TrustPulse Social Proof for WooCommerce

Have you ever visited a website where messages appear onscreen announcing that someone, somewhere has just purchased the product or service that you're viewing? Have you been influenced by it?

We have, especially when booking hotel rooms where there are only a few of them left.

This marketing technique, known as "social proof" and based on the psychology of FOMO (fear of missing out), can be extremely effective. As many as 56 % of social media users experience FOMO (Mashable), along with 69 % of millennials (Eventbrite). Among millennials, FOMO occurs most frequently in response to travel (59 %), parties and events (56 %), and food (29 %) (Strategy).

Smart WooCommerce store owners seek every advantage possible, and this should include the use of social proof. Fortunately, you can implement social proof with WooCommerce by using TrustPulse.

What is TrustPulse?

TrustPulse is a WordPress plugin from the team that built OptinMonster, one of the most successful marketing plugins ever. As always, let's start things off with an introductory video:

That should give you an overview of TrustPulse, but there are a few things that are not explained very well in this video, so we're going to elaborate on them here:

• TrustPulse is not a plugin where all of its functionality is self-contained on your site. It is in part a remote platform that uses the WooCommerce REST API to communicate with your WooCommerce site. As such, you are granting it access to some of your data. Given the reputation of TrustPulse's parent company, OptinMonster, this should not be a big concern. Still, in this age of data security problems, we thought we'd mention it.
• To display social proof notifications, TrustPulse injects javascript into your web pages. Again, not a big deal if all is well. However, should you run into any problems, it is good to know this.

TrustPulse Features

TrustPulse offers four different subscription plans:

• Basic
• Plus
• Pro
• Growth

All plans come with the following features:

• Create unlimited campaigns for tracking and monitoring, including the duplication of existing campaigns to speed up campaign creation.
• Capture activities. Whether form submissions on your website, user clicks on page elements, or even off-site activities from platforms like MailChimp or Stripe, TrustPulse can capture them all.
• Display welcome messages.
• Display a live stream of website activity notifications for recent events like purchases, registrations, signups, etc.
• Create On-Fire notifications. Show the number of people who have taken a certain action on your website within a specified period, i.e. "29 people have joined our newsletter in the past day".
• Target individual pages for both capture and display.
• Control whether to display notifications on mobile devices.
• Control the timing, frequency, and looping of notifications.
• Filter out older activities or activities that can't be verified.
• Exercise control over notification design and effects using a simple yet powerful design editor.
• Generate basic reports/analytics on which notifications are causing the most views & clicks.
• Archive older campaigns to keep your dashboard focused on current activities.

TrustPulse's Plus subscription additionally lets you:

• Highlight active areas of interest on your website by showing real page visits over time.
• Use action messages to highlight information and drive visitors to take actions.

The Pro subscription adds:

• Advanced layout controls for conditional output of each element in a notification.
• Priority support.
• The ability to invite co-workers and consultants to collaborate in your account.

Finally, the Growth plan adds the ability to remove TrustPulse branding information so that you can white-label your solution.

For a complete list of features by subscription plan, please see this feature chart.

TrustPulse Pricing

As of the publication of this article, here is the top portion of the pricing panel for TrustPulse:

As you can see, it is not overly expensive, especially for a product that claims to increase your sales by 15 %!

In addition to the feature differences for each subscription plan, as described in the preceding section, note how the number of supported sites and monthly unique visitor limits also vary.

TrustPulse User Reviews and General Quality

At the time of writing this article, TrustPulse had received only 3 reviews at https://wordpress.org/plugins/trustpulse-api/, all of which were 5-star, despite having 20,000+ active installations. So we broadened the search across the general internet, the major software review sites, and technical platforms like Stack Overflow. We found a fair number of review articles but not much in the way of user feedback.

Normally, this would cause us to reject TrustPulse from our Best WooCommerce Plugins list until it had more of a track record. But the main marketing plugin of the parent company, OptinMonster, has over a million active installs and nearly 500 reviews with roughly 85 % of them being 5-star, so the company clearly knows how to build winning software.

In summary, then, we're going to give TrustPulse a pass for its lack of user reviews, point to the parent, and say that end-users are probably in pretty good hands here.

Please note that we do not accept or receive affiliate fees for any of our articles. These articles and the opinions expressed in them are written solely as a value-add for our paying customers.

Wrapping Up

We are constantly on the lookout for WooCommerce themes and plugins that provide exceptional value to end-users. We're impressed by TrustPulse and, as a consequence of writing this article, plan to try it out on our own website.

If you have an opinion about TrustPulse, please let us know so that we can share it with others.

Click here to visit TrustPulse's website.

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