Endorsements by celebrities are great, but endorsements from rafts of happy customers can be even better. The most successful companies have adopted testimonials and reviews. Below is five cracking reasons why using onsite testimonies will benefit you and your business.
Testimonies increase trust, confidence and sales
As a new startup your company needs to do the utmost in order to establish trust with consumers. This is exactly what onsite testimonials can do. Positive messages about your product or service act as a powerful social proof which builds consumer confidence and reduces pre-purchase anxiety.
The statistics back this up too. 63% of people are more likely to purchase a product from a site if it has reviews from old customers and 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision.
Testimonies show that you care about the opinions of your consumers
Consumers want to know that their happiness matters to your company. Onsite testimonies allow your business to show that it does. It shows that your company respects and cares deeply about your consumers. It shows that your company is more human and enjoys the interaction and community that you sell your product to.
In short, onsite testimonies not only develop your company’s ethos and message but also display it to the public.
You can use the testimonials to better your company
Testimonials can act as a great source for data. Data on what your consumers like, on what they don’t like and on what will make them buy your products again. They could even point towards a future market for you to tap into!
Even if the feedback sent to you is negative, this data can still be useful in helping you find and fix flaws in your product or service.
Feedback can also help you learn how to communicate better with your audience. It allows you to understand who you are selling to. This can help your company in setting your tone, ethos and brand image in order to maximise traffic and profits.
You can use testimonials as advertisements
Spreading consumer written testimonials about your business is a cheap and effective way to advertise your startup. Sharing some of the best consumer experiences of your products by social media, or encouraging them to share it themselves can quite quickly spread your reach and increase intrigue into your product.
One of many examples of this is Ben & Jerry’s #caputreeuphoria campaign. This campaign invited users to share pictures of themselves tucking away into a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. This quickly led to over 15,000 hashtagged images, a 22% increase in followers and a reach of 70 million.
You could also use these testimonies as advertisements on other platforms. Whether that’s on billboards, business cards or on the side of bicycles. Here’s an ad by Kia who realised the power of advertising with testimonials.
Improve your ranking on the web
Last but not least, the benefit of using onsite testimonies is that they can work to increase your search engine optimisation (SEO). For those of you that might not know; SEO is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase traffic to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine.
So why does onsite testimonies and feedback increase your ranking on search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and Bing? In short, it’s because when customers leave feedback and reviews on your website it gives search engines a consistent supply of fresh content that relates directly to your page. Consistent, new and relevant content is at the core of SEO.
In a nutshell then, onsite testimonies provide various benefits to your business. They increase trust and confidence, show that your company cares about the opinions of your consumers, they can act as a huge data mine, they are appealing and persuasive advertisements for social media and can rack up your search engine ranking.
What’s not to love? What are you waiting for?
