Last week, I wrote that many retail stores neglect to develop their customer testimonials.
You may object and say that your product pages feature “product reviews.” Yes, reviews are great. They are specific to the product being shown, they are current, and they give an interactive feel to your website.
However, reviews do not take the place of a well-developed rich customer testimonial.
A “well-developed” and “rich” customer testimonial is one that grabs your prospects attention, is easy to read, is specific about benefits, natural sounding, and believable.
Developing a rich customer testimonial may mean …
- Determining who to request a testimonial from
- Soliciting a written testimonial
- Interviewing a customer with a set of prepared questions (You may wish to hire a professional writer for this task.)
- Editing the testimonial so that salient parts are showcased (Be careful to preserve the “voice” of the customer.)
- Getting approval from customer for any edits made
- Putting most important point in bold
- Choosing a pull-quote to headline the testimonial
- Getting a picture to go with it
- Getting permission to use the above in all of your promotional materials along with name and city of person (You can make-do with first name only or anonymous if person objects.)
Once the customer testimonial is ready, you can put it …
- On a Testimonials page
- On your Home Page
- On a product page
- On its own dedicated page
That last bullet point is a really good idea. If you build an individual interior page with just one testimonial on it, you can optimize that page for the product and the city of the buyer. This will help bring in more local searches and odd long tail searches.
For example, you may sell home theater recliners in Memphis, TN. Your main home theater recliner page is optimized for “home theater recliner” “memphis” and maybe a few other larger communities. But maybe someone in an outlying area like Pickwick had purchased one and given you a wonderful testimonial. Then that one page could be optimized for “home theater recliner” and “pickwick”
These individual pages won’t clutter your site. They can simply be linked to from a page in your sub-navigation. The goal won’t be to have people navigate to these page, but to have them as “bait” to bring people to your site.
P.S. If you really want to wow your prospects, you’ll include as many “video testimonials” as possible.
Easy Web Tip #113: Develop rich customer testimonials for your website to prove to your prospects that your store is the best and to attract more prospects through local and longtail searches.
