Testimonials are vital marketing tactics to boost customer confidence in your products or services. Customers want to feel confident and assured that they are making the right purchasing decision. Nobody wants to go through the post-purchase dissonance after buying a product. They want to be happy and satisfied with their purchase. 

Reviewing testimonials helps customers to make a smart purchasing decision and better understand your products or services. Websites with enough reviews psychologically help customers to make purchase decisions easily. In today’s competitive market place it is very important for businesses to have testimonials and feedback from the prior clientele for attracting new potential customers.

As statistics show that a satisfied customer will ‘ word-of-mouth’ eight other customers when he/she is satisfied with the purchase. Testimonial is an effective viral marketing technique that helps to pass on the information from clientele to clientele very quickly. Testimonials and reviews can escalate customer confidence and accelerate sales.

Selecting the right testimonial is important. Not all testimonials will have the same impact on your products or services. Therefore, companies should be careful in picking up the right testimonials and phrasing them correctly. Testimonials should be streamlined in accordance with your product offering and corporate image.  Selecting irrelevant testimonials can negatively ricochet and give a negative connotation to your offerings. So selecting the right testimonial is very crucial. All testimonials should be genuine and unbiased. Moreover, testimonials should be quantitative rather than qualitative. It should quantify the benefits and results rather than just generic praise. 

For example instead of choosing the testimonial 

“ I am very satisfied with the product performance” choose the testimonial that says “The product helped me to lose 10lbs in 4 weeks. 

The later testimonial is far more informative and effective in building customer trust than the previous one. More testimonials you have, the better for establishing your business credibility and reliability. Always encourage your prior loyal customers to write reviews about your product or service. Request them to write about their experience or how they benefited from using your product or service. If possible add customer contacts, company names,s or logos, which will further reinforce potential customers’ confidence level in your product or services.

However, the placement of the testimonials needs to be done very carefully. Testimonials should be placed in such a way that will grab viewers’ attention instantaneously and be easy to locate. It should be eye-catching and interesting to read with full of information. The goal should be to get the maximum outcome from your testimonials.  

The most common way is to create a separate navigation button termed ‘Testimonials or Reviews,” where potential customers can read all the comments and reviews of your past clients. Another way is to use Flash testimonials on the side of the toolbar on the home page along with the clients’ names, contacts, company information, or logo. However, be careful so that too much flash exposure does not distract your customer from the main message that you are trying to convey. You can also combine  ‘Audio and Video” testimonials along with the regular ones for more effective results in enhancing your credibility to a greater extent.

Therefore, whatever techniques you use always keep it simple, concise, and clear. Be honest and use both negative and positive testimonials otherwise potential clients will think you are being dishonest and biased. Least but not least, your testimonials should be specific, credible, and believable in order to strengthen customer confidence and reliability in your products or services.