Cluttered webpage holding you down?
14th June 2016
Web & Graphic Design
You’d trust what a friend tells you while you’re out to lunch, but why is it soo hard for a company to share testimonials in a trustworthy and targeted manner?
Word of mouth is a great selling tool for business, it really is, and testimonials are a great way to promote that trust to a wider audience. Over the years, we’ve seen many testimonials pages on websites. A good decade ago, it was typical practice to dedicate a page of your site to dump all your testimonials on. This is totally efficient, but hardly effective, as there’s simply no context to the information in front of the user.
Of course, there is a range of more thoughtful ways to make use of this high quality word of mouth. What I consider to be of highest value is context, so the end user can understand why John Citizen thought your service was excellent for him. Depending on who your are and the business you represent, you may be able to do this in a few different ways. It may just be me, but I like to keep them shorter rather than super-detailed – I’m an end user too and I know that I won’t bother to read a testimonial that reads more like a novel. Please – tell me in a sentence or two that your service is awesome and I’ll be sold.
Starting with least specificity, you can include testimonials that apply to your business or its services as a whole. People that commend the ability or professionalism of your staff may suit this model well. It does remain somewhat generic, like the old-school testimonials page, but at least the purpose has been thought through a little. Barfly Cocktails use this space well across the site we recently designed for them.
I prefer to opt for a more particular approach, one that lines up services with end users who appreciated that precise service. This can be helpful, as you may offer some unique or specialised services, so customers appreciate seeing how you might have benefited previous users in these areas. You need not be constrained to a list either, if you’ve got numerous past customers who love a service then you can choose the best ones and have them scroll through. We applied this principal to the Services of Berwick Tax, so they can insert testimonials that are relevant to a particular service that they have expertise in. We’ve allowed for multiple testimonials to display within a slider, so there is room for this content on the website to grow as well.
This works a bit like the service option, though it makes use of how most businesses will only deal with one client on a project – so their opinion is totally valid and most worthy of trust. The downside of this option is that you may find it harder to get a testimonial for every project you do, but if you make it a priority, then this can be an effective display of how clients appreciate the work that you do. We incorporated the example below into the individual projects on Pronto Roofing’s new site. Within WordPress, the client has the capacity add an image, heading and text that’s relevant to each individual project that they complete.
Interested in promoting better testimonials for your business? See some of our recent websites here or call 0425 804 026 to discuss how we could implement clever strategies for your next website.
