How a Customer Testimonial Cut Our Sales in Half

You 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.

1. The keyword group for this landing page was for “Alex Mandossian” and the testimonial is not perfectly targeted
2. 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.