When your potential customers visit your website for the first time, what do you think are the most important elements they look for? Sensible paths of action? Visually attractive calls-to-action? An authoritative "About Us" page?
Of course, all of these things are important. These elements need to work harmoniously to create a website that, on the whole, makes sense.
Like with all things web design and digital marketing-related, there isn’t just one answer to apply to all possible scenarios in order to achieve this. Each visitor has their own distinct reason for checking out your site, their own sensibility for website preferences, and their own particular location on the spectrum of the buyer’s journey.
For one visitor, the fact that your color scheme is jarring might be enough to cause the fateful and dreaded hard bounce. For another, a seemingly money-in-the-bank sale could slip through your grasp due to shoddily written content.
Across all of these different possibilities, though, there are certain constants. X-factors, we’ll call them. To me, an x-factor is an element of your website whose unpredictability is matched only by its potential importance. It can be the clincher for a sale for a customer from any background and from any place along the buyer’s journey.
One of the most interesting web design x-factors is the ‘Testimonials’ section - If you aren’t well-versed in the construction of websites, you may not even immediately notice if a site you are visiting lacks testimonials from satisfied customers. It’s not an immediately necessary way to highlight your product or service, but for many customers, it is the key piece of evidence to determine that you can provide actual value to them. In fact, customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for all types of content marketing, with a rating of 89%.
Why Are Testimonials So Important?
Much has been written about the importance of humanizing your brand. Customers in the 21st century can sniff out insincerity before you even get a chance to upsell, and it’s necessary to design your web presence accordingly. While things like humor and an ability to poke fun at oneself definitely help towards this end, it doesn’t mean that brand humanization has to come at the expense of credibility. When executed correctly, the two go hand in hand.
Testimonials provide a perfect example of this. Any time a customer is being sold to, they are on their toes for deception. It’s only natural. Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned dollars and cents on a product presented as far more valuable than its reality. As consumers, we’re all more willing to believe in what’s being advertised if we can identify with the source of the information. Testimonials can provide the perfect way to bridge that gap.
It’s always a good idea to position your marketing strategies in a way that sells an experience, as opposed to just a product. This is nothing new. It’s why beer commercials have .1% to do with the beer in the bottle and 99.9% to do with the epic night out the sharply dressed twenty somethings are having while holding those beers.
When it comes to digital marketing, you can apply this same concept (with much more subtlety than the typical over-the-top beer commercial). For a lot of your site’s visitors, this idea alone can be the difference between a sale and a bounce.
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When your potential customers visit your website for the first time, what do you think are the most important elements they look for? Sensible paths of action? Visually attractive calls-to-action? An authoritative "About Us" page?
Of course, all of these things are important. These elements need to work harmoniously to create a website that, on the whole, makes sense.
Like with all things web design and digital marketing-related, there isn’t just one answer to apply
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