Social proof notification popups are being used on more and more websites as part an increase in growth marketing tactics. Maybe you’ve called them social proof ads or social proof marketing messages — regardless of what you call them, brands are using them and in great abundance.
You’ve seen these notifications across popular SaaS and e-commerce websites informing you that other individuals just like you are engaging with the service or product that you’re currently viewing.
We use social proof notifications for Campaign Donut as a way to get our free resources and upcoming events in front of new visitors who may not be aware of what we make available.
Learning how to use and integrate social proof notifications throughout your website is pretty straightforward and is something that nearly anyone can do.
Honestly, the hardest part of using social proof notifications is finding a service that meets your needs and your budget. There are all sorts of social proof apps and social proof softwares available, but which is right for you?
You’re in luck… helping you find a service that meets your needs and budget is what this post is all about!
How to Make Marketing Popup Notifications Work for You
The great thing about nearly every social proof app we include in our round up is that the notifications look good right out of the gate. You don’t need to make any changes or customizations to your notifications to have them look good on your website.
In addition, each service provider does a good job providing starting text for your notification. Maybe you’ll make a small tweak to the wording here or add a title there, but for the most part, you’re ready to publish within minutes of creating your account.
However, most people will want to go beyond using everything straight out of the box — you will, no doubt, want to make language and design changes to better integrate the marketing popups into your brand. So, in order to make social proof marketing work for you, here are a few suggestions regarding design, language, and integrations.
Design Your Social Proof Popups to Be On Brand
There are three elements to nearly every social proof notification: color, icon, and shape. Keeping these three elements consistent across all your social proof marketing popups is essential to finding success with social proof notifications.
Customizing Colors for Your Notifications
In regards to injecting color into your design, each social proof app will have different elements you can change color for. For instance, in the screenshot below we have customized the color for the name title and the Prove Source branding. The message text and the time stamp text is not editable.
Take a look at a social proof example from a different service — instead of being able to customize the count and the text separately, all the text shares the same color.
When choosing colors for your notifications it is important that all the colors be consistent across all notifications. Stick to a specific combination of colors — one primary, one accent, and one font color. Using different shades of colors throughout all your designs will lower brand consistency which in turn diminishes trust.
Selecting Icons and Images for Your Notification
Not all, but many social proof softwares will allow you to upload icons to your notifications. The default image is often a map or generic avatar — uploading icons allow you to inject your brand into the design and tighten up the overall brand experience on your website.
As great as being able to upload icons and images is, it can go sideways really quickly if the designs do not compliment the brand as a whole and are mismatched from one another.
At Campaign Donut we chose to have a set of custom icons created and we used those icons for our notifications to maintain consistency with our overall brand.
If you do not yet have a set of icons that you rely on for your brand, here are several places you can find large families of icons that will work for your brand:
Choosing Your Marketing Notification Shape
Each social proof app will offer their own collection of pop up shapes customizations. The two most common shapes across all software developers is the rounded shape and the squared shape.
Some apps will have variations of rounded and squared. Some will allow you to choose the overall border radius. Whatever you choose, make sure to stay consistent across all your notifications. Using the same shape across all your notifications will create a stronger visual brand which will increase trust and brand value.
Social Proof Marketing Integrations
Integrating your social proof notifications into your current marketing stack is incredibly important — capturing conversions and sending live data updates to the notifications popping up on your site is the life-blood of the entire social proof notification concept.
The more integrations, the better — however, it is important to understand the crux of how most services will capture conversions and turn them into a popup.
The standard way of capturing data for a social proof notification popup is done with a small snippet of code placed on the same page as the capture form. This small snippet of code latches on to the form, captures the fields provided, and sends that data back to the service app and then uses that data to produce the notification popup.
For instance, you are running a webinar and you want to show a social proof notification on the registration page saying “Bob has registered for the SEO webinar” to encourage other visitors to register as well. In the header code of your registration page, you would place the small snippet of code to capture the name and location data of the person registering.
Once installed, the tracking code will pick up the name and location for every individual who registers for that webinar. The data will be sent back to the social proof app, and the app will push a new notification to the page or pages of your website where you want the notification to appear.
All but one of the services included in our roundup utilize this method of capture which works for any website where you have a form as well as the ability to inject code into the header of the page.
Social Proof WordPress Plugin
If you’re using WordPress you may be wondering, “Is there a social proof WordPress plugin I’ll need to install?” and the answer is maybe. Many social proof app developers will offer a WordPress plugin to either make installation easy for everyone and/or provide a deeper integration into the website itself.
It is worth noting that there are standalone social proof WordPress plugins that offer marketing and social proof without a third party service — however you must be using WordPress for them to run which means you won’t be able to integrate them into any website pages hosted outside of your WordPress install.
For this article we’re covering only third-party services because of their ability to integrate across all platforms including Shopify, Squarespace, Leadpages, Clickfunnels, and more.
Additional Integrations Beyond Form Capture
Beyond using the pixel method to capture submissions, there are direct integrations you may want to take advantage of, especially if you are using a shopping cart service.
For instance, a WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento integration will not only generate a marketing notification saying “Bob from Phoenix just completed a purchase.” — it will also allow you to send more specific data to the popup such as what you see in the image below “Danna (Missouri, US) recently placed an order Downhill Hip Saddle Pad)”.
Beyond shopping cart integrations, you will want to consider additional integrations such as reviews (Google, Facebook), payment processing (Stripe), analytics (Google, Segment), email marketing service (Mailchimp, Drip, ActiveCampaign), and CRM apps (Pipedrive, Agile CRM).
Major Differences In Social Proof Notification Pricing
The primary pricing differentiator for all services we cover includes the ability to remove branding and total number of visitors per month to see your notifications. You will find there are other variables that may appear in different plans, such as dedicated support agent and number of domains you can install the service on, but visitor count and branding are the two big ones.
In almost all cases, you will have access to all features but will pay for a larger plan if you need more visitors. So, you may have access to activity notifications and live count notifications in a starter plan, but you’ll need a larger plan if your site visits exceed 1,000, 10,000, even 50,000 visitors in a one-month period.
When it comes to branding, you’ll find that these social proof apps will allow you to remove branding once you pay for a second or third tier plan. NOTE: Even in cases where your plan would allow you to remove branding, retaining the third-party branding provides an important and valuable ‘verified’ impact — increasing the trust and authenticity of the conversion.
Personally, the reason I appreciate having the verification on my notifications is because I do not want to be accused of using a fake social proof plugin where I can create false registrations and conversions. Of course, there are always methods for working around this, but for the Campaign Donut brand, we want to do things the right way and build strong trust. We say “no” to using fake social proof plugins.
While there may be some cases where removing the branding is desirable, there are still many applications where it is advisable to retain the branding — especially if it can be customized to match the look of your site.
ProveSource | Skyrocket Your Conversions with Social Proof
Types of Notifications Available with Prove Source
Stream: The Prove Source Stream notification is the baseline notification that reports the actions individual people have taken on your website related to a specific conversion: signups, registrations, purchases, etc.
Informational: The Prove Source Informational notification allows you to present arbitrary information to your visitors such as guarantees and security statements.
Counter: The Prove Source Counter notification provides cumulative counts for recent actions taken on your website including how many visitors your site has had, how many purchases have been made, number of registrations, or how many current visitors are on your website.
Reviews: The Prove Source Review notification pulls a stream of individual reviews from Google, Trust Pilot, and Reviews.io.
Combo: The Prove Source Combo notification is similar to the Counter notification but is cumulative counts over a specified period of time.
Examples of Prove Source Notification Popups
Prove Source has a single notification widget style that is apparent across all notification types. There are small customizations allowed to each notification within the single style — but having the single style keeps brand uniformity in tact.
Biggest Advantage of Prove Source
In addition to offering multiple variations of notifications (listed above), Prove Source is incredibly easy to use. Minus some getting familiar with the terms and overall functionality of social proof notifications, Prove Source is intuitive and makes creating your first notification easy.
When you create your notification, Prove Source takes you through six steps to launch the notification live on the website. Each step is straight forward and the constant preview in the lower lefthand corner of the screen shows you exactly how your changes will look once the popup is live on your website.
In addition to the step-by-step prompts, each field inside each step is labeled, clearly informing you as to what each field is responsible for and educating you on the app’s capabilities.
Biggest Drawback of Prove Source
Prove Source provides few native integrations with its platform, relying on webhooks and third-party integrations to feed information to each notification. While not a huge deal, this does mean that either the platform you want to feed notifications from will need to work with webhooks or have an integration with a tool like Zapier.
Despite the limited integrations, Prove Source’s pixel code functions like most social proof apps and actually captures the user’s form input on the page where they take action. All you need to do is tell Prove Source which URL you would like to track actions from (be it filling out a form or otherwise) and then customize the message for that action. Prove Source will do the rest.
Prove Source Free Trial
Prove Source does not offer a “Free Trial” so-to-speak — rather they have a limited free plan available as well as a 14-day money back guarantee on their paid plans.
The free plan allows you to create one notification and limits you to 1,000 monthly visitors (which means your notifications can be seen by a maximum of 1,000 devices). The free plan does not allow for you to customize the branding of the Prove Source popup.
Should you want to have complete control right out of the gate and be able to create multiple notifications, they offer a money back guarantee.
The team from Prove Source has proven (no pun intended) to be reliable and helpful.
Prove Source Social Proof Notification Pricing
The pricing plans offered by Prove Source are very competitive, if not disruptive.
Next to the free plan, the lowest plan option from Prove Source is the $19 monthly Starter Plan and gives you access to all social proof marketing features, unlimited notifications, allows for 10,000 monthly visitors, but limits your ability to remove the Prove Source branding.
After the Start Plan comes the Growth Plan at $49 monthly and removes branding limitations and increases visitors to 50,000 monthly visitors. At this point, you have access to everything Prove Source has to offer.
Their Gorilla plan, which is the highest plan (before their unlimited option), is $199 monthly and allows for 500,000 visitors per month. This is where Prove Source is really disruptive. This same plan can run twice, even three times as much on other platforms with similar features, making Prove Source a great value.
Fomo | Social Proof Marketing Platform
Fomo is a very popular social proof notification popup option. On our agency side, we have actually used Fomo for clients. There is a lot to like about Fomo, including nearly all features available at the entry level plan.
Types of Notifications Available with Fomo
Fomo handles notifications differently than most of the social proof apps. Instead of creating a notification to display, Fomo integrates with services and generates notifications based upon the events which are pushed from the services to Fomo.
Fomo does utilize the form capture option described above — but the strongest customizations come through their direct integrations.
Examples of Fomo Notification Popups
The design of each Fomo widget definitely has a distinct look unique to Fomo. While many other services parody one another, Fomo’s native styling is different and has a branded flare to it.
You can choose the single style you’d like to use in Fomo’s Theme section and once selected, you can customize the padding, text color, and link color of your notification in addition to dialing in specific CSS rules you’d like to apply.
Biggest Advantage of Fomo
Fomo allows for a lot of customization to your notifications. From colors, to images, to fonts, to merge fields — you can do A LOT to dial in your notification to look, feel, and say exactly what you want. As of this writing, they offer seven different notification popup templates.
Fomo also has A LOT of native integrations. Whereas some social proof popup services will claim “thousands of integrations” delivered through third party tools, Fomo offers direct integrations with dozens of popular services.
Biggest Drawback of Fomo
Fomo is complicated to use. It probably didn’t help that a great deal of their support documentation was out of date and referencing an old user interface. The documentation being out of date required us to constantly seek help directly from their team which slowed down our ability to implement even the simplest changes.
While our email provider was supported natively, to dial in popups for specific actions taken by our users inside of our email system, we needed to contact support to have those notifications configured.
If we had more patience to become Fomo experts there would definitely be a lot to enjoy.
Fomo Free Trial
Fomo does offer a 14-day free trial. After signing up for the free trial, we were given access to their Essential plan.
Their support was great when our account was live and when it was time to cancel our account, there were no problems.
Fomo Social Proof Notification Pricing
Fomo is on the more affordable end of the spectrum, given that their essential plan has access to all features minus A/B Split Testing and API Implementation Support.
The main difference between the plans is how many notifications you’ll be allowed to display per month. As of this writing, the Essential Plan runs $39 monthly and includes 50,000 notifications across unlimited domains.
The middle tier Plus Plan is $79 monthly and includes 250,000 notifications per month.
Finally, the third and highest tier is the Advanced Plan which provides 3,000,000 notifications per month plus API Implementation Support, Managed A/B Split Testing, and Optimization Support. The Optimization Support costs $29 for users of other plans and is described on their website as the following service: “For a $29 one time fee, our team of technical support engineers will personally inspect your setup and implement improvements to help you get the most of Fomo.”
Proof | Increase Website Conversions With Social Proof
Proof was the very first social proof notification service we tried at Campaign Donut. It has an “industry leader” feel to the brand, the product interface, and the actual notification itself. Nearly everything about Proof feels polished and professional, making it a great option for getting started with displaying social proof marketing notifications on your website.
Types of Notifications Available with Proof
Activity: The Proof Activity notification is the standard feed of showing an individual user’s specific conversion action. This is the feed to show a registration, lead generation, purchase, or other individual action.
Live Visitor Count: The Proof Live Visitor Count notification is a cumulative count on current visitors on a particular domain or a particular page.
Hot Streak: The Proof Hot Streak notification shows how many cumulative actions were taken by all users for either page visits or conversions in a 24 hour time period. For page visits, you can either select specific page visits or page visits across the entire domain. For conversions, the notification will specify how many users completed the specified goal for the campaign.
Conversion Card: The Proof Conversion card allows you to send an informational prompt, void of any metrics, encouraging users to take a particular action.
Examples of Proof Notification Popups
Each Proof notification widget maintains a consistent Proof style across the entire line. Aside from customizing the message, there are two overall ‘looks’ you can choose from for your widget: rounded corners or boxy corners. There are no color customizations (that we could find) and there are no style customizations (outside of the corner selection).
Biggest Advantage of Proof
The biggest advantage of Proof is they are viewed as the industry leader. How is that an advantage? They continue to innovate and come up with new ways to leverage the in browser proof notification for marketing.
The entire concept of social proof notifications is simple and each service delivers an end result that is almost identical to what you could get from another service — Proof separates itself from parody by innovating.
In the last year they’ve added split testing and goals — two items that other companies have since copied to their own platform.
After using Proof for nearly a year, it was clear they were committed to evolving their platform and adding new experimental features.
Biggest Drawback of Proof
If you’re looking for a drawback of Proof, the pricing will certainly give you a reason for pause. Their pricing is, by far, the most expensive for the social proof app space.
While many services will offer a free plan or an entry level plan in the teens, Proof starts at $29 monthly for their Basic Monthly plan. In addition to being a more expensive entry level plan, they also strip out a considerable number of features, reserved for their Pro and Business plans. They also limit the number of visitors to 1,000 which is on par with other free plans.
When we first began using Proof, configuring our notifications was very simple and easy to customize. With the introduction of Goals and A/B Split Testing, the process became confusing because of compulsory nature of these new features.
In an effort to provide more evidence to customers that Proof helps increase conversions, it is now mandatory to create a goal and run A/B Split Testing.
When we went to create a new notification that could not be tracked using their goal feature, we were still required to create and associate a goal — no way around it. After speaking with support we discovered that we could choose an arbitrary goal just to get past the screen. Once past, we were required to run an A/B Split Test. Even though we could make the decision to send all traffic to our Proof widget, the interface still showed A/B Split Testing, which was aggravating since we did not want to run a split test.
It is worth underscoring that their team is super responsive, very kind, and was receptive to the feedback we provided about the service being priced too high.
Proof Free Trial
Proof does offer a 14-day free trial for all of their plans.
Their support has always been responsive and quick to reply, helping you make the most of your free trial.
Proof Social Proof Notification Pricing
As mentioned above, Proof is expensive. After your free trial expires, you’re looking at $29 monthly. On the Basic Plan Monthly you receive 1,000 visitors per month and do not have access to Live Visitor Counts, Conversion Cards, Hot Streaks, or Priority Support (thought it’s not clear what the difference is between priority and standard support).
The next pricing point is their Pro Plan which is $79 monthly. When you choose this plan, you receive 10,000 monthly visitors, Live Visitor Counts, and Hot Streaks. Unfortunately, you will still not have access to their entire feature set: Conversion Cards are reserved for the next plan.
The third pricing option is the Business Plan which is $129 monthly. On this plan, you finally receive access to all features and 50,000 visitors per month.
Beyond the Business Plan, each step provides additional visitors — no additional features. Their top monthly plan is $299 and includes 300,000 visitors.
Purchasing any plan on an annual basis does provide a slight cost reduction.
One notable item missing is the ability to remove or customize branding. When you search their help center for the option to remove branding, they do offer to remove branding for those on the Business plan and higher — though it has to be done manually and is either an all or nothing proposition.
We actually don’t mind leaving the Verified by Proof branding, especially because when users click on the link they are taken to a page that explains what “Verified by Proof” actually means. It is a nice marketing touch that we haven’t seen anywhere else.
Provely | Boost Conversions Adding Social Proof to Any Site
Provely is a unique option when compared to the other services listed in this rundown. Nearly all services allow you to display your notifications across all websites, Provely separates its three plans by defining the number of domains on which your notifications can appear.
Another point of difference is that Provely does not limit visitor counts for your account — which is something other services will charge $799 monthly and higher to enable.
Types of Notifications Available with Provely
Provely offers only the conversion/activity notification. While creating your conversion notification, there is an option to enable Live Counters within a conversion/activity notification — but live counters are not available on their own.
Examples of Provely Notification Popups
Provely offers seven different notification base designs. This is more than any other service we’ve profiled. Beyond selecting your base design, you are able to customize the color of the name, text, time stamp, and select either map icon or generic avatar.
Biggest Advantage of Using Provely
The price point plus the unlimited visitors is the clear advantage Provely has over their competition. While other services may have a low price point or offer unlimited visitors, there are no other services that offer both disruptive pricing plus unlimited visitors.
The unlimited visitors feature may not be as important for individuals using Provely’s single domain plan (after all, many websites don’t eclipse 50,000 monthly visitors — much less, 10,000), however, for those who are using social proof ads on multiple websites (and for clients), the unlimited visitor feature will be ideal.
Biggest Drawbacks of Provely
The impression Provely created with its website is largely confirmed immediately after purchasing Provely and then using the app. I would describe the overall experience as “unpolished” and shifty.
Immediately after signing up for Provely, you’re presented with two additional opportunities to spend money. This is pretty typical for info products but feels a little unscrupulous for a software product. These bump and tripwire offers left me wondering if Provely is a legitimate software company.
Once you log into the website, the process of creating your notification feels unpolished and clunky — as if there wasn’t much thought put into the workflow experience and it was built just to function.
For some, this may not be a drawback. However, after interacting with other services for the purpose of writing this article, the Provely interface feels like a dramatic downgrade.
All that said, the functionality is there, the product works, and Provely delivers exactly what it claims on the sales page — how it delivers on its promise leaves something to be desired.
Provely Free Trial
Provely does not offer a free trial, but does provide a 30-day money back guarantee. We signed up for their smallest plan to check out the product and when we requested a refund they provided it the same day.
Provely Social Proof Notification Pricing
The pricing for Provely is very straightforward and very affordable. The differentiator between each plan is the number of domains you can install their social proof app on.
The least expensive plan, Basic, is $17 monthly and allows you to run Provely on a single domain.
The second plan, the Pro, is $27 monthly and allows Provely to run on up to five domains.
The third, and most expensive plan is the Ultimate which unlocks all domain restrictions and allows Provely to run on as many domains as you’d like.
There is an approximate 50% discount for purchasing Provely annually and with a 30-day money back guarantee, it’s a great way to try the product and secure great savings!
Morevago | Display Reviews, Build Trust, and Get New Customers
Morevago social proof notification services focuses their attention on displaying reviews as the primary driver of social proof for customers. Unlike the other social proof apps featured in this round up, Morevago does not automatically capture your conversions or track your site activity in real time — you manually add your reviews and notification content to each campaign you’d like to run.
Types of Notifications Available with Morevago
Morevago offers one type of notification called a Sticky Review. What makes the Sticky Review unique is that you can customize the individual item to say whatever you would like. So while technically speaking you only have one notification available, in theory you could create an unlimited amount of notification types by customizing the Sticky Review to suit your needs.
Examples of Morevago Notification Popups
There are five designs to choose from with the Morevago service — and with each campaign you can customize the notification background color, heading color, and text color.
Because Morevago chooses to handle the individual notifications, Sticky Reviews, separate from campaigns, this means that you can apply one Sticky Review to multiple campaigns and each review you use will take on the unique design traits of each campaign.
Unfortunately, when you’re designing your campaign notification style, there is no preview of your work — you have to wait until the changes are published to view them on your website.
Biggest Advantage of Morevago
Being able to create a custom stream of unique reviews and notifications and assign them to a myriad of campaigns is a capability not offered by any other service we’ve tried. To be able to create a notification that brings in your best reviews from all across the internet — including email and chat bot messages — is incredibly valuable.
Also, the ability to run a single “Sticky Review” across multiple campaigns could be very useful in some circumstances.
Biggest Drawback of Morevago
Originally, we were going to list the biggest drawback as not automatically capturing new conversions as they happen or bringing in reviews when they’re published to various reviews sites — however, since this is what makes Morevago uniquely different, we couldn’t list it as a drawback.
The primary drawback with Morevago is a lack of savvy and artistic design. This drawback applies not only in the app experience itself, but also the individual notification designs.
Looking at the same notification styles below, there is a clear drop off in quality of design.
The entire design is lacking which will diminish the ability to brand your notifications and take more time to dial in those which you would choose to use. Still, for some the ability to custom create notifications will be a great benefit and shouldn’t be removed as a reason to overlook the design shortcomings.
Morevago Free Trial
Morevago does offer a 14-day free trial by providing a credit card during sign up. Once logged in, it is very easy to cancel your account without needing to contact customer support.
Morevago Social Proof Notification Pricing
There are only two differences between Morevago plans: number of domains and removable branding. The entry level pricing for Morevago comes in at $14.99 monthly for what they call the Starter plan. This plan does not include the ability to remove the Morevago logo and limits your notification installation to a single domain.
The second plan is the $19.99 Plus plan which allows you to use Morevago on a single domain like the Starter, but with Plus you can remove the Morevago logo.
The Premium plan is the third tier and is $29.99 monthly, providing you with the ability to install Morevago on up to 5 domains.
The final plan listed on their site is the Agency plan which is $197 monthly and allows for you to install Morevago on unlimited domains.
Proof Factor | Free Plugins to Increase Your Conversions
Proof Factor feels like a straight-forward social proof app right from the moment you first arrive on their website. The middle of the road pricing with robust feature set makes Proof Factor a strong value. Proof Factor goes one step further than other competitors by introducing exit intent triggers and interactive gaming into the experience.
Types of Notifications Available with Proof Factor
Proof Factor is limited to two notifications and what they call the Fortune Wheel Email Pop Up.
Recent Activity: The Proof Factor Recent Activity notification is for displaying the individual conversions you want to track and report on. This would be your email opt-ins, sales, and registrations.
Live User Count: The Proof Factor Live User Count notification shows a cumulative number for how many users are currently visiting a specific page or specific website.
Aggregate Visitor Count: The Proof Factor Aggregate Visitor Count notification shows how many visitors have viewed a specific page or specific website within a specified period of time (hour, day, week, month).
Fortune Wheel: The Proof Factor Fortune Wheel is an interactive game popup that uses a “spin-the-wheel” style of game to entice users to signup or purchase your products.
Examples of Proof Factor Notification Popups
Proof Factor offers two design options for their notifications: rounded and squared. In addition, they provide you with the ability to add custom CSS to change the notification appearance to suit your tastes. This would include changing colors for background, border, text, as well as link.
Biggest Advantage of Proof Factor
When you compare all the social proof notification services to one another, there is one major advantage of Proof Factor over the rest of the competition — the Budding Entrepreneur plan.
This plan is 100% free, gives you access to the entire suite of products and allows for up to 1,000 visitors per month. What this speaks to is the overall value provided in Proof Factor. Whether you are just testing an idea or have a solid product ready to sell, you only pay when you use their platform beyond the 1,000 visitors.
What’s more, Proof Factor’s system is very easy to use so you’re not sacrificing functionality for cost — you can log in and create high end notifications easily, right away!
Biggest Drawback of Proof Factor
It’s difficult to find any drawback of Proof Factor, especially with a very generous free plan. The one area there could be growth would be in the overall design options for notifications. There are really only two options — rounded and squared. While it’s nice to have CSS to play with, if you’re uncomfortable editing CSS, you’ll find the color options easier to work with using other apps mentioned in this list.
Still, if you can live with the minimal design options, Proof Factor offers great value.
Proof Factor Free Trial
As already stated, Proof Factor offers something much better than a Free Trial — a generous free plan.
The Budding Entrepreneur plan is free to use and the only limitation in terms of feature set is a maximum of 1,000 visitors per month. They do note that free plans get Live Chat Support, however, the paid plans receive higher levels of support.
Factor Proof Social Proof Notification Pricing
After the Budding Entrepreneur free plan comes the Small Business plan which is $29 monthly. This plan increases your monthly visitor count from 1,000 to 10,000 unique visitors. The Small Business plan comes with what Proof Factor calls “Premium Support” though I am not sure what that includes.
The third tier plan is the High Traffic Site and that increase your visitor count all the way to 50,000 per month and includes what they call “Elite Support” again, not sure what is included in Elite Support that isn’t included in Premium Support.
Finally, there are three plans that Proof Factor calls “Larger Plans” and those range in price from $179 monthly to $429 monthly. All Larger Plans receive “Dedicated Support Team” and include 100,000 to 500,000 visitors monthly.
The value of Proof Factor pricing is really seen in the Small Business and High Traffic Site plans.
Influence | Increase Conversion Rate by 17% Using Social Proof!
Out of all the services I’ve included in this round up, Influence is the newest. In spite of being the newest, it actually has a lot going for it and, in some ways, is ahead of other services which have been around much longer. Influence includes access to all the standard notifications you would expect from a social proof notification service and has several additional features in the works (not live as of this writing) that could catapult it past competitors.
Types of Notifications Available with Influence
As of Summer 2019, Influence has three active notification types. When configuring a campaign, they have an additional three notifications in development which look intriguing and, quite honestly, exciting!
Bulk Activity: The Influence Bulk Activity notification shows the number of total signups for the campaign over a specified period of hours or days.
Recent Activity: The Influence Recent Activity notification shows the individual conversions for the campaign.
Live Visitor Count: The Influence Live Visitor Count notification displays the total number of visitors across the website. This notification can also be configured to display the number of live stream viewers on the site.
Review Notifications (Coming Soon): The Influence Review popup will allow you to show customer reviews through social proof notifications. There is no information on whether this is automatic or if reviews will need to be entered manually.
Custom Notification (Coming Soon): The Influence Custom Notification popup is described by Influence as having the ability to “show custom content” without any additional details.
Push Notifications (Coming Soon): It is not yet clear how the Influence Push Notification feature will work or what it will do. When I reached out to support, they didn’t provide any additional info.
Examples of Influence Notification Popups
The notification design styles available from Influence are very simple and largely mimic what we see from other social proof apps. With each notification you have the ability to customize the radius of the corners, allowing you to make them rounded out or squared.
Biggest Advantage of Influence
There is a lot to love about Influence, including the pricing. The biggest advantage I see with Influence is how easy it is to use. Since it’s a newer company, there are some interface design tweaks that should be made, however, overall it is straightforward and easy to figure out.
A second advantage is that Influence appears poised to grow beyond simple notifications — which could be a good thing or bad thing in the long run, depending on how their wide feature set impacts overall development of core features. However, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Biggest Drawback of Influence
If you’re looking for a reason not to use Influence, the biggest drawback in my mind is that it is very new and there may be a lot of uncertainty around it’s long-term viability.
Other concerns that come with a new company is a lack of support documentation. When setting up my first campaign I couldn’t find explanations for certain features in the knowledge base, leaving me to rely on chat support. Chat support was speedy — though it appears there may be a language barrier to overcome when chatting with support in the future.
There are dashboard design tweaks that I’d like to see, tightening up the UI with better color selections for borders, fields, text, and other UI elements — but I suspect these will come.
Influence Free Trial
All plans from Influence are available as a 7-day free trial. Seven days is a bit short, especially if you are wanting to measure conversions to decide if Influence moves the needle for your business — 14 to 21 days would be preferable, however, having a free trial at all is still nice.
Influence Social Proof Notification Pricing
Influence has four plans shared on their website — for larger plans than what is listed, you can contact them directly. There are three differences that separate plans: visitor count, removable branding, teammate accounts. Teammate accounts are essentially additional users able to access your account and make changes based upon the permissions you’ve assigned. After your free trial, you will land in one of the following plans.
The first and least expensive plan is called the Startups plan, it comes in at $15 monthly and provides you with 10,000 visitors per month. The second plan, the Growth plan (50,000 visitors), is $39 monthly and both the Startups and the Growth plans do not provide you with Teammate Accounts and you are unable to remove Influence branding.
The third and fourth plans, Advanced $65 monthly and Enterprise at $189 monthly, are identical except for visitor counts. Advanced provides 100,000 visitors per month and the Enterprise provides 500,000 visitors per month. Each of these accounts offer Removable Branding and Teammate Accounts.
Additional Social Proof Notification Services to Consider
New services continue to pop up across the web, each one offering unique and distinct benefits, separating themselves from other services.
Here is a list of additional services you may want to check out in your quest to find the right social proof notification app for your business.
Final Thoughts On Using Social Proof Marketing Notifications
Just because you can use social proof notifications on your website does not mean that you should. It really depends on your brand story and the relationship you have with visitors to your website prior to them making any type of a purchase.
For small e-commerce sites that are largely unknown and potential customers wonder, “Can I trust this company?” social proof marketing makes sense.
For the large software business that is well-established and has a strong relationship with their users prior to any type of financial transaction, it could feel gimmicky and even over the top.
Be sure to think through how your target audience will respond to notifications and try to anticipate what impact their response will have on what they believe about your business — from there, you should be in a good position to make a decision.
If you have any questions about adding a social proof app to your website, or how to best use the notifications for your brand, send us a message or leave a comment below. In some cases we may be able to provide a quick solution, in other cases we may redirect you to the app’s support.
In the end, the entire team at Campaign Donut is here to empower you to create content marketing campaigns that convert and however we can help make that a reality for you, we’ll stand ready to act!
