Pat Flynn
I love doing business online. There are so many advantages that we have over other kinds of businesses, such as being able to automate almost everything, and having our “front doors” open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to the entire world. It’s truly an amazing thing, and if you’re doing business online, you’re giving yourself a great chance to succeed. Another advantage we have, is something called continuation.
Continuation is the ability to keep customers or readers after the first point of sale or action has occurred. For example, if you had a newsletter on your website, that’s one way you can continue to connect with people after they have subscribed. Another example is if you sold a product to someone, you could easily contact them again to provide them new information or sell them something else.
Just Ask
While I was taking a gander at my October Passive Income Report, I was thinking about how my 300+ ebook customers were doing with their new purchase. Were they satisfied? Did they love it? Did it actually help them? I honestly didn’t know, but I really wanted to find out. So, I just asked them!
With the services I use to automate everything for me, I am able to send out a newsletter style email to each one of my buyers at my disposal. That’s continuation. I sent a newsletter to each of my buyers asking them what their opinions were about their my book. I sent it and went out for lunch. When I got back an hour later, I was amazed to see more than 10 responses waiting for me in my mailbox.
I was a little scared, but after reading each one, I’m delighted to say that they were all really positive responses. Here is my favorite:
“As you probably know, I purchased the walkthrough Friday night. Since then, I printed and read the entire publication and it is exactly what I was looking for. I previously printed the credit summaries from your website but the way your walk through summarizes them is more concise and more to the point. I also like the way you emphasize key points that we should pay extra attention to in preparation for the exam…So to finally answer your email, the walk through seems great. I will make it my bible for the next 5 weeks. Bottom line—it’s the best 25 bucks I spent in a long time. Thanks for everything. I will definitely keep you apprised of my progress and results.”
Taking Advantage
It always makes me happy to read such things about the work I’ve done. But do you know who else likes to read things like this? Future customers.
That’s right, potential buyers LOVE to read testimonials. If you are selling something online, and you don’t have testimonials for it, get some and place them all over your landing page. Now.
To give you an example, I took this testimonial and a few others and sprinkled them throughout my landing page. After a week of testing, I’ve noticed a 5% jump in sales in just the first week. 5% may not seem like a lot, but after a quick calculation, that’s an extra ~$400 a month. It only took me about 10 minutes to send out that email and another 5 to put the testimonials on my landing page. 15 minutes for 400 bucks…sweet.
So the moral of the story is: testimonials will help you sell.
About Testimonials
I know it can be really tempting to make up your own testimonials, but really—you shouldn’t. Most people can tell when a testimonial is fake or real, so do yourself a favor, and find some real ones.
Here are some helpful tips on how to get some good, legitimate testimonials on your website:
- Give away a few of your products to some of your trusted colleagues in exchange for a testimonial.
- Send out a newsletter or email, like I did, asking for their opinions on your product. When asking for their opinion, you can also include some or all of the following statements:
- What are your initial thoughts about [your product]?
- Please tell me what you like about [your product], and what you dislike about it.
- Would you recommend [your product] to anyone else to help them [goal or solution]?
- What would you suggest to improve [your product]? (This isn’t for your testimonial, this is just for your information so you can make your product better.)
- Make sure you file all of your testimonials into a dedicated folder. You may not need to use all of them at once, but if you ever wanted to rotate them to give your landing page some new spice, or maybe test different ones, having a central location where they are all located can really help.
Thee are just a few tips and suggestions based on my own experience. I’ve also read a lot of great tips on Copyblogger.com about testimonials too. You should definitely read these to help you even more if you’re serious about getting some good testimonials:
- 5 Tips for Knockout Testimonials
- Testimonials and Teenagers Whizzing in the Bushes: The Power of Social Proof
- 10 Quick and Simple Ways to Power Up Your Customer Testimonials
If you sell anything, or even if you only own a blog—try and get a testimonial or two to help boost your sales and or readership. Good luck!
