How to Use Testimonials in Your Sales Copy
If you want instant credibility you will need to show prospective buyers that your product indeed delivers what it promises. The best way to do this is by asking your customers to offer a small testimonial in exchange for a discount or special offer. You don’t give them the offer in exchange for a “good” word, rather you are giving them a discount or offer in order to make it worth their time to give you the feedback you’re requesting.
The best way to use feedback in your sales copy is to interject it when you feel that your readers may start to become bored by the sales letter. Inserting “pull quotes” will draw attention to the testimonial and is known as a standard way of spicing up otherwise dull copy.
When someone reads your sales copy online they may have hundreds of questions they would like to ask and you can more than likely stave off some of those roadblocks by answering the question, “how do they treat customers?” in advance.
You will want to completely avoid staged or fictional testimonials and at the same time you will want to make sure that all of the customers whose testimonials you do post are posted only with the writer’s consent. If you fake this type of information then you are immediately exposing yourself as a marketer with very low ethics and therefore no integrity. If you post information without permission then you may be exposing trade secret information and not even know it. That type of activity will leave a negative impact on all involved.
In summary, it is very helpful to have testimonials on your site and built into your sales copy, but if you can’t come by the information honestly then you are better off to not have any testimonials at all.
