WP Testimonial Plus: An Elegant WordPress Testimonial Plugin

When the herd goes south, you are likely to head just that way.

It’s human nature.

It’s called social proof.

What previous customers have to say about your brand, services, or products is one of those ways to reduce friction in a typical sales cycle.

It’s how customers can verify the claims you make. In a way, social proof is at the core of every brand.

Consider this: more than 63% of customers admit that they are more likely to buy a product or service when reviews and ratings tag along with the product.

At least 72% of millennial opinion-seekers between the age of 25-34 look to social media contacts for recommendations when purchasing goods and services, according to Mintel.

Clearly, customers do their homework.

Gregory Ciotti of HelpScout writes on Kissmetrics about understanding the impact of social proof on your business.

He writes about how people are influenced by others due to what is called as Implicit Egotism — the fact that most people subconsciously like things that resemble them in some way.

Just how do visitors to your website know that the service or product you sell relates to them? It’s when they look at others similar to them buying and then raving about your products in the form of testimonials.

The more authentic and real testimonials (the key word here is “authentic and real”), the more authority and social proof you build up.

Assuming you’ve been in business for a while and you do have happy customers, what is the best way to showcase all those testimonials on your WordPress site?

Say hello to WP Testimonial Plus – an elegant WordPress testimonial plugin that makes the job of collecting and displaying testimonials relatively easier.

Knowing The Why: You need Social proof

Before you even consider using the WordPress Testimonials Plus plugin, you should get this. As Graham Charlton of econsultancy puts it:

• According to Reevoo stats, if a product has 50 or more reviews then there can be an increase of 4.6% in conversion rates.
• Site visitors who interact with both reviews and customer questions and answers are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting and spend 11% more than visitors who don’t interact with UGC.
• Consumer reviews are significantly more trusted (nearly 12 times more) than descriptions that come from manufacturers, according to a survey of US internet users by online video review site EXPO.

According to Reevoo, reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.

Your customers are complete strangers. When they come visiting, they don’t know who you are.

Almost always, they don’t have much information to go with to make that purchase decision.

To make the right decision, they need information, trust, and social proof.

Using a WordPress testimonial plugin, you aim to bridge that trust plus social proof gap by simply showcasing a few testimonials of your previous users, customers, or clients.

Use Visuals

There’s a reason why people have already spent generations of television viewing, thumbing through magazines, and log into their social media profiles every day. People love consuming visuals. People love pictures. They can relate to photos (it’s another thing that Google loves images too).

Displaying your customer testimonials with pictures is a great way to build instant trust and authenticity while putting up testimonials.

When you use the WordPress Testimonials plugin, be sure to attach User Images to your Testimonials to make it authentic.

It just makes your testimonials that much more real, believable, and relatable.

Show Off as Many Testimonials As You Can

Just by showing testimonials, you can increase conversions on your pages by about 34%, like WikiJobs realized.

By running a simple experiment (with and without those testimonials on their landing pages), WikiJobs saw an instant lift just because of the presence of a few testimonials.

But you can do even better.

If you have multiple testimonials, you can choose to display as slides or columns (of your choice) as Snip.ly does it:

With the WP Testimonial Plus plugin, it’s easy to place your testimonials in any layout you want your testimonials to show up in, as shown above.

You can also choose to have testimonials show up in sidebars while opting to enable or disable scrolling through testimonials.

See those Stars?

Do you happen to know why almost all the big brands (and even small ones) show testimonials on their websites?

According to Nielsen, it’s because more than 92% of people will trust a recommendation from peers.

About 70% people will also trust recommendations from someone they don’t even know, as long as the recommendation is from someone real.

That’s why it makes sense to get your products and services rated and then give starts to testimonials. The higher the star rating, from 1 to 5, the better it is.

Apart from grabbing testimonials from your customers, put a system in place to get the ratings.

Review stars immediately give a sense of confidence to customers and review stars attract instant attention.

The WordPress Testimonials Plugin allows you to showcase your testimonials with the option to show user images, customer titles or designations, stars, and text.

Seek & display authentic testimonials

Almost anyone can write up a couple of lines posing as a testimonial.

These are fake testimonials and these are worse than having no testimonials to show at all.

Be sure to pick up authentic testimonials from real customers. The way you can identify real testimonials is by showing:

• Actual pictures of your customers
• Testimonials in your customers’ own language, rhetoric, or style.
• Testimonials with complete information such as website URLs, Twitter handles or links to other social profiles.

A name, a piece of text, and a title just won’t do anymore. If these people are real, there has to be some kind of information about them that other customers can check or verify.

Show Testimonials where you should

The WordPress testimonial plus plugin is built to be baked into your WordPress website.

While it works exactly as you’d expect it to, the versatile WordPress testimonial plugin allows you to deploy slider displays for your testimonials (if that’s how you want it).

Easily integrate the testimonial plugin for your WordPress and choose to display testimonials where you should, as follows:

• On Product pages
• Product copy pages or product descriptions
• Product category pages
• Check out pages
• “Shopping cart” pages such as “My Cart”.

The WordPress Testimonials Plus Plugin is fully-responsive, out of the box, and also gives you many options to customize the look and feel to match your website.

Plus, you also get auto-generated shortcodes using which you can place testimonials practically on any page or post.

Build a separate testimonials page

While displaying testimonials by using the WordPress Testimonials plugin on various pages like product pages and checkout pages makes complete sense, don’t just stop at that.

Build a dedicated page full of testimonials (displayed together in columns and rows) to give you a little more juice for your marketing efforts.

For instance, a dedicated testimonials page on your WordPress site can be used for:

• Add some more content to your dedicated testimonials page to give it more weight.
• Make your testimonial page carry some SEO juice, all by itself.
• A dedicated testimonial page allows others to naturally link to you (as against trying to link to a single product page).
• You can use the separate page (URL) as a site link when you decide to go with PPC advertising. This gives your ad more space as against your competition.

Conclusion

WP Testimonial Plus is an amazing plugin which can be used to display testimonials on any section of a page or post. You can actually construct an entire page specifically for testimonials.

If you have raving reviews, a great database of customers, and quite some traction with the market, you should show off.

Testimonials, when used right, are your bridge to fame.

Have you used the WordPress Testimonials Plus plugin yet?