They often think a merchant cares more about making a sale than about providing a good shopping experience.

How can they be so sure that the product or the service they pay for will meet their expectations?

This is where testimonials come in. As a merchant, you need your customers to feel confident when doing business with you. The presence of effective testimonials will inspire trust and almost immediately boost your sales.

Here's Why Testimonials Work

· Testimonials Stand Out

· Testimonials Foster Trust

· Testimonials Eliminate Customer Fears

Smart Ways to Collect Testimonials

How do you get customers to give you great testimonials? Here are some creative ideas that make collecting testimonials easy and efficient.

1. Give complimentary samples to customers in exchange for feedback.

Any feedback you receive, whether positive or negative, is valuable. Naturally, you want it to be positive so that you can use it for your marketing purposes, but even negative feedback will help you to improve your product.

A powerful testimonial is surely worth the cost of a sample of your product.

2. Seek feedback from customers who purchased your product or service.

We do this automatically by placing every customer in an autoresponder series designed for this purpose. They first receive an email with information about their order and then a few weeks later (after the product has arrived) they receive another email asking them for feedback.

About half the emails we get as feedback include quotes or comments that we can use as testimonials.

3. Request permission to reprint positive comments found online, such as in discussion forums, blogs, or ezine product reviews.

Automating the Gathering Process and Advanced Tactics

Automation will save you countless hours and allow you to gather testimonials without having to lift a finger.

This is a killer tactic we have used to generate hundreds of testimonials for our product. It worked so well it created a backlog of over 800 testimonials we have yet to add to our site.

Here's How it Works.

One of the easiest ways we have found to gather testimonials is to add an email requesting feedback to our autoresponder series.

New customers as well as those who have just tried a free sample of our product receive this email.

Remember - don't shy away from asking for testimonials from non-customers who have only tried your free sample. Seriously. Ask them what they think of the sample.

Add these testimonials to your sample or demo page and you'll find they can significantly boost signups.

We offer support if there was, and we'd appreciate feedback.

Note: we don't blatantly ask for a testimonial. We request "feedback."

By doing so, we not only get testimonials from happy users, but also receive valuable negative feedback that allows us to improve the program.

This technique gets a very high response rate - around 5% of customers receiving the email will respond with feedback or testimonials.

A copy of the email we use is shown below. Feel free to use this as a template for your own purposes.

Sample Email

Hi {Customer Name},

We hope you enjoyed the {Product Name} you purchased from us last month.

As promised, here's the survey we said we were going to send you. We'd like to hear your thoughts on the course.

Could you kindly answer the questions below?

Your feedback is truly invaluable not only to us, but to many other people who are devoted to lifelong learning.

We'd love to hear your opinions on the following:

1. What did you feel was the main benefit you gained from the home study course?

2. What part of the course did you enjoy most and why?

3. What part did you enjoy least and why?

4. Have you had any interesting coincidences or events happen in your life since you started applying Silva techniques?

5. Would you be able to provide us with a quote or story that we can share with other readers about your experiences with the program? (We can keep your identity confidential at your request.)

Please send your reply to: info@yourname.com

Thanks for your commitment to lifelong learning and for sharing your feedback with us.

We truly appreciate it!

Sincerely,