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Testimonials Turbo-Charge Profits

By: Harry Piper


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Every business has an easy way to persuade customers of the value of their services - testimonials from past customers. Do you have half a dozen strong written testimonials from your customers to showcase the benefits of your products and services? It's no accident that professional advertisers seek to employ strong testimonials in the top performing ad campaigns. Keep reading to learn more.

Time and time again, testimonials have been proven to increase your sales conversion rates, so let's quickly explore why that is. If you want to learn to do something well, you have to study it. That's precisely what Professor Robert Cialdini did, explaining it in his book called Influence. In this book, Cialdini explains how he went undercover at car dealerships and other pressure-sales environments to understand the techniques used to close sales.

While there were many dozens of specific techniques, he discovered that there were really only 6 broad ways that people are persuaded to part with their cash for your services. If you want to refine your own sales process, it's well worth studying this book. When you demonstrate the value of your products to real people, using testimonials, you are employing one of these core influence strategies.

So let's now explore what you need to gather for testimonials. Commonly, a testimonial will be along these lines, "Bloggs bakers have looked after us for years and we are very happy to recommend them to any other restaurant in town". This statement has no substance to it, it's very vague and so doesn't give you confidence in anything in particular. One difficulty with this sort of sweeping statement is that your customers may think you've paid your customer to say it, or even written it for yourself!

A strong testimonial will explain, in your customer's own words, how your service has helped them specifically.. Going back to our example testimonial, "Blogg's understands the things that matter to a commercial customer. We have been customers for 17 years and they have always delivered on time. Their prices remain very competitive and they are always willing to bring us extras if we have a rush job. In the past, other bakeries have not really understood what we need as a commercial customer and that's what makes Blogg's stand out for us."

Take a moment to study the differences. Even a cursory glance at the second testimonial will show several factors that will really matter to a commercial bakery customer. It's customer feedback like this that can really help to get new customers to come on board with you. When you combine this with another 5-8 similar ones, you get the basis of a very powerful marketing and sales tool.

So how do you get testimonials to use in your marketing? It's starts with asking them! You'll get nothing if you don't ask for it. Some of your customers might be a bit tight for time and ask you to write it for them. I've personally found that when I do this, they will scrap what I write for them and completely rewrite it, far more powerfully than I do.

Once you've got your testimonials, use them liberally in everything you do for marketing. Adverts can be embellished with a few customer comments, use them on your business signage, include them underneath the signature in your email messages

All that remains is to use this information now to help your business.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Check out a sample of some great testimonials in these links. One's from a member of the Chris Cardell business club. There are other examples too on a business coaching site.

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