential that you ask them to include the specific reasons why they’ve enjoyed working with you. How has your service benefited them? Why do they keep using your product? The more detailed and specific the testimonial, the more trustworthy it will become.
2. Number crunching
As an offshoot of the first point, the inclusion of numbers and statistics has been repeatedly found to add value to your landing page testimonials. And the more specific you can be, the better — research has found that we view “precise numbers” (like 57.34%) as being more accurate and reliable than rounded numbers. While your testimonials don’t always need to go super precise with the numbers, the inclusion of any type of stats ultimately makes your testimonials more trustworthy.
Let’s say you run a business designed to improve online sales for your customers. Which testimonial sounds more persuasive? “Using [Company X] gave us a big sales boost!” Or “Using [Company X] increased our sales by 34 percent!”
Using specific numbers in a testimonial reveals just how much your company has helped its customers solve their problems and improve results, which lends to a more persuasive (and trusted) argument.
3. Bigger names, bigger business
Not everyone is able to land those big-name clients right off the bat, and that’s okay. But the minute you start getting major companies, authority figures, or news outlets to use (or talk about) your business, highlighting this in your testimonials section should be one of your top priorities.
The thing is, we don’t really care that much about what Joe Schmoe thinks about a product or service. But if a known authority has something to say, we naturally tend to trust what they have to say. We may even transfer over some of the attributes we associate with that authority figure (such as knowledge or innovation) to the company they’re endorsing.
Marketing guru Neil Patel famously used testimonials from major companies to grow his online brand. And while you may not have a Fortune 500 company as one of your customers, you can still take steps to lend authority to your testimonial-givers. Include company logos and list job titles of the individuals providing endorsements. Add logos and links to press from publications that have talked about your company. These simple moves can lend much-needed authority to your testimonials section, no matter who your clients are.
4. Pictures
After everything else, the idea that including a picture would really make a difference for your testimonial page might seem a bit silly. But photographs have been found to be a powerful attribute for making your testimonials believable and authoritative — even when you’re just quoting a regular customer!
A/B testing has found that having a real-life photo accompany a customer’s testimonial can increase conversions by 102.5% — and it doesn’t matter whether that customer is attractive or a well-known authority figure.
Rather, what matters is that the inclusion of an authentic (as in “not a stock photo”) image of the customers providing a testimonial reassures landing page visitors that the testimonial is actually real. That alone can make all the difference in whether or not people actually value the testimonials on your page.
Conclusion
By paying attention to the above factors, you can go a long way towards ensuring that your testimonials are persuasive, authoritative, and most importantly, believable. And when landing page visitors see quality endorsements from real, living customers, they’ll be far more likely to turn into customers themselves.
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Originally published at landingpageschool.com on May 10, 2018.
