We recently covered the types of social proof you can add to your website’s landing pages. But that’s just the beginning, because there’s more to social proof marketing. In this article, we take a deeper look at social proof marketing for two major eCommerce stores: Shopify and WordPress.
Social proof is really powerful. It is a tool that instantly builds customer trust. When used correctly, social proof can persuade your buyers to take action.
The term social proof was coined by Dr. Robert Cialdini, who observed the human tendency to rely on other people’s opinions and actions in forming their own worldviews and decisions.
How do ecommerce storefronts on Shopify use social proof?
Shopify uses social proof to encourage more customers to check out successfully. First, customers are lured to the product shop via promoted Facebook posts. Once customers reach the store, Shopify pulls real-time emotional data from other customers and adds relevant information like their location to help them complete the purchase. For example, you may see that person X completed the purchase Z minutes ago at location X (near your location). This allows new customers to build on the positive experiences of other customers. It creates trust in the offer and increases offer conversion rates.
You can add social proof to your Shopify storefront using the following apps:
Nudgify
Nudgify is a free app that seamlessly adds scarcity, urgency, social proof, and other trust-building measures to your store. Create urgency by showing that the offer ends in a specific time. Take advantage of shortages by displaying the number of items still in stock. Show how many people viewed the product and/or made the purchase. Nudgify allows you to 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 provides social proof and urgency. In terms of usage, some people feel that it is inferior to the popular Nudgify app that we just covered.
WordPress social proof plugins
Are you stuck with WordPress? Well, the good news is that it happens to be one of the most powerful development platforms in the world, and for all the right reasons. The kind of versatility you can achieve in WordPress thanks to hundreds, if not thousands, of carefully designed plugins and tools is unheard of on any other development platform we’ve seen to date.
And if you run a Woocommerce-based 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 eCommerce store.
In the coming days, we will think about publishing a dedicated post on the free and paid WordPress social proof plugins you need to consider in 2020. However, in this post we will cover some popular options.
Proof factor
Proof Factor is a lightweight WordPress plugin that shows recently completed purchases and real-time traffic on your WooCommerce store. It comes in free and paid versions.
With page-level targeting, you can choose to show or hide notifications on specific pages on your site. Customize the style, text and timing of notifications.
beekeeping
Beeketing offers a range of marketing and sales apps for popular eCommerce stores such as Shopify, WooCommerce and Weebly. We would like to cover Beeketing’s Live Sales Notification plugin for WooCommerce storefronts. The plugin uses your store’s sales data to display live sales feeds of real orders. To generate excitement about a new product, you can improve these sales notifications. Other options include changing the color 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.
Reach First is a premium digital marketing company based in Edmonton, Alberta. We specialize in full eCommerce and WordPress development and support. We also help customers migrate from other platforms to WordPress. Other services we offer to our clients from all parts of Canada include SEO, SMO, SMM and PPC advertising. Contact us today for a free online marketing audit of your business.