Have you ever heard of the propaganda phrase “band wagon”? This is a technique to make people follow what all the others are following. Generally, public believes in what other people believe, especially people of their own kind; personally or professionally. So, if you can successfully pull together a group of people admiring your work, you have build yourself some credibility—and of course customers!
One of the ways to show-off people favoring and appreciating your work as a website designer is through “client testimonials” placed on your own site. Here are the few credibility gains you get through displaying testimonials on your website:
- Makes you reliable against your competitors
- Speaks for your experience and expertise
- Provides comfort to individuals and companies seeking to conduct business with you
- Removes doubts about the services you provide
- Gives opportunity to clients to thank you and communicate with you
- Shows how much you care about what your clients have to say
- Portrays your strengths
- Shows your abilities to solve diverse problems of clients by providing them unique and effective solutions
However, with many benefits, if these testimonials are not utilized and displayed the best way, they can prove to harm your reputation. Here are a few tips of how to deal with the testimonials:
Don’t fake it!
The worst thing to do is fake your testimonials or hire others to fake them for you! Always be genuine and true with your work and to the people seeking to avail your services. When you can get testimonials from clients already, is it worth you cross the ethical boundaries and falsify? Nothing will damage your trust and image faster than using phony testimonials.
The right time to ask for testimonials from clients:
The best time to ask your clients for testimonials is when you have fully completed their work and they are satisfied. This way, they’ll be happy to write some pretty goods words on you! Another thing you can do is to tell them how effective it will be for their own site visibility and benefit if they put their link on your website.
Increase your testimonials credibility:
Including a thumbnail photo or even video feeds of people talking good about you increase your site visitors’ response even more towards you. To be more genuine, add full name, title, and company name with the testimonials. And don’t forget to provide a link to the website you have designed for them.
Make testimonials worthy and less-boring
If you include stories and stories of details in your testimonials, you will lose your visitors interest. If your client has written a long word, you can always give the quote a headline that reflects the essence of what has been said.
Specific but solid testimonials are what you need. For e.g. “I love the work you people did. Thanks!” is a specific testimonial but not solid. Instead, “Our previous designer went out on us a couple of days before our website launch, leaving us worried. On extremely short notice, Cyber DesignZ came forward with their matchless services and excellent web designing solutions.” This testimonial addresses more to how you brought out positive results of an issue facing the client.
Place testimonials where they can’t be overlooked
Though it’s a good idea to make a separate page displaying all the good words about you, but many times it is possible that this page may be accidentally ignored by a visitor. To increase the visibility of your testimonials, try placing them somewhere with the body of your content or in a sidebar present on every page of your website.
A satisfied client is hard to get, and when you have several “genuine” satisfied clients—they are enough to speak for your work. Testimonials play strong and sure role to get someone select your services. For lots of you who have missed out on this, I think it’s time to get started!
1 comment so far ↓
Well done! I’d like to add that if testimonials are hand written and scanned ones are on site… that increases its value more and more!