Raise Conversions by Highlighting Positive Customer Feedback

Posted on Apr 19, 2011 in Blog | 3 comments

Everyone loves an exuberant high-five. And the positive feedback you get for your business can add serious muscle to your brand.

Of course you could trumpet your own fabulousness, but it’s so much sweeter — not to mention more authentic and convincing to all your potential clients out there — when your fans do it for you.

So how do you manage that? How can a business encourage and promote positive customer feedback to raise their conversion rate and increase the health of their brand?

Mechanisms for Getting Feedback
There are so many ways to get feedback these days that it’s often less a question of how to get it and more a question of simply collecting and promoting it. Check the social profiles of your best clients for interactions you have had with them, scan emails and written correspondence, look over your company Facebook page and blog comments. Depending on your business type, Yelp, Google Places and Amazon may also be places you find reviews. If you haven’t been doing it, start soliciting feedback on your website and in your emails. Hand out comment cards at every seminar you offer. Simple questions like “How are we doing?” are often better than lengthy surveys (although those have a place sometimes too).

Don’t forget to promptly resolve any customer service and support issues you learn about; your hunt for positive comments may turn up some frustrations and complaints as well. In fact, handling some of your “negative” feedback really well may end up providing some of your best testimonials to date.

Add Testimonials to Your Website
Once you have a good handful of positive comments, choose the very best ones and ask your customers for permission to showcase them on your website. It adds to the authenticity of the comments if you can use a full name and business affiliation (a photo is awesome), but there are plenty of companies (pharma companies, for example) who might be uncomfortable with that, so you’ll have to do what you can with what you have. Give your testimonials their own page as soon as you have enough to post. You can also turn them into a short video, or even give them an entire mini-site of their own. Here’s a great example of a video testimonials page at Mathnasium, and you can check out the incredible customer testimonial page at 37 signals for another example of testimonials done right.

Write Your Customers’ Stories
Another way to highlight positive client feedback to increase the power of your brand and increase your conversion rate is to write a profile story about your customer’s experience with your company. This can be a blog post or article about the client, written with their express permission, which describes their particular business need and how they came to use your product or service. Briefly interview your client by phone, email, or in person, and use as many of their quotes as you can. Give them a chance to see the final draft before it is published, and be sure to thank them for the opportunity to share their story with a small gift or special discount.

Don’t forget to retweet positive comments and send out social links to these testimonials so that your clients know how much you value them!