Once you’ve collected some great feedback from your customers, there comes another pain in the neck: how to squeeze the best out of these testimonials placed on your website? First of all, make sure you:
- Have the best testimonials on your homepage: no silver-bullet advice on the form and positioning here – just exploit your design to the fullest to make the testimonials visible and readable across all screens (think of a slider, for example).
- Create a dedicated Testimonials page: be sure that other pages link to it so that visitors always have the proof of your credibility at their fingertips.
- Include relevant testimonials on product/service pages: but don’t overwhelm, or they will think you are pushing too hard or just trying to show off.
- Use visuals when possible: the more visually rich testimonials you provide, the stronger the social proof is. A photo or video grabs attention (people empathize with faces) and gets the visitor to read the testimonial text, and that’s exactly what you want. Besides, the visitor will see: that’s a real guy (not some fake) of a real company giving their feedback. It’s priceless.
In other words, you need to place testimonials everywhere on your website, but do it wisely, to empower your personalized approach to every client.
Based on our 11-year experience in web development, we recommend implementing testimonials as objects, it means as configurable and reusable content. Once uploaded to a CMS, it can be shared across multiple pages according to the rules tailored for each page type individually, in case you want to display them differently.
This way, every object (testimonial) will have several attributes, which can be rearranged (edited, moved, removed or replaced) from a single entry point, at any time and without the help of technical specialists:
- a testimonial text, picture or video
- a person’s name, position and photo
- a company logo and name
As simple as that. From now on, you’ll be able to add and edit testimonials with no fuss and duplicates. Now, go ahead and make the positive feedback work for you!
By Vadzim Belski, Head of Web Development Department at ScienceSoft, a software development and consulting company headquartered in McKinney, Texas.
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