In this article about Social Proof, you're going to learn:

Social proof is validation of your brand or products from third parties. These can be other companies, the news media, but most importantly the best social proof comes from customers. They can come in the form of videos, articles, and reviews. The logic behind social proof is that If customers (or some other trustworthy, unbiased source) are saying good things about your product, then your products must be good.

Social proof matters because customers truly care about it. For example, here’s a quote from a FinanceOnline article:

“93.4% of online shoppers rely on customer reviews when researching online retailers they are not familiar with.”

Needless to say, the type of social proof that online shoppers care about the most is the social proof that comes from people just like them in the form of reviews and video testimonials. People like to see and hear from people that are like them. New moms want to hear and read reviews from new moms. Surfers want to read reviews from other surfers. You’re much more likely to trust someone that you can relate to than a business that you’ve never heard of before or have never purchased a product from before.

Seeing someone like you enjoy a product is a more powerful selling tool than ANYTHING that you could ever put on your website or in an advertisement.

Don’t Buy Fake Reviews

There are a lot of ways to get social proof. Some of them are ethical and some of them aren’t. We want to be very clear about this: don’t buy reviews or write fake ones. It is unethical and in some cases even illegal.

You might think that a few here and there won’t hurt, but the repercussions from Shopify, Google, and Facebook for misleading shoppers can be extremely severe. Shopify can completely remove your site from their platform altogether. Google can remove your pages from search results entirely. Facebook can limit or ban your ads from being shown to customers. How will they catch you? They don’t disclose the methods that they use, but we can assure you that they catch merchants doing it every single day and they mean business!

When there are so many legal and ethical options available to get some good, quality reviews and testimonials, there is no reason to take the risks involved with buying shady reviews.

How to get customers to leave reviews

One thing that’s not unethical is asking customers to write reviews. You can’t ask a customer to write a good review, but you can ask them to write an honest one. You can also make them an offer in exchange for a review in order to entice them to take time out of their day to leave an in-depth review on your site. Some of these can include a small coupon code or a small free item from your store. The most scalable way for established brands to do this is incorporate this into your email and SMS marketing. At least once a month customers should be getting emails and SMS asking them to leave some feedback.

What if I’m just starting out?

Getting your first few reviews is really, really tough. But there’s a tried and true way of connecting with customers and asking if they’d be so kind as to leave an honest review. Call them! Before you do, make sure that you’re collecting phone numbers in your checkout process and that customers are agreeing to your terms and conditions which opts them in to being contacted by your business.

Calling customers sounds strange in the world of ecommerce. It is a little strange, but if you have little to no reviews (or you’re looking to get 1,000 reviews!) you need to hit the phones.

The call can go something like this:

“Hi Janice, it’s Tim from Fake Beauty Company! I was just calling to ask how you’re liking that new lash kit that you ordered from us. Have you tried it out yet?”

“Oh...hi Tim! Yes, I actually did use it last night and I loved it. I think that the bristles in the lash fluffer were a little tough though so I wish they were softer.”

“Well Janice, we really appreciate that feedback. I’ll make sure that it gets to my team. I’ll let you go now, but we’d really appreciate it if you’d take 2 minutes out of your day to leave a little feedback about your purchase on our site and leave a review so other customers know what you think about your purchase. You should have just gotten an email that’ll take you right to where you do that. Have a great day!”

Doing whatever it takes

See, that wasn’t so hard! These conversations can be 30 seconds long. What we’re trying to say is that sometimes you need to do whatever it takes to build a healthy library of social proof.

Is it scalable to call thousands of people? No, it’s not! But, one thing that you’ve got to remember is that these reviews last forever! Once you have them on your site they are there for people to see for years to come. If you can build up a strong library of product reviews early on, you’ll be able to scale your ecommerce business much faster in the future.

The short answer is: almost everywhere. Social proof should be on your homepage, on your product pages, and on your collections pages. It would be really difficult to overdo it because, like we’ve said before, social proof is your best salesperson. It will sell more products than anything else that you’re doing in your marketing or on your website so you need to find as many opportunities as possible to incorporate it into your brand.

Where exactly does it go on those pages? That’s a tough question to answer because it depends on what your website looks like and what products you sell. However, here’s a few examples of what we think social proof should look like when displayed on different types of web pages on your site: