Zen and the art of leveraging testimonials?

[skbohler]

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what science/art/experience there is regarding using testimonials to persuade.

For instance, should testimonials be in the main column, or off to the left...or off to the right?

Should there be one way up top, or distributed evenly throughout the copy?

Should there be multiple testimonials per page?

How can you get people to click on a link to a testimonials page?

I'm wondering what other people have found to be effective.

Thanks in advance!

Steve

[deejay]

Best way to get people to click on a link to a testimonials page?

A link for super-bored people to click:

"Willy's Widgets changed my life!" read more...

A link for seriously interested buyers to click:

"Things I wish I'd known before I bought my widget" read more...

Of course, the second link then goes on to tell viewers how I wish I'd known how much my widget would change my life, so I could have bought one a lot sooner.

That hint of possible cautionary or negative information in the second link is a great incentive.

[JayCee]

Have had great success with a "feedback page", where we let customers rave or complain, as they wish - no editing by us. It contains language at the top about how we don't edit their comments (except for abuse) and, so far (3 years) we have only had to remove 3 or 4 posts.

3 posts we removed were questions instead of comments (they should have used our email or 800 number. One was an obvious phony complaint from a competitor (last month).

Was not easy to talk the client into this, but i'm a big believer in establishing credibility through obvious honesty. The results have been "marketing dynamite". Much more effective than the usual testimonials - which look like the site owner wrote them and have no method of verification.

Because the feedback also contains honest complaints, it is very credible and people don't seem to mind giving their full name and email addresses (we ask that they just put in dummy test if they like, but few do that).

The product is excellent, so the raves outnumber the complaints by something like 90%.

Now doing some upgrading and trying to talk the client into letting me install a "slide show" of the best recent feedback posts on the home page. Also need to do something about email harvestors on the new version of the feedback page.

[nakulgoyal]

I just usually try to have a testimonials page and then some of them rotating from there on the main page. Works well for me.

[TimmyMagic]

I put one or two testimonials on the product page and the a link such as [read more] to take the user to the testimonial page.

We have lots of testimonials and many of them have links to the persons website or even there email address (permission granted). I have these at the top of the page. I think they add enormously to the credibility. These testimonials are worth 10x more than say Fred from Bolton.

Tim