People who trust your brand are much more likely to give your products or services a chance.
Customer and client testimonials, along with other direct statements from people you’ve worked with, can make your brand seem much more trustworthy.
A real quote from a previous customer can help prove how seriously your business takes customer service — plus, what kind of things you do to make customer service a top priority.
This is how any business can use client and customer testimonials to improve their web presence and drive sales:
1. Highlight Quotes From Reviews and Feedback
Pulling quotes from customer reviews and solicited feedback is the quickest and easiest way to start using testimonials on your site.
Location will matter. Some companies carve out a dedicated testimonial or feedback page on their website to highlight their testimonials, but this may not always be the best strategy.
Often, these pages don’t receive that much traffic compared to the rest of the site. There is the risk that a customer, unless they’re definitely seeking testimonials, won’t see them if these reviews are only hosted in a certain section of your site.
Instead, many businesses have started folding these quotes into landing pages, helping them show off the benefits related to a CTA. Some businesses may also use product-related quotes on specific product pages, allowing them to further highlight certain benefits that one of their offerings can provide.
With one of these strategies, you have the highest possible chance that potential customers will see these testimonials while browsing.
Soliciting these testimonials in the first place can also help you improve customer happiness — identifying what you’re doing well and where you can improve is a key step in boosting your customer service.
2. Highlight Your Customer Service Wins
Strong customer service can be a major draw for customers — especially those who may have questions, or have had bad experiences with competition in your niche in the past.
With customer testimonials, you can show off some of your biggest customer service wins, backing up hard numbers on consumer satisfaction with more qualitative evidence.
Advantage Outfitters, a provider of commercial van shelving, provides an excellent example of this in practice.
The page places real stats directly above a set of customer testimonials. This is another common strategy businesses use to make client testimonial quotes even more effective.
By providing both numbers and qualitative evidence for your business’s success with customer service, you can more effectively build trust with potential customers.
With this kind of page setup, you’ll be able to convince people who want proof of your business’s success, recommendations from people like them and everyone in between.
3. Use Photos and Job Titles to Build Credibility
An all-text approach is a good one if you’re worried about your page becoming too busy, or if you want your use of visuals to highlight other information — like statistics on your customer service record.
However, you can also use visuals to make your testimonials seem even more credible and trustworthy.
KEYLAY Design, an Atlanta-based graphic design firm, offers an example of this. In addition to testimonials, the page adds in photos of clients and their job titles to make the reviews seem even more credible.
This will take more work than soliciting a text-only testimonial, but it can make a significant difference in making your testimonials seem trustworthy and real.
4. Use Testimonials in Success Stories or Case Studies
In a similar way, you can also use testimonials to dive deep into professional successes — challenging jobs or client requests that your business delivered on in the end.
Zendesk’s customer stories page provides an example of this technique.
This page provides links to stories and case studies on big successes that Zendesk has had with major clients. The stories show how Zendesk has worked with a range of customers — like Grubhub, Mailchimp and Tesco — to solve a particular problem the client was having.
Each of the success story pages includes a few different elements — including direct testimonials from the client, stats on the project and the technology Zendesk used.
The testimonials become part of a bigger story that shows how the company problem-solves in a real-life scenario — and what lengths they’ll go to when delivering results for a customer.
They also provide real-life evidence that Zendesk has had success working with clients from particular niches — like energy, financial services and education.
For businesses that regularly work one-on-one with large business clients and devote significant resources to individual jobs, this approach is a great way to back up claims about business success and customer service.
5. Post Testimonials on Social Media
Social media is a great place to post bite-sized content related to your brand — which makes it an excellent way to host testimonials.
If you have an active social media account, occasionally posting a testimonial can help you slowly build brand trust and encourage customers to shop with your business.
More visual content typically does better on social media, but you can still get a lot of mileage out of all-text testimonials with appealing typography and graphic design.
6. Create Video Testimonials
Video testimonials have become a popular way to show off client feedback in the past few years. Typically, video testimonials feature video of a client or customer, discussing briefly the positive experience they had with your brand. In some cases, they may hit on specific evidence of how your company helped — like dollars saved or revenue generated.
These testimonials will probably be harder to create than a simple text-based testimonial or even a case study.
The benefits they offer, however, may make the added investment worth it in the end. They can be much more attention-grabbing than other testimonials, and seeing and hearing the client can make their statement seem more trustworthy and real.
Using Testimonials to Boost Sales and Build Trust
A well-placed collection of testimonials can have a major impact on how customers perceive your brand.
If you want to convince customers that your brand is committed to its values — like providing high-quality customer service — following one of these approaches for implementing testimonials can be a great way to start.