How a Customer Testimonial Cut Our Sales in Half
January 8th, 2007 by Mike Reining Read more about Conversion Rate, Copywriting, Landing Page OptimizationYou would think that a glowing customer testimonials would help to boost the conversion rate of your site? Think again!
We just added a powerful customer testimonial to one of our landing pages and as a result we saw the sign-up rate of our page nosedive.
Here is the landing page with the testimonial:
The customer testimonial reads:
The MindValley Way should be required reading for everyone that is thinking about growing or building their small ecommerce business.” James Fox
Surprisingly, the identical landing page without this testimonial converted way better!
Here is the landing page without the testimonial:
The detailed test results for this test are:
What did we learn from this?
- Not all customer testimonials are created equal
- Test customer testimonials and do not assume that they will help your site convert better
Why do you think that the landing page with the testimonial did so much worse?
Here is two potential explanations that I came up with.
- The keyword group for this landing page was for “Alex Mandossian” and the testimonial is not perfectly targeted
- The testimonial is too high up in the copy and you first have to engage the reader and suck them into the copy
Either way, we were definitely surprised by this finding. My guess was that the testimonial should have helped, not hurt the conversion rate of this landing page. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
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About the Author
Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype.
Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.
Check out other posts by Mike Reining
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Vishen Lakhiani
The only words I saw, when I looked at the testimonial the first time were ‘required reading’. That promptly gave me a bad reaction.
I read it a second time after reading the rest of the page and then I thought ‘marketing hype’ ‘not a chance am I getting scammed with this.’
didn’t sound like a real person talking, sounded like someone you paid to say things to make me want the product.
I’d guess it also has something to do with the traffic.
That’s not really enough, for me, to call it a reliable test and did the clicks for both tests come from the same source, same etc, etc ?
Not where I’d place the testimonial either, it should enhance or give social proof to the copy around it and, to me, it’s out of place and off topic.
Maybe if it were for the actual product, which in this case, is the ecourse, not the ‘Way”.
Just my 2 cents.
We can call the above test reliable because all of the traffic to the two landing pages come from the same source and the results are statistically valid.
We run a landing page optimization software from http://www.clickmuse.com to create all of our landing pages and split tests.
The link to this landing page is here:
http://www.mindvalleylabs.com/index_lpo.php?prid=38
In regards of the placement of the testimonial I agree with you that there are probably lots of better places to put it and we are now testing those to see what will happen.
[…] Read the full story: How a Customer Testimonial Cut Our Sales in Half […]
[…] Do you use Customer Testimonials? January 10th, 2007 — ventureskills While catching up on some reading due to a power-cut at Venture HQ, I came across this post from Mind Valley labs on their recent marketing campaign they discovered that having a very impressive testimonial on their site actually hurt their conversion rates. They offered a few reasons but I would like to add a couple more. […]
[…] I have a Google Alert setup to alert me whenever there is news on the net about landing pages. Today I saw the headline “How a Customer Testimonial Cut Our Sales in Half” which is an interesting title considering common knowledge is that a customer testimonial increases landing page conversion rate. I read through their blog entry which concluded that their landing page with a testimonial converted at only 9.35% where the identical page without a testimonial converted at 22.69%. If you read their blog there is some missing information and the whole test wasnt really that scientific. […]
[…] place your customers testimonials on your website (test which most visible ones improve conversions the most, though). […]
My immediate thought was the statement “required reading.” That phrase might do fine, but required reading at the top of the page, before I even know what I’m supposed to read, completely turned me off. I have enough required reading; I’m looking for something I will want to read that will help me achieve my goals. Required reading might even work if there were a reason why. “should be required reading because it will help you…” might work better.
I also have the same impression when I first read the testimonial box..I felt like it was some sort of a scam..that they just had the person paid to say positive feedbacks for their company…I guess this study shows that Netizens are already smart enough and are not easily influenced by other people’s view.
[…] A Testimonial Can Lower Subscribe Rates It may be hard to believe that adding a glowing testimonial could lower your subscribe rate on your opt-in list. That’s just what happened to Mind Valley Labs when they added a positive customer testimonial to a squeeze page they where testing. The results without the testimonial were twice as good as with it included. This could be a result of improperly positioning the testimonial on the squeeze page, or not having a properly targeted testimonial. Check out this example of a testimonial that actually lowered their opt-in rate: How a Customer Testimonial Cut Our Sales in Half __________________ P.S. Make sure you download your 117 free gifts, worth $ thousands of dollars and improve your life. Here is the link: Work at Home Gifts (Take a look at the site. It’s free.) […]
I may be way off here, but the “small” is what stood out to me. I wonder if it turned off people who in their minds were not “small”?
Hmm, I saw “small ecommerce business” and wondered if that was it (if the visitor didn’t fit that definition it put them off).
Interesting post though.
I thought it was too generic. I agree that it’s too high up in the copy. I want to know specifics quicker. I couldn’t figure out what you did, why I would care what this guy said or what his comment meant specifically.
In a world where you only have a few seconds to capture someone, the blurb just made it that much longer before I found out what I wanted to know about your business.
I also didn’t like the “all initial caps” sentence before that. It’s just a regular sentence. Why capitalize everything?
Testimonials are great triggers for a more successful sales and marketing movements. But like other tools, they must be use properly. I beleive that an strategic planning is very important to do before we act. It’s also great to hear from you that you monitor the trends and statistics of your performance. And you share it to us for our realization. Thanks for sharing.