The art in using testimonials on your website

I was with a new SEO client recently who has a really good business and has established an excellent reputation over the years.

I was trying to explain to him how powerful testimonials are on a website if they are real and are used properly.

He was having a hard time understanding the benefits of this so I asked him to contact some of his many clients and to ask them for a testimonial.

You should have seen how excited he got when people quite happily wrote back with some lovely comments about him and his business, and how good he had been at helping these people find a new home.

To say he was surprised at people's honestly and willingness to submit a testimonial is an understatement.

I then asked him to chose 10 of them and asked him to contact these people again and see if they would email him a photo of themselves that he could use with the testimonials on his website.

8 of them sent him a photo.

We then placed these testimonials, including the phots with each one, in strategic places on the websites (such as beside the enquiry form) and guess what happened??

From a usual 4 - 5 enquiries per day he suddenly started getting around 8 - 9 per day.  That one action alone has already nearly doubled the conversion rate of the website.

Not a bad result for a day's work hey?!

Testimonials work.  The problem is that many people make them up.  By including a photo of the person, or family, that wrote the testimonial, it automatically hugely increases the credibility and value of those testimonials.

Then you've just got to make sure that you place them where people are going to take an action to help them overcome any objections they may have in contacting you.

Have you had any similar results with testimonials?  So few people really seem to know how to make them work effectively for them.