We recently covered the types of social proof you can add to your website’s landing pages. But this is only the beginning, and there’s more to social proof marketing than that. In this article, we take a deeper look at social proof marketing for two major e-commerce stores: Shopify and WordPress.
Social proof is really powerful. It’s a tool that instantly builds customer trust. If used properly, social proof can influence your buyers into taking action.
The term social proof was popularized by Dr. Robert Cialdini who observed the human tendency to rely on other people’s opinions and actions for forming their own worldviews and decisions.
How do E-commerce Storefronts on Shopify use Social Proof?
Shopify uses social proof to get more customers to successfully checkout. First, customers are lured to the product store via promoted Facebook posts. Once the customers reach the store, Shopify pulls up emotional data of other customers in realtime and adds relevant information like their location to assist them in completing the purchase. For instance, you may be shown that person X completed the purchase from location X (near your location) Z minutes ago. This allows new customers to relate to the positive experiences of other customers. It builds trust in the offer and increases the offer’s conversion rates.
The following apps allow you to add social proof to your Shopify storefront:
Nudgify
Nudgify is a free app that seamlessly adds scarcity, urgency, social proof and other trust-building measures to your storefront. Create urgency by showing that the offer ends in so and so time. Use scarcity by showing the number of items left in stock. Showcase how many people viewed the product and/or made the purchase. Nudgify lets you add these elements to any page of your Shopify store, including home, product, cart, confirmation and other pages.
Fera
Fera is a paid app for adding social proof to a Shopify store. It offers social proof and urgency. In terms of use, some people feel that it is inferior to the popular Nudgify app we’ve just covered.
WordPress Social Proof Plugins
Stuck with WordPress? Well, the good news is that it just happens to be one of the world’s most powerful development platforms and for the right reasons. The kind of versatility you can achieve thanks to hundreds if not thousands of carefully developed plugins and tools on WordPress is not found on any other development platform we’ve seen so far.
And if you’re running a Woocommerce-powered store, the good news is that there are a number of free and premium plugins and tools you can use to add social proof to your blog or e-commerce store.
In the coming days, we will consider publishing a dedicated post on the free and paid WordPress plugins for social proof you must consider in 2020. But we will cover a few popular options in this post.
Proof Factor
Proof Factor is a lightweight WordPress plugin that displays recently completed purchases and real-time visitor count on your WooCommerce store. It comes in free and paid versions.
With page-level targeting, you can choose whether to display or hide the notifications on specific pages of your website. Customize the style, body and time of notifications.
Beeketing
Beeketing offers a number of marketing and sales apps for popular e-commerce stores like Shopify, WooCommerce and Weebly. We would like to cover Beeketing’s Live Sales Notification plugin for WooCommerce storefronts. The plugin uses the sales data of your store to show live sales feed of real orders. To create buzz around a new product, you can enhance these sales notifications. Other options include altering the colour elements of notifications to match the look and feel of your storefront. It comes in free and paid versions.
Other WordPress plugin alternatives for social proof include WPfomify and ProveSource.
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