By Marty Rogers on Feb. 12, 2021
Social proof marketing tools are all the rage right now.
If you're looking for an easy, cheap and effective way to generate more revenue from your website visitors then a good social proof tool might be what you need.
"But Marty, what the heck is social proof?"
I'm really glad you asked.
The proof tools featured in this list:
Humans are like sheep. We follow one-another in life and in our actions.
It's a psychological influence which can be manipulated.
Social proofing tools take advantage of this proven social phenomenon by displaying live widgets and tickers on a website, showing live purchases, signups and other relevant actions by real users. This instills confidence and trust in visitors.
Here's how they look:
This leads to an increase in conversion rates and, of course, MORE SALES!
Just think about it for a moment.
You're on a website you've never seen before and they're asking you to spend your hard-earned money on their product or services. Tough ask, right?
Usually you'd go off searching for business reviews to give you confidence.
But social proof tools remove that from the equation. There's no need to search for reviews because the live actions of others are showing you it's legit.
It really is smart software, and it works tremendously well.
Benefits of social proof tools and marketing:
It's more varied and diverse than you'd guess, actually.
Social proof widgets work great on any website that handles any sort of transactions, bookings, sign ups and other interactions that require commitment from users.
Here are some examples:
Anything that takes confidence to complete, or lacks history.
There's no point investing your time and money in inbound marketing channels such as SEO and Pay Per Click if you're not going to maximize your conversion rates.
According to ProveSource, it can improve by 17% on ecommerce and retail sites.
Setting up social proof on your website is much easier than you'd imagine.
It's essentially a very simple 3-step process.
Select the tool of your choice and create an account.
You'll be provided with a snippet of code that looks something like this:
You'll need to paste this on every page of your website, before the </head>.
That's it. If it's a little confusing or complex for you then you will also have the option of using a plugin for CMS and shopping cart software like WordPress or Shopify.
Next you will set-up all of the notifications you want to run on your website.
You will be able to feed in data from your platform using integrations and webhooks, and you'll be able to set them up in different formats and designs to suit you.
Finally, you configure your settings and get going.
Things like where to show, when to show, how long to wait before appearing and so on. Maybe even setting up A/B split-testing to see the difference.
Some of the blogs providing lists of the best social proof software feature far too many options, which can lead to information overload. So I'm not going to do that.
Instead, I am going to post just 3. The very best of the bunch.
Ready?
ProveSource is probably the industry leader when it comes to proof tools.
According to their website, they have more than 25,000 websites running their social proof software, which for a fairly new industry is pretty impressive.
ProveSource pricing:
Pretty fair and affordable pricing, on a monthly basis.
They did have a free plan originally, but that has now gone.
Compared with the other tools featured in this list, ProveSource is probably the most aesthetically pleasing with the most customization and options available.
ProveSource features:
Proof is another big one that is used by over 20,000 websites.
Their pricing begins at a much higher end than those of ProveSource, but I must admit that their widgets do look great. Especially the hot streaks.
Proof pricing:
So as you can see, ProveSource definitely have the advantage with pricing.
From the outside looking in I'd certainly say that these prices are a little extreme, but maybe they're just targeting the larger, more corporate users.
Proof features:
Provely is the cheapest social proof app of the bunch, with their basic plan starting at just $17 per month. That's $1 cheaper than ProveSource. Interesting.
Their pricing is also based on domains rather than number of unique visitors.
So it's ideal for startups and bootsrapping companies.
Provely pricing:
At all of these price-points you get unlimited traffic and widget notifications.
Having looked into them a little more they're definitely priced accordingly as they have a very no-thrills product that just does what it says on the tin.
That's not a bad thing, of course.
Provely features:
So there you have it, 3 of the best social proof tools available.
