How many case studies should you have on your website?

Testimonials are easy to fake, especially if they are not attributed to a named person from a named business.

Case studies are also easy to fake but they generally refer to a business, sometimes a named person, and they wouldn’t be allowed to stay online for long if that business picked up that they were fake case studies.

Case studies also provide the opportunity to go into more detail about the product/service provided, which will interest people more than a list of testimonials.

While there’s nothing wrong with having a page of testimonials within a website, and to include those within specific product/service pages, they will never be as powerful as detailed case studies.

The answer to this is simple:  the more you’ve got, the more positive the impact.

The best option on your product/service page is to have 6-9 case study excerpts (typically displayed three across the page and three rows deep), and below those have a button that says:

See more case studies (which then loads the additional case study excerpts into the page).

Even better than that would be a button that has a number in it that can create more reason to click, with a call to action, such as:

See 10+ more case studies.

Three case studies would be the minimum – any less than that and it will create an impression that you haven’t performed well at that product or service.

Three is OK.

3-6 is better.

6-9 is even better.

A ‘See X+ more case studies’ button will get even more people interested because they will look at that number (e.g. 12) and even without clicking on the button they’ll think:

“Wow – they’ve got another 12 case studies – they must be good!”

There are a few steps to this, best undertaken over a period of time …

1. List all your products/services down the left-hand column of a spreadsheet, and from column B to K insert Client 1, Client 2, all the way up to Client 10.  Click here to download the Excel spreadsheet template that you can use.
2. Go through your historic orders (your invoicing system/CRM should help here) and enter the names of customers alongside each product/service, aiming to get at least 6 for each product/service.  It doesn’t matter if they are no longer customers – you provided a service or product to them in the past.
3. You should now have a spreadsheet that shows where you are strongest and weakest in terms of customers that can be linked to each product/service that you offer.
4. Taking just one product/service and customer, create a rough draft of how you helped them, structuring that draft in this way:
   1. What industry they work within.
   2. The positive outcome your solution brought to the client.  You start with the outcome because that’s what your prospect customer is most interested in (before they then
   3. How you worked with their challenge to get to the point of a client where you matched or exceeded their expectations.
   4. (if available) a testimonial from the customer, ideally including their name and job title.
   5. Excerpt of the case study (this will be the brief summary that people see on the product/service page, and that gives them enough reason to click through to the full case study).
5. Share that rough draft with staff internally and resources externally, asking for feedback about how well it creates trust in the eyes of a potential customer who works within that industry.
6. Refine the draft if necessary.
7. Create drafts for just one customer from each product/service type you have listed.
8. Share those again in the same way, to ensure that you are on the right path to fully impressing your website visitors.
9. Build in a process of creating at least one case study per day until you have at least six for each product/service that you want to actively promote within your website.

You may be thinking at this stage: “but surely we need to get permission from our customers before we create these case studies?”.

That may be the case, but often it’s not.

Unless you have strict rules that you have to work within (e.g. agreements with your customers), then what’s to stop you creating case studies from your perspective of how you impressed those customers?   This is especially true for those that are no longer customers (you’ve worked for them in the past).

Here’s an experiment very much worth running:

1. Create your case studies and make them live on your website.
2. See how long it takes for one of your customers to comment about it.

You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised that few of your customers are actively looking for what people are saying about them and even if they are, those that object to it would be relatively low (and you can always blame it on someone else before removing their case study if they really don’t want it live).

What’s worse? …

1. Having no/very few case studies to impress your website visitors.
2. Having loads of case studies and maybe having to remove one or two over time, perhaps annoying a customer in rare cases.

It’s worth repeating this important point: if you don’t have case studies, then you will get much fewer enquiries from your website visitors.

Obviously, the best way to see how impactful your case studies is by you gaining more enquiries and sales.

From a statistics viewpoint, you can use software to track how many of your website visitors get to your case studies from your product/service pages. 

Here’s a video example of how that can be done by using the software I recommend (initially, via a 30 day free trial), showing how 26% of a specific type of website page visitors clicked through to case studies related to the topic they were interested in:

If you have an enquiries logging process within your business then you will be able to link enquiries gained back to those website visitors.  If using the software (let me know if interested in trialling it free for a month) it will be very easy to see evidence that your case studies played an important role in making that happen.

That in itself will give you plenty of incentive to create even more case studies so that people have even more reasons to make contact with you about the product/service that they’re interested in.