The Venture Skills Blog

While catching up on some reading due to a power-cut at Venture HQ, I came across this post from Mind Valley labs on their recent marketing campaign they discovered that having a very impressive testimonial on their site actually hurt their conversion rates. They offered a few reasons but I would like to add a couple more.

• People don’t believe testimonials without proof -I know it sucks but people just don’t trust.
• Testimonials need to be relevant to the product, not to the company unless your selling the company.
• Testimonials should be there if asked for, but not shoved down peoples throats.

So how to combat this problem?

• Don’t place testimonials in prominent places
• Use short testimonials, or teasers linking to longer testimonials
• Don’t use them at all, no seriously we have no testimonials on our site, in fact we only have testimonials in our quote packs (so only when we are providing quotes do we give testimonials out)
• The best form of testimonial is an external testimonial so the testimonial is on a site not run controlled by you. This brings back a certain amount of trust.

How do you use testimonials?