Customer testimonials have been known for long as an effective way to add value to your store and increase sales. Marketing Experiments and the group of specialists doing marketing research have composed 6 tips on how to make the most of customer testimonials on your site. Each aspect has several implementations, so you can test and combine them as you like.
Page placement
One of the biggest testimonials values is their ability to add credibility to the online store. Therefore it is better to place product reviews somewhere on the page where you expect your potential buyer to doubt whether to buy from you store. For example, short, two or three-word testimonials could be placed near “Add to cart” or “Purchase” button; make sure to provide the link to the full version of such testimonials then.
The same goes for products. If you have positive online product reviews on feedbacks, positively describing the price, delivery or other aspects, place such comments next to the product price.
In “Landing Page Design: Eye path vs. Thought sequence” article, published on MarketingExperiments blog, says: testimonials can increase conversion providing they are placed close to the most important to you block of information. In online store such place could be “Add to cart” button, or if we it is email subscription page, this block could be “Email” button.
Testimonials size
There are short and long testimonials, brief and detailed. All of them are useful, however, 
their effectiveness is determined by several factors: audience, product complexity, and price. For instance, if you sell kids toys or garden tools, which don’t cost much, a brief comment like “A great toy, my kid is happy” will be enough to convince your potential buyers. So short comments are good to attract new customers, while long product reviews online should be located in the place where the user is interested in the product but have some doubts.
Another case if you sell complicated and expensive software. Short comments will not be convincing enough, so you should place some long and detailed customer testimonials.
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Rating
Rating in the form of five stars or other symbols allows the user to quickly understand people’s opinion about the product. It is important to keep in mind that number of votes influences the final rating score, so in order to give the most representative results indicate how many people have voted.
In fact, such rating score is rather a navigational tool, which gives the user quick results about people feedback. Nevertheless, rating stars are connected with feedback, so you can ask your customers to do both: rate and leave a feedback afterwards.
Geo-targeting
A user reading a testimonial will trust more, if the such testimonial will be written by the person from the same city or state. There are several ways how you can go about this: you can filter your customer testimonials by the region with the help of IP address, or directly ask the customer about their location when they submit the comment (however, such method is possible only when customer response will influence other aspect as well – assortment, delivery terms, etc.)
Geo-targeting is especially effective, when the customer comments on delivery quality. As it turns out, delivery quality could be essential to the user and a weak place of internet-shopping. A couple of lines saying about speed and simplicity of goods delivery in a certain city could be a trigger point in your sales.
Images
If you happen to have pictures of happy clients, who have used your products, make sure to
include them in testimonials. You can receive such photos during the contest, or in exchange for discounts. Visual aspect affects users’ opinion considerably – it can change their mood, the information perception, and, of course, final decision. We advise to experiment with photos placement and comments design so you could find the best variant for yourself and ecommerce product reviews.
Third-party testimonials
Since many testimonials are fake and made by marketers, very often users tend not to believe them. One of the ways to restore the audience trust is to place third-party testimonials. Some of them you can receive in social networks, some of them you can find on the special websites about your product group.
To sum up, testimonials perfectly fits into concept of global open network, and you shouldn’t ignore them. If right now your customers are not ready to leave their feedback, search for your product reviews and comments outside the site. Again, try to experiment with design, formats, placement. You should find the best option and make the most of it.
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