- Just who are these people, anyway?
Always ask before you publish someone\'s comments on your website. Ask for permission to include their comments and to edit if necessary. Get their consent in writing, and keep it on file.
When you ask permission to include their comments, be sure they also agree to let you include their identifying information. Only include testimonials from people who are comfortable with the level of personal detail you intend to provide.
The last thing you need is to have a customer getting upset because you published what they intended as a private letter or e-mail on your website without their knowledge, or included their personal details without their permission.
It\'s a good idea to have a testimonials page on your site. Prospective customers may find a long list of favourable comments from all your previous customers to be very impressive. But to increase the impact of your testimonials, try also interweaving them with the content on your main pages.
Site visitors may skip or accidentally overlook a separate testimonials page. Testimonials that are interwoven with the body copy or in a sidebar have a better chance of being read by more of your site visitors.
If your testimonials are focused and specific, this can be a powerful technique to improve your sales conversions by directing attention to the benefits of your product or service.
You\'ve probably run across websites with testimonials that could constitute a full page in themselves. They just go on and on and on...
Now, be honest. Do you actually read them all the way through? Or do you do as I do and simply scroll past them?
If you want your testimonials to do their job, they need to be readable. Try to keep the quotes to five lines of text or less. If a customer gives you a very long - but excellent - testimonial and you want to use substantially all of the comments, consider breaking it up into several segments to scatter throughout your site.
