Are You Influenced By Customer Testimonials?

[David Jackson]

Research has shown that customer testimonials dramatically increase sales conversions. That's a proven fact.

My question to you is this: Are you influenced by customer testimonials? Do they persuade you at all, or do you take them with a grain of salt?

David Jackson

[simplyfreegas]

For me it really depends on what the product is. For example,... the scam site www.freeuslaptop.com had lots of testimonials. Those made me even LESS likely to try it out. Yet OliveGarden had testimonials about their experience and made me choose that for dinner the other day. See what I mean? But you're right, either way, testimonials will either hinder or help, depends on what you're offering.

MLM Testimonials are the ones I hate most.

Richard

[David Jackson]

I hear you, Richard. I'm naturally cynical of testimonials in general. But I tend to find testimonials that have a way to contact the customer more credible than others. For example, if the customer posts his or her website URL or e-mail address, those testimonials carry a lot more weight with me.

David Jackson

[ucavik]

Exactly David otherwise testimonials can be manipulated,i think there should be a way to find out if all those 'testimonials' were infact posted from a single IP address.

[lmadam]

Me and one of my good friends actually had this same conversation a few weeks ago, from my point of few I think you should never trust testimonials that are hosted on the same website as where the product/service is being sold, its just to easy to fake testimonials (Theres actually software out there for getting the job done fast) - Although if the testimonials are hosted on some third party service that has secuirty features to dis-allow the upload of testimonials from the service provider, then yeah testimonials can be a great asset to finding out if a business is good or not!

As for the whole the testimonials having a link to some website, you should still never trust this, its just so easy to link back to a website! - Ie. I could go about making up loads of great testimonials and add a random link to some website I found via google, by the time that website finds out i'm linking to them on my website I would have already made 10sales just from that one testimonials! (: - So never trust testimonials, always look deeper into the company/product or service before you buy anything from them. A good way to do this is a google search.

[Mark Atkinson]

Interesting topic! I often wonder about testimonials myself.

I run a web and corporate design business, and I often consider adding a testimonials section on our services pages. I think in that case, it could prove beneficial.

In the large majority of cases, however, and particularly with internet marketing, testimonials probably cannot be trusted.

[jonn655]

I think that customer testimonials are a great way to enhance the credibility of a service or product.