Using testimonials in website design
Using testimonials in website design
Good words go a long way
Testimonials on websites aren’t only for the newest restaurant in your town or your AppleWatch. When used effectively in website design, they work well for every company. You want people to know about your happy clients, especially those willing to go the extra mile and recommend you. Here are some companies who found unique ways to incorporate testimonials on their websites to market their product or service and enhance their company’s offering. Let them inspire you in your own website redesign!
1. Back up your numbers
Public company: Shopify
In big, bold type on Shopify’s online store page it says ‘Shopify powers over 200,00 businesses’. The numbers are impressive, and will probably make most investors look twice. But what really hits home are the distinct and carefully chosen customer testimonials underneath the big number. Short snippets of praise from the founder of Tattly, the owner of Packer Shoes, and a star on the ABC show Shark Tank offer three real world business examples from the 200,000. In one swoop Shopify succeeds in sounding grand and successful with their big number as well as intimate and personal with three real life stories. The reviews are short, but still make an impact.
2. Enhance your Corporate Social Responsibility section
Public company: TD Bank
Testimonials from real people and real communities are a great addition to a public company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) section. Why? Including first hand experiences of how your company has helped the community and environment is just good sense. In their CSR video gallery, TD Bank includes interviews and personal stories about how the bank’s social teams changed lives. The ‘After the Storm’ video features members of a community in Massachusetts after a fierce tornado. They speak about the volunteer experience and how thankful they were for TD Bank’s contributions.
3. Show your product in action
Public company: Tesla
Tesla Motors has an entire video section on their website that brilliantly blends customer experiences with their own product demonstration videos. Our favourite example of this hybrid product demonstration/customer review is their ‘Ready for Take-Off’ teaser video, in which Paul Thomas, a Tesla Vehicle Engineering Manager, takes customers on a drive in order to showcase the new Model S takeoff speed. In the video, Thomas says “there’s two reactions you get from the customer, it’s either a scream, or a grunt, but it’s the moment of silence after they’ve realized just how quickly they’re going”. More true to testimonial form, the customer stories section just next to their product videos provide quotations from happy Tesla customers. But we’re really into this video hybrid method. Here’s another good customer video from the Google Self-Driving Car Project that shows all different people from small kids to senior citizens trying out the product.
4. Display your wide range of industry experience
Public company: Salesforce
Testimonial categorizing and sorting is a pretty ingenious way to #humblebrag about how many different companies you’ve worked with from different industries. Salesforce does a great job of this in their Customer Stories section. A website user can choose to look at testimonials from a wide range of industries, products, and company sizes. Below the sorting function are featured companies from retail, banking, healthcare, and education. This level of sorting won’t work for every public company, as many are much smaller and more industry specific. But testimonial categorizing is still a great technique to think about including. If your company focuses on 2-3 main industries, think of a successful story in each industry and separate each testimonial with phrases like ‘Success in mining’ ‘Success in biotech’, etc.
5. Show how ANYONE can benefit
Company: Codecademy
Okay, so these guys aren’t public, but we loved the layout of their ‘Customer Stories’ section so much that we’re including them anyway. Codecademy, an online interactive coding course, features over 20 different people from around the world as ‘learner stories’. Each story has their own service label that showcases the plethora of needs Codecademy covers. The testimonial page underlines how Codecademy isn’t only supposed to be for people who want a coding career. Stories range from a woman who wanted to study the human mind, to a man who wanted to exercise better, to a teen duo who coded their own calculator for fun. It doesn’t matter the age, dream, or experience level to begin Codecademy, and the testimonials are an easy-to-understand and fun way to display this message.
Marika Hirsch
As Blender’s Content Manager (aka ‘Resident Wordsmith’) Marika enjoys bringing readers the latest and greatest in both digital trends and IR tips. Follow along on Twitter:
