If you are trying to promote your new WordPress website along with products and services, putting up customer testimonials is a great way to connect with new customers. Check this supporting infographic to know the effectiveness of testimonials on your digital audience. Such is the importance of customer reviews that Google has been showing interest in phasing out backlinks as the strongest website ranking indicator. Instead Google is likely to incorporate customer testimonials as a core part of its website ranking matrix. This also explains the growing prominence of dedicated testimonial widget. In terms of increasing your website traffic, a testimonial widget can make a real difference.
A testimonial widget can empower you to have a better control over capturing, displaying and monitoring the effectiveness of customer feedback. This has been proven to be a more efficient way of converting potential visitors into customers compared to the process of adding testimonials simply through new WordPress posts.
Worried about the cumbersome and complicated process of writing codes to leverage the power of a testimonial widget? Well, you are lucky. Nowadays, you can lay your hands on a range of free to premium category testimonial widgets that simplify the testimonial creation process. For instance, have a look at our previous post on a list of popular testimonial plugins. Majority of these testimonial widgets have an embedded testimonial shortcode generator with which you can customize a testimonial’s appearance on your website. Shortcodes are WordPress specific codes that allow you to tweak several testimonial features. Thus, without the requirement of any complicated coding knowledge, you can quickly change the color, font size, shadows and alignment of testimonials.
The interesting part of this discussion is that majority of the websites that deploy some form of testimonials are not even sure how to measure the impact and quality of their testimonials. So now you know how testimonial plugins can play an important role in enhancing the effectiveness and verifying the authenticity of the social proof on your website.
A positive influence on your customer testimonials can be created if you keep them personal and visually appealing and target them to specific users, just like it is shown here. More importantly, make sure that you perform A/B tests to check for testimonial consistency in terms of length, fonts and color every time you change a webpage element.
Here are five key factors that you should keep in mind while trying to extract the juice out of your testimonial widget.
1) Keep It Short And Crisp
The ideal length of testimonials should be somewhere between 2 to 5 sentences. Research shows that going for a too short testimonial might not provoke trust while long paragraphs of customer opinion might get lost in translation.
An engaging way to do the same would be to develop a rotating carousel of testimonials with the help of a testimonial widget, just like TasksEveryDay does. It clearly displays the name, picture, video, and geolocation of the customer who precisely highlights the benefits from the virtual assistant services provided by the company.
2) Don’t Try To Create Bland Sales Pitches Through Your Testimonial Widget
That might sound weird considering the fact that we all mean business out here. However, at times being too pushy about selling a product might irritate a customer away from your website. There is unlikely to be any benefit if you solely rely on the capabilities of your testimonial widget to bombard your customers with redundant and boring sales pitches. Instead, be genuine and restrain from making a cold sales pitch, particularly when you are a relatively new digital company with little reputation.
Thinking out of the box, you can highlight few of the truly successful stories of your customers. New website visitors are likely to find this was of engagement to be interesting compared to others. A similar philosophy has been adopted by Clarity, as evident from the company’s case study discussion page.
Finally, you should always try to engage with customers who leave reviews on the website. As rightly pointed out by music entrepreneur Derek Sivers in this TED video it is important to treat your customers as equal partners, especially when they do a favor by offering their valuable feedback.
3) Use The Power Of Your Testimonial Widget To Infuse Creativity Within The Testimonial Space
You really don’t have to do what others do in order to succeed. The same applies to innovation around testimonials. Although video testimonials and product demonstrations have been in use for quite some time, there is still merit in keeping these videos simple and effective.
You might want to peek into some of the most effective practices in this space to figure out ways to make the best use of your favorite testimonial widget. Slack is of particular importance as the company uses video testimonials to not only highlight customer’s viewpoint but also provide a brief demonstration of all of its services.
4) Highlight Important Keywords And Customer Logos
As mentioned earlier, a dedicated testimonial widget can play a crucial role in highlighting keywords within each testimonial. With this, customers would immediately know the true nature of the product or service in terms of its advantages and disadvantages.
Another cool way to build and showcase your website’s reputation is to display customer logos with the help of a testimonial widget. This can either be done on a standalone basis or along with a traditional customer testimonial. One such instance is validated by InVision that offers a dynamic website for designers to create mock-ups of website products.
5) Give Priority To Opinions Of The Thought Leaders
Everybody is excited about developing their own version of social proof. What might differentiate you, particularly if you are a B2B marketer, is your ability to demonstrate the trust that industry stalwarts put in you.
Acknowledgement from industry experts can go a long way in instilling trust in new customers about your relevance and credibility within the industry. In this regard, HubSpot does an excellent job of interviewing industry leaders and highlighting them subtly in its website as a way to attract more customers. In your initial days as a start-up, you can always rely on your testimonial widget to appropriately demonstrate the reviews put forward by some of your most respectable customers. As you grow and earn reputation, you can easily start highlighting the opinion of the thought leaders in your industry.
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