Getting the attention of your website visitors happens in seconds, not minutes. We are all learning more and more about the need to make a fast, positive impression.
Before your potential customers switch browser tabs or change their minds, you will want to ensure your homepage is working hard to encourage them to stay.
Data shows that people trust endorsements from others, whether family, friend or stranger. This makes your best testimonials a major asset. When presented well, they help build confidence in your business and encourage your website visitors to stay.
To ensure trust is built quickly, the position on your page matters. There is no need to make your valued visitors scroll down to find them.
Start the confidence-building process earlier by putting your key testimonials high on the page.
This how to guide has been written to help you maximise the impact of your testimonials and to use Endorsal to maximise your conversion rates.
Step 1: Your Page Layout
Have you heard the term 'above the fold'? It is a useful piece of website terminology. It refers to the area your visitors see before they scroll. It is the prime real estate of your webpage and is where first impressions are made. You want to begin the trust-building process at that point or very soon after.
So for this step, I recommend that you review your page layout. The key points to look at are:
- Is your page offering trust-building content above the fold or directly below?
- Will your target customer have enough confidence within seconds to decide to stay on your page?
Step 2: Choosing your Best Testimonials
A good testimonial is not just about star rating. Interested visitors will read them and the impact of the words will matter, in particular how relatable the recommendation is to the reader. When a visitor sees that the experience of others matches their own expectations of good business, an important step towards a new potential customer has been made.
Endorsal is built to help your business get more from testimonials and offers a number of ways to approach this. Endorsal customers have a feature called Testimonial Rules, designed to automatically approve your highest rated testimonials. They can also to mark their best testimonials as "Featured", which enables them to appear first within Widgets, ready to resonate with and attract your target customers.
When a visitor sees that the experience of others matches their own expectations of good business, an important step towards a new potential customer has been made.
Step 3: Setting Up Your Testimonial Widget
Among other features, Endorsal offers a range of "Widgets". These are used to quickly place a selection of testimonials at the location of your choice on your page.
After creating and naming our Widget, and choosing Widget Type of 'Multiple Testimonials', we are presented with several key options.
Following the settings in the above image, we have "Only show testimonials with 5 stars" and "Only show featured testimonials" selected. This refines our selection and testimonials displayed to the best and most effective available.
We can also activate "Randomize Testimonials" so that multiple visits from a single visitor will give a different selection within the above criteria. This is especially useful if you have more 5 star and featured testimonials that you are choosing to display in the widget.
With our best testimonials in Endorsal and the above setup complete, we now have a testimonial widget that is good to go and ready to impress.
Step 4: The Best Location for your Testimonial Widget
Now we want to see things from our target customers point of view. If you have done your homework, you know who they are and what they want. With that in mind, you can determine the content that needs to be at or near the top of the page in order to encourage them to stay.
With the awareness of the value of having your best testimonials either above the fold or directly below, you want to now find the ideal space. For example, a local business may want a strong heading, brief description, location and contact details, followed by a row of glowing testimonials.
Step 5: The Power of a FOMO Popup
Given the importance of your visitors gaining trust in your business quickly, there is one more feature that needs to be included: Endorsal's FOMO Popups.
For the uninitiated, FOMO stands for fear of missing out and is used in marketing as a way of capturing a potential customer's attention with timely messages, designed to stir their desire not to miss out and take action quickly.
As with Widgets, FOMO Popups can be set to display your choice of testimonials, based on a criteria.
The key benefit an Endorsal popup offers with regards to this article is placement.
It can be positioned in the bottom left or right of the current view. So no matter where visitors are on your page, even if they do not scroll, the FOMO popup will be displayed. The setup in Endorsal includes control of the delay before displaying as well as time between each testimonial.
Step 6: Let the Results Speak for Themselves
Testing changes to your website helps to better understand how to communicate with and encourage your target customers.
By keeping tabs of conversion rates, you can make changes to your page knowing that you will be able to measure a major indicator of performance.
Remember that conversions can come in different forms. Sales are not the only ones you should measure. Clicking on a particular page, a product page or a contact page could be considered a conversion. The more action a potential customer takes on your page, the more invested in your business and offer they are likely to be.
Summary
Getting your visitors attention is important but not always enough. With Google at hand, potential customers can quickly find multiple businesses and your competitors. So get the most from Endorsal and your best testimonials by getting them early on your page.
By following this process, you can easily build confidence in your business with potential customers in under one minute.
Collecting high-quality testimonials is important to every business.
But it's always been a long, painful game of back-and-forth.
Endorsal streamlines the whole process by fully automating it, saving your business time and money.
Increase conversions, build customer loyalty and strengthen your brand.
Over 5,000 companies trust Endorsal to boost their social proof. Try us out for free and in less than 10 minutes, you'll see why ⤵︎
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