Effective Testimonials

Every store owner loves testimonials, right?  It gives your new customers the warm and fuzzy feeling that anything they buy from you is going to be shipped to them quickly and the transaction will go smoothly.  So, in most cases, this is something a store owner wants to show their customers right away.  While that’s a pretty good technique, that allows a customer to browse through your available items without fear.  Most of our clients that install Solid Cactus’ Randomly Displayed Testimonials feature (and a lot of advice I’ve given out over the years as a project manager here at Solid Cactus) was to put them in an area that would maximize the amount of testimonials a customer saw while browsing.  For example, if the testimonials are placed in the navigation, it gives your customers a chance to see more testimonials from other happy customers and keeps that warm and fuzzy feeling going throughout the whole process.

While this was good advice as far as maximizing the use of the feature, it’s probably not the best advice I could have given as far as effectively using the idea behind the feature.  After digging into the psychology of the buying process a little deeper, I have some even better advice about using randomly displayed testimonials.

It all starts with buying anxiety.  Think of it this way:  You’re in a retail store and you have $20 in your pocket.  You see an item for $30 that you REALLY like, and want to buy.  You know you have a credit card in your pocket, and you could just buy it, but for that one second, you automatically stop and think: “should I actually do this now, or put it down and get it another time”?   Shopping online is no different…  In fact, it’s the same thing, just in a much quicker fashion.  Everything about being online is about grabbing someone’s attention quickly and at just the right time.  Every time a buyer hovers over your add to cart button, they have that same reaction, whether it’s conscious or not.  In many cases, the best place to show a testimonial is right in that product info table, directly below that add to cart button (we wouldn’t want a long testimonial pushing that button below the fold).  This helps alleviate any anxiety a customer may feel about clicking it.

Using that same psychology, another great place to display testimonials is right inside the shopping cart (are you starting to think the best place would be right next to the continue button like I am)?  The anxiety a customer feels increases as the steps to completing the order get closer and closer.  We take steps to make sure a checkout is a dead simple process to get through.  3 steps and your product is on the way to being delivered.  However, placing testimonials near the buttons that a customer is going to feel the most anxiety about clicking is something to think about.  It might just stop a few customers from clicking the close window button instead of the place order button.

The other thing to think about regarding testimonials is that most new customers that are going to feel any kind of buying anxiety from you are probably using google or a comparison shopping engine to search for a product, not necessarily your store.  So your item page is really their first impression of your store.  Having a great tesimonial close to that add to cart button could be the difference between a new customer clicking add to cart, or them hitting the back button to go back to google and on to the next merchant in the list selling the same product.