Using Proof to Increase Engagement and Boost Lead Conversions

Imagine you are craving something sweet — ice cream, we’ll say. You’re strolling downtown and you turn on a block where there are three ice cream shops (convenient, right?) and you need to decide which you’re going to go into.

You might base your decision on things such as ice cream flavors or how you like the design exterior of the shops, but you’re probably more intrigued by that one ice cream shop that has a substantially longer line. What’s the hype? What do they put in their ice cream that makes everyone want some? You just have to find out.

That is what social proof is. Here’s how digital marketers can use it as a tool to connect with more visitors, customers, and donors.

What is Proof?

Proof is our favorite online business tool that capitalizes on the concept of social proof. It displays activity notifications in real-time on your website or landing page. Proof notifications look similar to Web Push notifications, but Proof notifications give you more content options. Proof boasts that you can expect a 10% lead increase in less than 10 minutes. Proof is optimized to help increase conversion from visitors to leads, save on lead acquisition, and establish legitimacy capitalizing on the concept of social proof.

You can integrate Proof with your various platforms to convert your page visitors into active users. Using social proof on your website will build trust with your visitors and can create a “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) if they don’t take action.

In addition to increasing conversion rate, you can track a page visitor’s journey through your website, collect detailed informative profiles on all of your visitors, and much, much more.

How does Proof work?

Once you set up social proof notifications on your webpage, users are encouraged to take action on your webpage, their individual contact information is collected, then stored for you to download. Proof offers customizable features and can be optimized to cater to specific audiences.

1. Users are encouraged to take action

As previously mentioned, Proof uses the concept of social proof to entice users into taking some form of action. Social proof was coined in Social Proof Theory, popularized by psychologist Robert Cialdini, which expresses that people who do not know how to act in a given situation will look to others around them for guidance.

When a user visits your website and is greeted by social proof notifications, they are initially exposed to one of four different notifications that reflect, in real-time, how many other users have acted on the site. You can customize your notifications to cycle through any or all of these notification options:

• Recent Activity: how many users have taken action on this website or page recently.
• Live Visitor Count: how many people are currently viewing the page.
• Hot Streaks: how many users within a given time frame have taken action on this website or page.
• Conversion Cards: this notification allows you to tether a specific user action to a specific call to action you can customize.

In the above example, the user is exposed to real-time updates of other people visiting or taking action on your website. Then the combination of peer pressure and FOMO convinces them to follow others’ actions and engage more with your site.

John James for Senate used social proof to increase the likelihood of a user completing a donation. His outsider campaign used Proof to bolster the feeling of a grassroots movement. From the pages where social proof was running notifications, users donated over $65,000 to the John James for Senate campaign.

When more and more users engage with your website, then the effects of social proof increase resulting in more and more engagement with your page. Once they engage and take action, Proof will collect their data and store it in a database for you to download.

2. Useful data is collected

Proof collects and stores useful data about the users visiting and engaging with your webpage. Proof will show you the journey a visitor takes through your website and will capture their personal contact information.

On your main Proof dashboard, there is a breakdown of how many people visited your page, how many views the page has, how many users interacted, and how many contacts were captured from this process. It also incorporates a report function to see how your page is doing compared to weeks prior.

Perhaps the most useful feature is when Proof captures valuable contact information from users visiting your website. From this data, not only can you catch their email and add it to your mailing list, but you can find demographic information and figure out where in the country most people are visiting your pages.

From pages where social proof notifications were running, we were able to acquire over 1,000 contacts and unique user emails and add them to John James’ mailing list.

Think you can do more with your website? Proof it.

Social proof is a concept marketers can use to utilize psychology for their benefit. Using social proof can help you establish authority over your brand and use that establishment to expand your network. Whether your goal is to prompt page visitors to download a new report, sign a petition, donate, or anything else, social proof will help help your brand or client grow by letting your users sell for you.

Looking for more tips and tricks? Here are our 5 most useful digital tools that campaigns can’t live without.