Social proof comes in several different fashions such as video reviews, written text, awards you have won, logos of happy customers, product reviews and more. But the big question is does adding customer testimonials on website help or hurt your conversions?
9 times out of 10 website testimonials can have a major impact on your conversion rates in a good way. But sometimes this just isn’t the case.
Customer testimonials on website – Do they help?
Potential customers typically don’t want to be first. They want to know that there have been others that have came before them, others that have experienced what you have to sell and have achieved the results you are claiming they will get by purchasing. A great way to convey this is to add customer testimonials on website.
Get your visitors to get a sense of what it is like to experience your product or service before they make a buying decision and hear it from a third party that has been there before them. This is why Amazon reviews are so powerful for top merchants on their platform.
As mentioned, 9 times out of 10 testimonials on website can help your conversions.
We have loads of case studies showing this including 289% increase in sales by adding some proof elements to the order page, 36% increase by leveraging written customer testimonials on website for a package selection page and the list goes on and on.
The important thing to understand with website testimonials is that you need to test them as you are going to see here in just a minute. You need to understand how much your audience reacts and responds to different levels of social proof. Each market and product is different and website testimonials can have a positive or negative result.
For example with one company.
They have a big list of customers, some of the biggest names in business.
They were already highlighting the logos of their customers on their landing pages in an effort to attract additional companies to their product.
In an effort to see just how much the audience responds to these logos on what is relatively a simple page we agreed to test adding additional logos to the page.
We simply added 5 additional logos to the page and ran a simple A/B test to see just how much these customer testimonials on website affected the conversions.
Yes we do understand that these are direct “customer testimonials” but they are social proof that there have been some pretty big names that have used the product and experienced amazing results.
So what impact did adding the 5 new logos have on conversions?
Adding the 5 logos actually decreased the on-site conversion by more than 15%.
We found this to be quite interesting and has setup some new test hypotheses to see if leveraging another form of proof will make a bigger impact.
What we are going to test next…
1. Removing logos altogether
2. Highlighting a simple written testimonial
3. Simply using language such as “X Number Of Happy Customers” without logos
This will give us a better look at the impact and reaction from visitors that will determine how new pages are designed and advertised.
So the big question is does adding customer testimonials on website actually help? The answer is that you need to test it. Test different forms of proof, test number as well as placement to see what moves the needle most.
Test, test, and test again. Website testimonials can make an impact but you need to find out what works best for you and your visitors.
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If you need help coming up with test hypotheses be sure to reach out for your no obligation conversion acceleration session.
