Hearing the term social proof for the first time and wondering what it is? Social proof is nothing but a great marketing strategy to integrate into your WordPress site. It is a marketing technique that you can use to ease the minds of potential customers by showing them that others are using and enjoying your products and services. When a prospective customer lands on your website, they have no idea whether your product is worth their money and time. In order to convince them to give your product a try, you need to build social proof around your business.
If you want to use social proof on your WordPress site, you need a social proof plugin. That’s what we’re looking at in this post.
What is Social Proof?
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people count on the actions of others to decide what is right and wrong because they see those actions as widely popular and accepted. It is an incredibly powerful tool as consumers want proof from others like them, not the brands trying to get their money. It believes that people perceive group behaviour as appropriate behaviour.
Marketers have long been using this principle as a strategy to gain the trust of new consumers. Some of the most popular social proof examples in use are testimonials, customer reviews, celebrity brand endorsements, certifications, and various stats. With that said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress social proof plugins you can use to grow your sales and revenue.
1. WPfomify
WPfomify is a well-developed social proof plugin with a user-friendly interface, multiple location types, several integrations, and helpful targeting rules. It’s easy to set up and includes many integrations that let it work with the best WordPress plugins and email marketing services. You can display sales notifications, showcase recent user activity, highlight how many people are browsing your site, and display recent reviews.
WPfomify lets you show off real-time activity, subscriber activity, and client reviews. It’s easy to customize to match your site’s branding and completely responsive. It also hooks up with tons of other services, including a catch-all Zapier integration. And to set everything up, you get a convenient notification builder interface.
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2. NotificationX
NotificationX is a freemium WordPress social proof plugin that lets you display social proof notifications for a ton of different actions such as sales, email signups, WordPress download counts, and more. It has 6 different notification types including sales alerts, blog comments, WordPress reviews, WordPress download counts, email subscriptions, and can be used as a notification bar. You also get integrations with a number of popular plugins and tools, including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and a couple of LMS plugins.
The interface is also quite user-friendly, giving you an easy-to-use setup wizard and notification builder tool to get started. You can also create your own promotional notification bar. The pro version of the plugin adds a number of new integrations such as LearnDash, Google analytics, Envato etc and also several other notification types.
3. TrustPulse
TrustPulse is the most social proof notifications plugin available on the market. It helps to boost trust, conversions, and sales by displaying attractive social proof notifications on your website. The plugin tracks user activities in real-time and displays it with their location on the screen to foster trust. It also tracks and highlights real purchases, signups, user activity, and more.
With its advanced rules and timing control, you can display social proof notifications to the desired audience at the right time. You can select exactly where and when to display notifications to convert more users into customers. TrustPulse works well on all popular website platforms, including WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Drupal, and more. You can either use the built-in social proof box template or fully customize the box.
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4. Thrive Ovation
Thrive Ovation is another social proof WordPress plugin that makes it extremely easy to add testimonials to your eCommerce site. Testimonials are usually words of admiration and recommendation from the satisfied customers of a business. Adding testimonials to your website helps to increase trust and boost your site conversions. Thrive Ovation enables you to transform any WordPress comment, social media comment on Facebook and Twitter into a beautiful testimonial with ease. It also lets you create testimonial landing pages to collect testimonials.
It includes a tagging system that lets you easily find the testimonials you want to include on each page. You can also send approval emails from your WordPress dashboard and the testimonial will be held in “awaiting approval” status until it’s approved.
5. Nudgify
Rather than delivering simple sales notifications, Nudgify offers a full range of Social Proof, FOMO and Urgency notifications. It also offers Nudges designed to reduce Friction on your website. All the integrations you need to show recent sales and sign-ups with WooCommerce or WordPress are built-in, and there are also integrations with several apps. Stock data feed, Form Auto Capture etc are some of Nudgify’s other features.
Alongside notifications displaying your live data, Nudgify allows you to create your own Custom Nudges. That means you can announce a discount offer or new feature on any page. You can also keep an eye on how your Nudges are performing with the built-in analytics dashboard.
6. Notification for WooCommerce
Notification for WooCommerce is a one-time purchase plugin from a trusted WordPress developer. It helps you create social proof for an online store and gives you recent sales notifications in 22 different templates, all at a very reasonable price. The plugin displays recent orders on a pop-up, with information about customer name, address, purchased items, product image, purchased time. You can set up to display recent WooCommerce orders.
The interface is a bit basic and there is a lot of technical fiddling required to get your notifications set up. Even then, this is a way to add unlimited Social Proof notifications to your website for the same price as other plugins charge per month. Unfortunately, the plugin does not have a way to distinguish between real and made-up sales, so you do run the risk of losing trust rather than building it.
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7. Provely
Provely provides 3 different campaign types that let you show real-time activity, rotating activity from a selected period of time, or past activity. It is easy to set up; i.e you can run it with a single line of copy-and-paste code. It has a clear and 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 lets you customize your popup notifications and also offers several templates. You can also choose a colour scheme that complements your brand. It also shows lead/sale notifications only from a certain country to help tailor your social proof to your audience.
8. ProveSource
ProveSource is yet another social proof plugin that is easy to set up. It has an easy to use interface and four different types of social proof notifications: page visits, sales, number of people to take specified action within a period of time, and Stream(measures conversions). It automatically collects impressions, clicks, hovers, leads, engaged visitors, engagement rates, and more. You can use the analytics in the software and also connect to Google Analytics for even deeper analysis.
ProveSource makes it easy to create a new social proof notification, using a tab system for user flow. Each tab includes a limited number of options so it is almost impossible to make an error. You can also add GIFs to your social proof notifications, making things fun and really engaging.
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9. NextSale
NextSale is full of useful features and functions, giving you an incredible range of options. It has an impressive range of both messages and widgets. You can set your messages to be triggered based on scrolling or exit intent, define your own animation and sound preferences, and create an unlimited number of different campaigns.
Apart from the usual sliding notifications, it provides exit pop-ups, a top bar and promotional pop-up boxes. The personalisation of these different widgets is extensible, so you can use them to promote sales, disclose new features or collect emails, on the basis of your industry. The only drawback of this plugin is that the pricing increases very quickly once your traffic goes beyond 3000 sessions per month.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that social proof can be a game-changer for your business and as you can see, there’s no shortage of social proof software tools on the market. But picking the best WordPress social proof plugin must depend on your needs and budget. We are sure that any of these 9 social proof software tools on our list will help you improve your marketing message and unleash the power of social proof.