Your sales page, as I have often stated, is the most important part of your sales system.  You can have the greatest product in the world and the most traffic in the world but without an effective sales letter none of that will matter…

Your sales page is designed to programmatically lead your prospect down the path to the inevitable conclusion that they must buy your product.  The components of the sales page each are designed to play a specific part in the sales system.  One of the most important parts of the system are your testimonials.

Testimonials are statements by customers telling the world how much the product helped them.  The job of the testimonial is two fold.  First, testimonials are part of the comfort stimuli that your prospect needs as an important factor in making a positive buying decision.  Your visitor has to be comfortable with you, the seller, in order to even think about buying from you.  Testimonials help to provide that measure of comfort by underscoring the fact that many others have purchased from you and are very happy.

The other function of testimonials is to provide a group acceptance factor.  It works like this.  People’s decisions are affected by other people’s decisions.  If a significant group of individuals believes a certain way, it becomes harder for a single individual to ignore that belief.  If you have a lot of testimonials, it validates in the prospects mind, that it is alright to want to buy this product because all of these other people did.

There are some rules you need to follow if you want your testimonials to be effective.  First, you can never have too many testimonials.  The more you have the better.  I have seen sales pages that have up to 500 testimonials as part of the site.

Your testimonials are more effective if they are specific.  The statement “I lost a lot of weight on this diet” is not nearly as effective as the statement “I lost 51 pounds in 2 months on this diet”. The first example was too general to be effective.  The second example is a much better statement for a testimonial.

You need to have full name and location.  Testimonials are only effective if visitors to your site think they are real.  Having a full name and a city and state makes the testimonial much more believable than a testimonial from Bob with no other name and no location.  If the customer has a website, include the URL.  Not only does it add more credibility, you will be doing your customer a favor because you will be providing them with a backlink to their website.

If you can utilize a picture of the customer providing the testimonial, it makes it even more credible.  Audio clips or even video clips can be used very effectively as testimonials.  Then your prospects actually hear and see your customers giving their testimonial.  Seeing and hearing is believing.

Your testimonials are an integral part of the sales page logic. It is an important part of the systematic process that leads your prospects to the decision to buy.  If you utilize testimonials, if they are stated correctly, if they include all the important information necessary and if you use enough of them, it will make your sales page more effective. The more effective your sales page, the more product you will sell.

Tags: Copywriting, Internet Marketing, testimonial, testimonials