What are the strongest factors that influence your customers to buy?

Social proof, first introduced by Robert Cialdini in “Influence“, is one of the most impactful drivers of consumers’ purchase decisions.

As an ecommerce site, socially-reinforced trust signals can help you:

• Increase conversion rates.
• Improve the trustworthiness of your brand.
• Increase consumers’ confidence in transacting with you.

Here are seven tactics for incorporating social proof into your ecommerce site.

1. Transactional Pop-ups

A core tenet of social proof is that in an uncertain situation, we rely on individuals around us to make us feel certain about our decisions.

Transactional pop-ups allow ecommerce sites to provide quick bursts of social proof by displaying real-time reviews, recent transactions, and website activity.

This form of social proof is effective because you’re able to provide third-party reviews that are highly influential in most purchase decisions.

You can even curate these reviews so you are only showing the most helpful content for your readers, as opposed to prospects trying to seek reviews out themselves and perhaps being influenced to not buy.

I won’t lie – this social proof may have influenced my decision to buy a Nectar mattress:

2. User-Generated Content

UGC is one of the biggest drivers of social proof for ecommerce sites. Both onsite and offsite reviews, testimonials, and images of your customers using your products are marketing gold for business growth.

One of the challenges with UGC is that it can be hard to find, get permission to use, and integrate into your ecommerce platform or CMS.

Thankfully, there are a number of plugins and solutions (e.g., Pixlee, Curalate) that can provide this functionality for your site.

Here are a few examples:

Article.com

I’m currently in the hunt for a new lounge chair. This section provides both the context of the product in someone’s home and a review to show satisfaction with the brand.

Aloyoga.com

Here is a similar example for yoga clothing. Curated social media images like these can appear more authentic than the model in the “official” product image.

In my experience running social media ads, lower-quality, candid photography often outperforms overproduced, glossy stock photography.

3. Recommendations

Obviously, your website needs a review system to share social trust signals.

One of the issues with most review systems is that if you don’t have a high volume of reviews, the buyer might assume you don’t have many customers, your customers don’t buy specific products lines, and/or that your products are not good.

Recommendations are a great pairing or substitute for reviews because they give potential customers a binary look at whether current customers recommend your products.

These recommendations can be aggregated to give you a percentage of recommended buyers, similar to an NPS (net promoter score) at the product level.

Here’s an example from Urban Outfitters:

4. Getting More out of Your Review Content

Five-star rating systems are the gold standard for reviewing products, yet most ecommerce sites don’t extract enough value from this user-generated content.

Here are a couple of useful ways that your visitors can gain even more context for your products.

Search

Don’t make your users scan every review to find the answers they are looking for.

Give your customers the ability to quickly search reviews to find the features, specs, and concerns that are most important to them.

Here’s an example from Guitar Center:

Review Analytics

Your visitors will likely read reviews from people who either hated or loved your product. Make it easy for them to filter based on the star rating.

Obviously, we all want more sales; however, we want buyers to disqualify themselves, before they buy, if the product is not a good fit for them.

Don’t let negative reviews pile up because you didn’t do a good job disqualifying customers before they bought.

Here is social proof from a niche ecommerce site:

As well as Amazon:

5. FAQs

Curate questions from your customer service ticketing system to identify and answer top-asked questions about your products.

Social proof isn’t just about showing the raving reviews of your products – it’s also about proving that your brand or brand advocates are responsive to your customers’ needs for any question that comes up.

Here is an example from Home Depot:

Home Depot employees, suppliers, and advocates are active across product pages to provide helpful feedback on customers’ frequently asked questions.

6. Third-Party Validation

This is one of the oldest social proof tactics for marketers but is still effective. What signals can you send to your buyer that your products are trustworthy?

An influencer marketing program can help you highlight this. Identify ways to incorporate blogs, case studies, or testimonials for industry-known celebrities on your product and product-category pages.

Here’s an example of a blog post featuring a rising star golfer who uses a specific golf club this website is selling:

Similarly, are there ways you can connect your ecommerce brand to other well-known brands that your buyer trusts?

Add the logos of partnerships, sponsorships, awards, and press mentions that your brand has gained since inception.

Here are a couple of examples from Quip and Tortuga:

7. Trending or Best-Selling Features

No one likes to look like a fool when receiving your product. Use social proof to eliminate this concern by incorporating trending pages, sections, or elements in your site.

Most ecommerce systems allow you to sort a list of products by best selling. Build out a page with your top-selling products.

You can take this further by incorporating social proof within product pages.

If you sell five variations of a single product, let your customers know which ones are most popular. This can be useful across verticals.

On the fashion vertical, consumers may not want the most popular SKU so that they don’t come across someone wearing the same item.

On the other hand, if I’m shopping for power tools, I may want the most popular SKU because others have clearly tested the item and I can trust that it will help me get the job done.

Many options are available for incorporating social proof elements at the macro level all the way to the individual SKU level.

Conclusion

Whether you sell to a B2B or B2C audience, social proof is one of the most impactful ways to improve conversion rates, grow sales, and develop an active network of brand advocates.

More Resources:

Image Credits

Featured Image: Mike Petrucci/Unsplash
All screenshots taken by author, April 2019

Worried about seeing “Avengers: Endgame” spoilers on Google?

You could always wipe out half of the search results.

A new (and awesome) Google easter egg is turning the search results to dust.

Here’s how to see it for yourself:

Head to Google. (The easter egg works on both desktop and mobile search results.)

Type in: thanos.

You’ll see something like the following:

See the Infinity Gauntlet (the gold glove with all six of Infinity Stones) in Google’s Knowledge panel? Click on it.

You’ll see the glove snap its fingers.

Then you’ll start seeing the search engine results start to vanish – just as many of your favorite Marvel characters at the end of “Avengers: Infinity Wars.”

The search results will even scroll by themselves, forcing you to watch them as they’re eradicated.

Ultimately you’ll be left with something like this as your search results page:

Indeed, Google’s 96 million results seem to have been reduced to 48 million!

Want to bring all the search results back?

Click on the Infinity Gauntlet again.

All the results will returned.

Here’s a video of the easter egg in action, via Tracy Ingram:

Millions of people shop online every year looking for the best deals for the holiday season.

According to Statista, in the U.S., Christmas shopping season traditionally begins on Black Friday. In 2018, people spent more than $123 billion on retail ecommerce.

With all this time and money being spent online, how can you make sure you have the right holiday SEO and marketing strategy to get more traffic, rankings, and sales?

Let’s explore the following:

• Planning
• Promotion strategy
• Technical strategy
• Your checkout process
• Internal and external linking
• Measurement plan

1. Planning

One of the most important things to consider before the holiday season is to plan for it. Unfortunately, SEO is not as quick as paid search. It takes time to see results.

If you know that 30% to 50% of your business is done in the holiday season, planning is critical to your success for the next holiday season.

One of the most important things to do is conducting a content audit and analysis to see where the opportunities are for you to create content or update existing content at least 6 to 8 months before the holidays.

I can’t tell you how many times a company has come to me with a request to rank for Christmas gifts, but they don’t have any Christmas related content.

No dedicated landing page that has Christmas gifts, no content that is relevant for different topics around Christmas gifts, no questions that cater toward different Christmas gift intent.

If you don’t have those basic elements, you aren’t going to rank for Christmas gift related keywords.

Always build out a content calendar with different concepts and different content types that cater to multiple intents.

For example, it would make sense to have content that has some imagery because most people would like to see different types of Christmas gift cards based on the intent of the query.

It would also make sense to have an answer box strategy for related queries because end users are asking questions. Therefore, your content strategy should be holistic to capture them at the early stage.

When trying to pick which products or pages to focus on, analyze your previous performance for the past season.

Review your analytics to see:

• What products performed well last year.
• How people found those landing pages.
• What queries drove traffic to those landing pages.
• How your landing pages converted.

It’s always a smart idea to work closely with your paid search team and optimize for keywords and content that performed well from a paid search perspective and rank in striking distance on the organic side.

Having both paid and organic ads will dominate the search engine result pages and put your brand in front of more customers, which can improve sales and drive more traffic.

Don’t forget about social. Social listening can provide you with a lot of content ideas that you may not have even thought about.

You may find some new buzz words, new content ideas, or new opportunities that competitors are using that could benefit your brand.

Pinterest is a must for promoting holiday content. You can create holiday Pinterest boards which will showcase your top holiday products and link to your holiday pages.

Reusing Old Content

Do you have a Christmas guide from last year? You can update it for this year with new products.

If you keep a database of people who have purchased from you last year or have signed up for your email list, use this to get your products in front of them even before holiday time.

You could also use sign-ups for Facebook remarketing.

2. Promotion

Writing content simply isn’t enough.

After creating your content plan, always make sure to collaborate with your paid and social team. This additional support will help your content get seen by the masses.

Always support your content with paid social from Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels.

Add links in your email to help spread the word about your content and put the content all over your social media channels and in newsletter and events, etc.

3. Technical

There are several technical mistakes that I have seen brands make trying to optimize for the holiday season.

One common issue: some businesses are not ready for the spike in holiday traffic.

Always make sure you have a lightning fast server that can handle big increases in traffic.

Believe it or not, some popular sites have crashed during Black Friday and other holidays because of the influx of new traffic to their site and unfortunately, they don’t have the proper infrastructure to support it.

Load Time

When creating or updating landing pages, it’s critical to make sure that they are mobile friendly and load in under 2 seconds at most (preferably 1 second).

Mobile customers are looking to purchase at the moment. Having a poor load time can provide a poor user experience, which could impact your holiday season sales.

Page Deletion & Redirects

Another common mistake I see some brands make is deleting pages without redirecting category and product level pages.

This is a big mistake.

If you delete product and category pages, especially pages that have rankings, authoritative links, fresh and high-quality content, etc., you’re going to have to create a brand-new page if you do not redirect them.

Keep your landing page URLs the same. Never change URLs unless you absolutely have to. If you do, always set up a 301 redirect to the new page.

Running Out of Products

If your brand runs out of products during the holiday season, always have a sound redirect strategy in place to provide them with related products.

This can help users stay on your site, find related products, and help you earn incremental revenue.

Site Monitoring

Consistently monitor your site for any crawl errors, dead pages, etc. which could impact your site performance.

Structured Data

Structured data is imperative to give additional information to the search engines in the way they could understand.

Make sure all your product pages and important pages on your site are marked up with product schema, and most important of all, review schema.

The more positive reviews you get, the more popular your products become. The more popular your product are, the better rankings your product will receive.

4. Your Checkout Process

Shopping cart abandonment rates are a little over 70% during the holiday season, according to Statista.

The best way to provide a good shopping cart experience?

Make it as easy as possible and to optimize your check out process.

For example, consider the following:

• Reduce the number of checkout pages.
• Reduce the number of forms and information that needs to be filled out.
• Provide a guest checkout option.
• A/B test.

5. Internal Linking & External Linking

Internal linking is an underutilized tactic that could help reinforce important landing pages.

If you have pages that are related to each other (i.e., blog content that showcases tips for choosing the best Christmas card), then that should have an internal link to the main category page.

Look through your site and find opportunities to take advantage of internal link opportunities.

Build links to your site from external domains and have reviews from bloggers that review your products.

This could help get high-quality links to your site that can improve your search engine visibility, traffic, and performance.

6. Measurement Plan

You need to know what worked and had an impact.

So set up a measurement plan to compare year over year performance on how your site performed during the holiday season.

Be sure to track all your keywords. Keep track of every activity that helped support your content and earn new links.

Final Thoughts

Planning in advance is key to getting a head start on holiday season SEO and digital marketing.

You need to provide the right content at the right moment to end users across all devices and platforms.

Always make sure that the content you give your target audience is relevant and gives your customers what they really want.

Content should:

• Be visual and not just static text.
• Link to the products or service that you want them to see.

As always, use strong call to action statements.

Be sure to integrate with other media to promote your message so it can grow in popularity and increase your visibility, traffic, and sales during the holiday season.

Most important of all, measure your success by comparing performance year over year – and sticking with what works for you.

More Resources:

Image Credits

All screenshots taken by author, April 2019