Consumers are bombarded by tons of ads every single day across all digital screens. While ads are still a quick and easy way to get your message in front of the right people, they aren’t the best fit for every business. Large corporates and multinational companies use them to create brand recall. But if you are a run an online business, online store or a digital marketer then social proof marketing tools are just for you. Social proof popup notifications instantly build trust and credibility among your online visitors.
Social proof can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. In a recent survey across locations and generations, it was found that:
- 66% of consumers were more likely to signup or purchase a product that included social proof on their website.
- 82% of consumers were more likely to signup or purchase a product with social proof popup notifications.
- 86% of consumers were more likely to signup or purchase a product with positive star ratings on their homepage.
Social proof leverages psychology to get your target audience to take action by showing them that other people are taking those actions. It’s a powerful marketing technique and it’s easy to do when you use the right tools. In this article, we’re sharing 7 of the best social proof software tools that we’ve found.
But first, let’s talk a little bit about what social proof actually is. Check out this blog post i recently published “Unleashing the Potential: How to Boost Shopify Store Conversion Rates and Skyrocket“
What Is Social Proof?
Social proof is when we copy the actions of others in order to become part of the group. It’s essentially peer pressure. For marketers, this means that consumers are more likely to trust real people (their peers, influencers, celebrities) more than an ad for a product. This makes social proof a marketing tactic well worth investing in.
Social proof is based on the concept of “normative social influence.” This concept asserts that people will conform to be seen as similar to, or accepted by, an influencer or society as a whole. It boils down to using third-party influence to get prospects to commit. Now that we know what social proof is lets quickly dive into the top 7 best social proof marketing tools.
7 Best social proof tools to boost online sales.
1. Proof
Proof’s social proof software tool, Pulse, shows notifications of the real actions taken by real people on your site. websites that use Pulse social proof get an average conversion increase of 10%.
Key Features:
- Hot Streaks: Show off the total number of people who’ve taken action on your site.
- Live Visitor Count: Create scarcity and urgency by showing the number of visitors currently browsing your site or page.
- Recent Activity: Show a live feed of real activity happening on your site right now.
Proof Pricing
Proof pricing starts at $79/month (when billed monthly) for up to 10,000 unique visitors.
While social proof tools will work provided you use them effectivel. Dont miss this blog post. “Boost Sales Instantly: Display Top Ranking Customers with Real-Time Popups on Your Ecommerce Store“
2. WebsitesToolz
WebsitesToolz comes with a variety of upto 24 different widgets and social proof tools. Customize the background, icons, display and triggers as per your own choice. This social proof software tool stands out in terms of the customizations you can have. You can create notifications that look and sound exactly how you want them to, without a developer and without a single line of code.
Create manual and realtime social proof popup notifications. Customise the title and description of the popup notifications in a language of your choice. Show popups when somebody signs up, adds something to a cart or makes a purchase on any website including wordpress, wix, squarespace, shopify or woocommerce store. you can show realtime paypal and stripe transactons as popups on your website. Integrate with over 1000 applications using Zapier or webhooks.
Key Features:
- Product notifications: Create FOMO with number of people who have purchased a product.
- Video Popups: Build credibility and trust by showing youtube video testimonial popups on your website.
- Recent Activity: Show a live feed of manual and realtime activity happening on your site right now.
WebsitesToolz Pricing
WebsitesToolz pricing starts at $9/month ( and $6/month when billed annually) for up to 50,000 notifications impressions per month. This is definitely the best deal in the market considering all the customisations and features loaded.
3. Provely
Provely has an easy to navigate user interface and it takes just a couple of minutes (2 minutes flat, according to their website) to set up. Once set up, it will auto-detect new signups for display immediately.
Provely offers 3 campaign types (live, rotate, and past data) so you can show notifications based on real-time activity, rotate through notifications for a certain period of time, or show notifications for past/historical activity.
Key Features:
- Widget Customization: Choose from a library of different sleek popup templates.
- Color Scheme: Choose to integrate your widget into your brand and website design or use contrast to make it stand out.
- Location: Show lead/sale notifications only from a certain country to help tailor your social proof to your audience.
Provely Pricing
Provely pricing starts at $17/month however there is no clear definition on the number of unique visitors per month or number of notification impressions per month.
We definitely think you will love this blog post. “Unlock Your Ecommerce Sales Potential with Social Proof Popups.”
4. SocialProve
SocialProve is easy to set up and shows visitors simple and sleek notifications for both desktop and mobile users. It integrates with several third party applications for those that might be interested.
Key Features:
- Live Activity Notifications: Show who’s signing up on your site.
- Live Count Notifications: Show visitors how many others are viewing your page.
- Visitor and Activity Combo Notifications: Show how many visitors were on your site or took an action.
SocialProve Pricing
SocialProve pricing starts at $29/month for up to 25,000 notification impressions per month.
If you are just starting out and trying to figure out ecommerce trends, then check out this article. “Exploring Popular Ecommerce business in 2023 – Home and lifestyle trend.”
5. WPfomify
WPfomify, as you can probably guess from its name, is another social proof plugin for WordPress. It comes with several powerful features to boost conversions, build credibility, and increase revenue. It’s easy to set up and offers good support.
Key Features:
- Real-time Customer Activity: Display real-time customer activity data from your eCommerce or LMS website.
- Subscriber Activity: Connect WPfomify with your mailing service and share who is joining your list.
- Granular Targeting: Take complete control of who, when, and where sees the notifications from WPfomify.
WPfomify Pricing
WPfomify pricing starts at $99/year for a single site license but does not state the number of unique visitors or yearly notifications impressions limit.
If you are building or running an existing shopify store, then you must read this blog post “Top 60 Shopify Stores making heads turn.“
6. Notifia
Notifia isn’t strictly a social proof software tool but integrates more than 30 marketing tools, plugins, and popups to help you convert, engage, and retain website visitors.
You can use Notifia to create social proof notifications that use customized text, design, and images along with page targeting, time delay, UTM targeting, and even exit intent.
Key Features:
- Personalization: Add personalization in your messages like { firstName} , { company } and { location } that will automatically personalize to your visitor.
- Multilingual: 181 languages supported, automatically display the right language based on your visitors’ preferred browser settings.
- Seamless Integrations: Seamlessly integrate with 1,500+ apps, use webhooks, or integrate with Notifia’s open API.
Notifia Pricing
Notifia pricing starts at $9/month per widget, but you can get access to all 30+ widgets for $49/month. The pricing structure is very different from the rest and is expensive when billed per widget.
For every ecommerce entrepreneur there is always more to look forward to and seek inspiration. This blog post does just that “40 Best Ecommerce Websites with stunning designs“
7. Thrive Ovation
Thrive Ovation is another social proof WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add testimonials to your wordpress site. It includes a tagging system that lets you easily find the testimonials you want to include on each page. Plus, you can use it to add social media and blog comments to your library of testimonials.
Key Features:
- WordPress Comments as Testimonials: Transform WordPress comments into testimonials with a single click (no cut and paste).
- Social Testimonials: Transform social media comments into ready-to-insert testimonials.
- Collection Automation: Automate your testimonial collection process by creating dedicated testimonial gathering landing pages, blog posts, or opt-in forms.
Thrive Ovation Pricing
Thrive Ovation pricing starts at $30/month billed quarterly for a single site license. However the pricing structure does not include clarity on the number of unique visitors or monthly notifications impressions.
Why Is Social Proof Important for Marketing?
Social proof convinces people that a product or service that gained attention or revenue from other people is something they should also be buying into. This is often the case where people search for a product, find a number of similar items and choose to buy one product based on its high number of positive customer reviews.Brands leverage social proof as a way to increase conversions and grow their customer base exponentially as more people join in and create buzz around products or services.
Marketing Ideas for Social Proof
Perform market research or customer surveys: Brands often use statistics to get their point across to consumers. Customer studies or surveys serve as a way to communicate that their business is preferred by consumers over competitors or that they have features or benefits desired by potential customers.Show consumers you’re an authority in your industry: Use original research and data to show others you are an expert or authority in your field or market. You can also cite facts and links from other authoritative sources to have a similar effect.Use influencer marketing to grow shared audiences: Partner up with an influencer to post on your social media accounts or other marketing channels to boost follower counts and engagement metrics. Choose influencers who have similar audiences to yours to raise the profile of your brand among their community of followers. Launch promos or giveaways: Increase engagement by announcing special deals for followers on social accounts. To generate more buzz around your brand, ask social media users to share or like posts and follow accounts in exchange for a chance to enter a giveaway or claim a deal.
How and when to use social proof on your site
So, now we know that social proof really does work more often than it doesn’t, making it important to most landing pages. the real question is how and when to use social proof:“ Good social proof is useful for all landing pages because people trust other people more than they trust marketers. But there are caveats, of course.Every landing page is essentially an argument or a case you’re making to convince the prospect (e.g., a member of a narrow market segment) to choose to opt-in for your freebie or to buy your product, and so every line of copy on the page—including social proof, like testimonials and data points—needs to support that argument.
This means your testimonials need to counter actual objections, not just praise your product or counter non-existent objections. Your testimonials need to appear at the right part of the argument, not just pop up whenever your designer wants to add a speech bubble or two. They need to be like highly credible witnesses in your case-with photos, full names, professions, and examples of what you’ve done for them-not just marketing copy in quotation marks. We’ve seen that strong testimonials that leverage future pacing—i.e. help the prospect visualize their improved life post-purchase—are best positioned near a call to action. And groups of testimonials are fantastic on long-form sales pages. To our surprise, we have not seen testimonials outperform regular copy in headlines, so we tend not to replace critical copy with social proof; instead, we test and recommend testing social proof as supporting copy.”All social proof is not created equal. It’s not enough to test your landing page with versus without social proof. It’s less about testing whether or not to include social proof and more about testing how and when you use social proof.
Here are a few of the elements of social proof that you should be constantly optimizing: Angie Schottmuller, a well-known growth marketing expert, shared her model for grading the persuasion quality of social proof known as CRAVENS. Is the social proof credible, relevant, attractive (emotionally), visual, enumerated, nearby and specific? The social proof psychology principle says that when people are uncertain, they’ll most likely look to others for behavioral guidance. In order to harness this concept for persuasion, marketers must first identify the uncertainties of their customers and then buffer accordingly with appropriate social proof. Customer words, numbers, and visuals can boost credibility, convey relevance, answer questions, and counter objections. The conversion impact of inspiring confidence is roughly proportionate to the social proof quality and the percent of ‘uncertainty’ friction preventing CTA completion. In other words, if there’s little uncertainty, social proof will have negligible impact. If there’s notable uncertainty and weak social proof, negative conversion impact is possible. If quality social proof buffers notable uncertainty, get ready for some remarkable conversion impact–in some cases up to 400% improvement.
Try your social proof in a popup, near the cta, near the POS, etc. Don’t be afraid to test social proof throughout the funnel, either. Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences has some additional insights based on tests he’s run in the past on landing pages. People don’t seem to care how many Facebook likes you have or which of their friends liked you. Or, they do care and leave your landing page to be social. Leave social network badges off of landing pages. Save them for the thank you page. For catalog ecommerce sites, product pages and catalog pages are often landing pages. Ratings and reviews don’t get tested often. They are either implemented or not. If you have them, display the stars and review counts near product images to increase buying confidence. Display the metrics for your product in a positive light. ‘3,413 customers can’t be wrong…’ As Joel says, there are no absolutes in CRO. All of the experts in the world can’t tell you, with absolute certainty, which type of social proof to use for your baseline. Chris of WebsitesToolz agrees that you have to test the different types of social proof to figure out what works for your specific landing page audience and goal.
Websitestoolz has done a lot of A/B testing on various social proof tactics on landing pages. On most consumer-facing landing pages, social proof lifts conversion rates in our tests. (Though sometimes it loses, too.) There are many ways to present social proof and not all work well. Testimonials are overrated, and sometimes social media counts can lift credibility, but only over a critical mass of followers, for example. Also, the numbers themselves play a role. The order of the digits in follower and customer counts is surprisingly influential. Most importantly, the response rate to social proof tells us something about the target audience and their persuasional triggers. We’ve seen that some target audiences who are motivated by ‘social inclusion’ triggers respond well. We then show our clients how to build on those insights to influence their other marketing activities. However, if you’re looking for some test fodder or if you’re unable to test, we conducted a little study to see if we could identify the factors that make social proof effective. Here’s what we found…All in all, that means…So, what if you’re just starting out and you don’t have social proof yet? A classic “the chicken or the egg” situation.
Anand founder of Websitestoolz, says he gets this question all the time. Here’s what he suggests…One of the most common questions I get is what to do when you don’t have any testimonials. For instance, if you are launching a product that nobody’s used, an eBook that nobody’s read or a service that nobody’s paid for, what do you do to add social proof to your landing pages? There are four main ways that I suggest going about it
.1. First, be okay with not having any. It’s not the end of the world. Yes, you might get a higher conversion rate with testimonials, but please never fake them. People can smell BS a mile away, so just be patient, or do one of the next three things.
2. Give your product or service away for free. Ideally to influencers in your community or industry. Then ask them for feedback.
3. Instead of having someone talk about your product or service, find a quote from an influencer that backs up the bigger picture concept.
For instance, on the International CRO Day landing page, in the absence of a testimonial, I put a quote from Rand Fishkin saying that conversion rate optimization is really important. He wasn’t talking about the event, but he did say that the subject matter of the event was important, which by proxy makes the event more important.
4. Ask bloggers or reporters to review your product or service.