When it comes to doing business online, few things are more powerful than when your visitors and customers trust you as a business. Testimonials are powerful when it comes to helping ease the feelings of wariness and mistrust in our online visitors. Your testimonials constitute powerful social proof that will work its magic only if you present them in the best way possible. This article shares a few tested and proven strategies for gaining more and better quality testimonials to use in your marketing machine.

If you offer a range of products and services, it’s important that your testimonials are specific to a particular product or service. If your site offers multiple products and services having different target audiences, you’ll need to arrange your testimonials accordingly. In other words, your website audience is going to be broad in this case. There are times in certain niches where you’ll be able to promote many different kinds of products, and then you can also offer services, as well. The important thing is to be clear about which testimonials belong to which product or service offering. The impact will be greater when people are reading about a product and the testimonial is right there for them to see. Be sure you request a picture of the person because they simply add to the credibility of the testimonial. A picture helps the visitor to relax a bit more and believe the testimonial is genuine. There have been surveys done which prove that having a picture with testimonial made a huge difference to the way people perceive it. You’ll find that most customers will be agreeable to the request for a photo, but not all will.

Last, do not make the mistake of not put your testimonial front and center. Try placing your testimonials on different sites that your customers might frequent so that they can affect their decisions. This might be your website home, service section, billing dept, etc. Your testimonials should be put in the center of the page because they are known to increase conversions. You should be creative when it comes to placement because you want your readers to always have access to them. Also try to place your testimonials in your sales emails because this is where your customers will be more willing to look at them.

It’s of paramount importance that all of your testimonials come from real customers and not the imaginary kind. The more you keep going and getting more real testimonials, then pretty soon people will see and maybe feel that everything is for real.