5 Mind-blowing Ways To Use Social Proof To Increase Sales

Imagine.

You’ve just arrived in a city — — a not so familiar one. You’re hungry and need a place to grab a byte. Here you found two restaurants. One is almost filled up with people and the other is almost empty.

Which one will you choose?

Let me guess. Chances are that you’ll likely choose the one with more people, right?

Your decision could be driven by some quick analysis you’ve done in your brain.

You think several people can’t be wrong. There must be something special about the filled-up restaurant. Maybe, their food is more delicious or something more interesting.

That’s social proof. Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that allows you to reduce the fear in your customer’s mind when they are about to make a buying decision.

Social proof is one of the quickest, easiest, and powerful ways of getting instant credibility to help you increase sales.

Persuasion, compliance, and negotiation expert, Robert Cialdini, listed social proof as one of the 6 key principles of influence in his recent research in the book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition.”

Want to influence your prospects to buy now? Think social proof.

It’s an important tool you don’t want to overlook if you’re looking to increase your sales. In the rest of this article, you’ll learn how to use social proof to increase your sales.

Whether you’re selling a digital product, a service or you own an e-commerce store (even if you drop ship) these strategies are going to help you increase your sale.

Let’s get started…

1. Customers’ recommendations

Are you ignoring your existing customers?

Leveraging your customers’ recommendation is a great way to use your existing customer’s voice to increase sales.

Without trying or testing your product it’s hard for customers to make a decision to buy your product. Except if there trust you. Unfortunately, most times, they don’t.

So they depend on what other people who have bought your product have to say. In fact, according to CompUSA, 61% of consumers looked at reviews before purchasing a product. More so, People Claim suggests 70%.

How are you going to get these recommendations from your customers?

Send them a survey: you can email your customers a survey asking them to rate your product or service.

NakedWines is a great example of a brand that does this. They send out surveys to customers who bought a bottle of wine asking them to give it a rating and state whether they’ll buy it again. Then, they calculate the overall percentage and place it on their website.

Another thing you can do is to add after sales review. Immediately after you offer a service to a customer, encourage them to review your service. However, if you sell a product, after a sale, follow your customers up and remind them to review the product after use.

More so, you can get your customers recommendations and place them on your homepage.

Using customers reviews or recommendations will to a large extent boost customers trust for your brand and of course, increase your sales.

2. Expert and celebrity mentions

Expert and celebrity endorsement is an age-long marketing tactics. This marketing tactic is called influencer marketing. Leverage on expert’s huge followings and trust they’ve built to increase your sales.

Imagine Warren Buffet endorsing your product as authentic. Oh, yea. You’re getting the feeling. An endorsement by an influencer can boost your brand’s trust and increase your customer base.

An endorsement by Jessica Simpson helped Beautymint grow their traffic to 500,000 visitors on day one of its launches.

Here is the best part:

You don’t need to spend so much in getting top celebrities to mention you. You can get social media influencers to mention you on a shoestring budget.

For example, you can get some Instagram influencers on Openinfluence to mention your product without breaking the bank.

After the mention gets them to write a sentence or two endorsing your product or service.

Here is a great example from Enchanting Marketing’s homepage:

Notice the picture of Brian Clark she added as well. It’s a strong booster. Ensure you add your endorser’s pictures. Recent studies by ConversionXL shows that endorsements with photos were significantly more effective.

Wonder why Neil Patel uses Ben Huh’s (a widely recognized name in the tech ecosystem) short-form case study on his website? It’s simple. It simply tells that Ben endorses his service. And that goes with a lot of credibilities.

3. Leverage the psychological “fear of missing out”

Photo credit: Susan Solovic

Imagine that you went for shopping and everyone is buying a T-shirt. A very beautiful one, you like it but, you’re not so sure about the quality, you are still contemplating if you should buy.

But, everyone is buying it. Interestingly, you got a text from your friend Brian saying he just bought the same shirt. And the salesperson has mentioned that they’ll stop the sales of that particular shirt in 2 hours time.

What will you do?

Will you bring out your wallet and buy that shirt? Chances are that you’ll. Because you don’t want to miss out.

You can use a tool like ConvertProof to copy exactly the same thing that happened in that supermarket.

For example, ConvertProof shows pictures, locations, and real names of your customers who just bought your product or service to your prospective customers who are still skeptical about bringing out their credit card to make a purchase.

MobiMatic got 300% more orders after installing Convertproof on their website. Including a sense of urgency together with Convertproof can also be a great boost.

4. Press mentions

A press mention is simply a mention of your company, brand, product or service by the press.

You can get these mentions when a journalist is writing on a topic in your industry and mentions a quote from you as an expert or uses your success as a case study to buttress a point. There’re a lot of chances of being mentioned by the press. You could be listed as part of an example.

Hence, if you’re looking to boost your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness which will eventually lead to more business for you, you definitely want to get featured in the press.

According to Nielsen, 66% of customers say they trust most earned press more than paid advertisement.

Even though the mainstream press is losing its credibility in recent times, press releases still hold some water and can boost your sales.

That’s why you can add reputable press or company’s logo on your website and it boosts your credibility Like so:

5. Numbers are powerful

Let’s face it. If you want to buy a product and two similar products are placed side-by-side. One has been bought by one person and the other by 20,000 people. Which one will you buy?

You’ll most likely choose the one with a huge number of buyers, right? I’ll do the same.

For example, if I want to buy a WordPress theme and I see this 33, 944 purchases. Boom. That will give me an almost automatic assurance I need to purchase the theme. It’s a numbers game.

So, if you’ve got some sales rolling. Ensure you flaunt the numbers on your sales page. Customers want to see those numbers.

Social proof is one bad-ass tactic you must integrate into your business to move your customers to the bottom of your sales funnel rapidly and to boost your bottom line.

Evaluate your product or service and find a way to integrate social proof as one of your strategies to increase your sales.

What social proof are you using to boost your sales?

I’m an inbound marketer and Freelance Writer. The founder of The Growthbar. I help businesses attract and convert customers with seductive content. Let’s connect on Facebook, or via hello@ezewrites.com.

First appeared on The Growthbar by Eze