You’re probably like every other human being. You’re using word of mouth to know which services you will use. You’re trusting your family, your friends. You’ve tried this small restaurant a co-worker told you about last week. You’ve been to the theatre, watch this high rated movie on IMDB. You’re working with people that your surroundings recommends you. On a home page it’s the same. You’ll register more easily to a service if the CEO of a well known company, or your competitor, said it’s an awesome product. This part is really important on a page for your users to trust you. It’s the testimonials part.
I started to talk about the main headlines and continued with Call to Actions. On this episode of my autopsies, I will focus on testimonials. What it is, how to use them and why using them.
Description
Testimonials is a section, containing images, quotes, full customer reviews about your product. Their main goal is to reassure the consumer discovering your product. People are social animals. They are influenced by other people. This cognitif biais is called Social Proof. It’s been discovered in 1935 by Muzafer Sherif, a psychologist. This theory explains that humans believe in people around them more than themselves. Even more if it’s about a subject they don’t know or handle perfectly.
Most of the time presented by three, the number is not an issue. It’s however important to think about how you will present them to be trustworthy to your final audience.
About presentation, you have multiple choices. You can go either with a customer review, a video or just simple quotes.
About Customer reviews it’s a must have. If you can present how you helped your customer it’s a rich content that will help you, at first with SEO, but also to guide your customers, knowing if your product will fit their needs.
If you’re thinking about doing a video, it can be either a good or a really bad thing. If your video does not look pro, it can hurt your company’s credibility. It’s important to think about what you want to do before jumping on this support.
Theses 2 supports are interesting, but take some time and money to do. Moreover, they’re aren’t 100% part of your home page. In this review I’ll see more how to use the 3rd option : The quote.
About your quote’s structure, you have to humanize it. Add a picture of your customer, his position, the name and even logo of the company. This will help your quote to be considered seriously.
About content, try not to put sentences that could fit for every content.
Use quotes telling why your product is a great one, how it helped it to fix its needs. What did your company bring them. Your product will solve issues use this as a strength.
Feel free to use some numbers in your quotes. It will help the visitor to calculate its return on investment. For example replace sentences like “This company helped me to earn some free time” by “I reduced my time on this task by around 80%”
Another thing you should focus on is to emphasize the human. Show how your product will make everyone’s life easier.
To finish, if your target is B2C, it’s a bit harder to get trustworthy testimonials. You can use 3rd party testimonials platform such as Amazon reviews or even TrustPilot.
Exemple of Successful Use
Here I will offer you a set of successful business using this advice !
Dunforce
Testimonials on Dunforce’s website
Dunforce is a company allowing you to automate your invoice’s process. It service allow collection agents to reduce their treatment time by 80%. It allow them to also focus on tasks with a higher human value. On their home page, they present testimonials as a slider.
On this, they interviewed Serge Papo, CEO of Nomination. His head in the main content en the page, allowing you to focus on what he’s saying.
If you’re looking at the wording, this quote is really interesting ! They show a double benefit, supported by numbers. They are helping humans by reducing the treatment time by 90 % and also a financial one : Reducing the DSO by 35 %
PayFit
Payfit is a company offering a solution to help HR pay its employees. This task is complicated to handle for companies, due to the complexity of the French work law.
On their home page they have 2 parts of testimonials.
Testimonials on Payfit’s website
The first one, contains quotes from some of their customers.
Here, they decided to show only the company name, the first name of the employee and its position. This choice is risky. As for the wording, every testimonial present one of the point I talked about above. The first one talks about a benefit with numbers. Dividing costs by 2. The 2nd one is about human. Using the expression give a smile. The last one is about benefits. Showing one of the pain Payfit is solving : Handling employees’ salaries.
The second part of testimonials show 4 use cases with videos. With a really clean production, they bring a lot of credibility to promote their product.
Video testimonials on Payfit’s website
If you want to see the complete study of Payfit’s home page, it’s here
To finish, customer testimonials show that there are words behind features. People using this service. Testimonials aren’t mandatory if your company is already known in its market. If it’s not, you should really consider putting them on your homepage.
This article is part of my newsletter and my future white paper about landing page study. If you’re willing to get it before anyone else, feel free to give me your e-mail address.
If you’re looking for an audit to your landing pages, how to do them, to make them faster and improve your conversion rate, you can contact me directly here :