Testimonials with dramatically improve your rate of conversion
| by David Callan While making every effort to get as many visitors as you can to your site, there is another side of your online business that requires equal attention, if not more. And that is the conversion rate at your site. Your conversion rate has to do with the rate at which you manage to convert visitors or prospects arriving at your site into paying customers. Most sites manage a sale after every 500 hits or so. The conversion rate of such a site is one client out of every 500 hits received. Some sites with a pretty good conversion rate consistently manage a sale after every 200 visitors or so.A fairly common situation on the net is where a site is receiving a good
number of visitors but is still starved for actual sales or paying clients.
The desirable situation is where a site with a minimal amount of traffic but
with a good conversion rate ends up being highly profitable on a very minimal
volume of visitors.
There are several factors that influence the conversion rate of any site. They include the copy-writing skills of the webmaster or the writer they hire to generate copy for their site.
However, the most effective copy-writing tool know to professionals in this industry can be implemented by virtually anybody. We are of course referring to testimonials.
Interestingly there are those who believe that testimonials hardly work and that their impact on the conversion rate of a site is minimal of any. People who hold this opinion have obviously not tested real testimonials at their sites, because if they did, the results would speak loudly and clearly.
Testimonials That Do Not Work
Or alternatively some folks who don’t believe testimonials work are referring to poor, contrived testimonials that offer little or no information and will therefore, not surprisingly, make no impression.
You will have seen these kinds of testimonials, they are fairly common on many sites. At times they will consist of one word. “Revolutionary” for instance, and it will be signed by a common every day name like ‘Mike’ or ‘Bob’. Just the sort of thing that looks like it was made up. And even if it is based on actual customer comments, this sort of testimonial will hardly be convincing.
This Is What A Real Testimonial Is
The truth of the matter is that compiling effective testimonials for your site is pretty hard work. Still it is well worth every effort made.
It starts with you emailing out questionnaires to your happy and satisfied clients and using your personal contact with them to get answers. A good idea here is to be as brief as possible and focus on the sort of questions that are mostly likely to yield the sort of comments you are looking for. For instance, what do they like best about your product. Other background information like how they first came across it (for example was it a referral) can also be of tremendous assistance.
Your clients, like everybody else, are likely to be very busy people, so you do not want to burden them with a long list of questions that will take them ages to complete. It is important to be careful because a careless handling of this project could easily turn a happy client into an angry and irritated one.
Based on this kind of preparation, your testimonials will be the kind where customers not only say that your product or service is “terrific”, but they go on to explain exactly why it is so.
Testimonials Will Always Help You Get Plenty of Nods
There is a lot of mistrust on the net and people do not easily believe everything that they read online. This is one of the reasons why real testimonials written with enough detail will always give any webmaster an edge.
After a prospect has arrived at your site and read all your material, they usually require something to nudge them into the positive decision mode. A testimonial usually does this very well.
A good way to test their effectiveness for you is to compare your conversion rate before posting testimonials and then after posting them. If you’ve written up your happy clients’ testimonials properly there will always be a huge difference.