If you are a creative person, you could probably make up names for a dozen types of testimonials — even more.
But I have identified three types of testimonials that really work in increasing your conversions of prospects to customers.
On the Free Interactive Copywriting Mastery Teleseminar Thursday night, we started with a million-dollar-copywriting mentoring client of mine, Mike Morgan, talking about being mentored. What he said ended up being a testimonial. For extra credit (if you listened to the teleseminar), put your opinion in as a comment, as to what kind of testimonial he gave.
(If you didn’t happen to catch the teleseminar, you can listen to it online here: Copywriting Call)
Later on the teleseminar, I mentioned the three types of testimonials as one of the 11 steps you need to write a sales letter that converts. Here they are:
1. The expert testimonial This is when you get a well-known name in your field to endorse you. If you had a real estate site, a positive testimonial from Donald Trump would be gold for you. If you had a fantasy football site, you could do worse than to have Coach Lou Holtz say something good about your site. If you had a corporate business site, a favorable testimonial from a Wharton School professor would definitely help your conversions.
Same for everyone in any industry. If you can get a recognized leader to approve — in writing — of what you’re doing, this goes a long way to reassure prospects that they should become your customers.
2. The user experience testimonial.
These talk about what it was like
- to work with you
- to buy from you
- to get technical support or customer service from you
- to use your product
… and so on.
These kind of testimonials relate your experience as a customer to prospective future customers. Most testimonials are like this. But they’re usually not as strong as they could be, because they don’t talk about experience that a prospect will see as valuable before they have done business with you.
It’s important to look at a testimonial through a prospect’s eyes to see if it will have the effect you want it to have.
3. The user results testimonial These are probably the most valuable testimonials you can get for most products and services. You have to be very careful about using these when you have a financial or medical product, as there are strict federal laws about what you can and can’t say. Getting into the details of these regulations are beyond the scope of this blog post, and besides, I’m not a lawyer.
For just about any other kind of product, though, a user results testimonial is incredibly valuable and, generally speaking, less risky. Make sure the results your prospect is talking about are true, not made-up.
Now… that’s some detailed information you’ve probably never heard about testimonials, isn’t it? It will add a lot of conversion power to any copy where you put the information to work.
It’s just a small sample of what’s on the free teleseminar and what you get in the Copywriting Mastery Guild teleseminar series coming up next Thursday. To find out more, go listen here
David Garfinkel
