Business Website Advice

In my series of posts on improving conversion - moving visitors to buyer status -  I must stress the importance of well placed testimonials.  The topic is more complex for one post so watch out for my series. 

Testimonials are key.  Be forewarned, having just one page for testimonials  gets barely a 1 on a scale of one to 10. Better than nothing but…barely. We can do better.

Focus, placement, length, levels of trustworthiness - all pertain to testimonials which I’ll discuss and give you tips about in future posts.

Why testimonials work to convert.  To help website visitors decide to become buyers of your product or service sprinkle excerpts of targeted testimonials throughout your website.  Research into the psychology of buying tells us people are more comfortable seeing others (like themselves) happy with their purchase, discussing their experience.  When we are unsure we hesitate and what can push us through that hesitation is hearing other buyer’s experience.  Sorry, we generally don’t believe the business owner because we expect them to be biased, and we don’t believe the salesperson because we expect them to be more interested in their commission than our purchase satisfaction.  

A reader prompted me for more info about conversions after my post on Trip Advisor Ranking. I answered with this:

Here’s a few more words to clarify my opening point about visitors being pushed over their hesitation - pushed from looker to buyer - by reading positive comments from happy customers.

Traffic conversion and it’s subtle complexities will be my focus the next few months because ultimately it is what website goals are all about -  doing more business, getting more buyers, creating more loyal happy customers.

Okay - my point is research on buyer pyschology tells us during the purchasing decision, people are often converted from looky-loos to buyer status after hearing other people like themselves are happy with the product/service.

Perhaps it makes us feel more comfortable, we’re not alone, we’ve all been ‘had’ before so we look around what others have to say.  

You know the experience of being the first ones at a restaurant? We think, whats wrong here. Compare this with seeing the restuarant next door with at least a few happy customers.  We want to be reassured with our decision to buy.

 You can google ‘buyer pyschology’ if you wish more on conversion research.

Testimonials serve this function on websites.  Thus my advice is always to sprinkle short excerpts from testimonials throughout your website. 

More detail on how to do this on future posts.�

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