Too Many Testimonials?

I think too many testimonials are not a good thing, it tends to dilute the message, and as you say it just bores the reader imo and could even appear desperate.

All you need are a few well known brands or quality testimonials and that should do the job.

I suppose it also depends on the medium being used (for example a good website design could enhance testimonials and use them in a clever way).

Your best bet - if you have tonnes - would be to select some of the best ones to show off then put a small link to another page with "all" your testimonials on.

Solves the problem.

Is there a problem with too many testimonials on a sales page? YES - If you had 1million of them, how would your customer find the BUY NOW button in the middle of all that information?



Your thinking seems to be on-point, trust yourself pal - your just as smart as anybody else out there.

Peace,
Gh0zt

Same principle applies here as to the question of long vs. short copy.
Copy can never be too long just too boring.

You can NEVER have too many good testimonials. Have books of them
if possible so that when you place them on the table they make a THUD!

Having too many many testimonials is like having too much money.

-Ray Edwards

Split test it but in general people know everyone is lying and deceiving them so they tend to think that to many is a scam, a few is more optimal. Test it and you will know.

Ever see Michel Fortin's "PROOF!" promo for John Reese's Traffic Secrets? It's 199 pages and about 90% of it is testimonials...

If I recall, Traffic Secrets was the first IM launch to do $1m in a single day, too.

So if that's any indicator, you can't have too many...

Colm

Depends on how much of a barrier to buying your product has. If it's cheap, rule of thumb says you need fewer testimonials. But if it's expensive, the buyer will want to know they're not getting scammed.

Bob Bly says you can never have too many testimonials on your website, but he's talking about having a dedicated testimonial page. His actual sales pages have several testimonials sometimes, but only enough to close the sale. Are you talking about a sales letter/landing page, or a website, or...? It all depends on the context, so there's not really a single right answer to this "general" question.

I'm with Ray.

Have as many as you can!! And, be sure they explain specific results your clients got out of using your product/service. You don't want them just to say... "StarkContrast was great!" or "I was so happy with the results StarkContrast got me."

Get specific!

I'm pretty sure I read the other day in Joe Vitale's "Hypnotic Writing" that you shouldn't list all your testimonials one after the other. Instead he recommended spreading them out on your sales page.

I think with any marketing piece there are many variables. Presentation is a part of it. How the testimonials are displayed.

I only have a few comments on number of testimonials which I'll touch on later. In general though the testimonials should contain the same elements as good copy...benefits, credibility, relevance, specificity, believability.

Whenever possible I test the testimonials and byand-large tests where testimonials have contained the elements above have positively impacted performance.

As for number of testimonials. You frequently see magalog, bookalog, tabalog formats from major mailers in nutra and financial where roughly 1/3 of the promotion are testimonials in one form or another. These are big, costly mailings and those formulas have been working well for a long time.

I have tested a long page with a number of testimonials against a control in for a nutra client. After running around $50k in paid media to the test, the long page with the testimonials outperformed the long running control significantly.