335: Use Proof to Add the Social Proof Conversion Cheat Code to Your Sales Pages, Shopping Carts, and Signup Pages to Increase Your Income with Dave Rogenmoser

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show Episode 335, use proof to add the social proof conversion cheat code to your sales pages shopping carts and sign up pages to increase your income. With Dave and Rogan Moser. Hey, everyone. We're talking right now with Dave. Rogan Moser And Dave is the co founder of proof, which is a software which creates a buying frenzy on your website by displaying a recent customer activity. And Dave also co founded the entrepreneur Alliance, which is a fast growing global club of digital entrepreneurs committed to building recurring revenue based businesses. So Mr. Dave, nice to be talking to you today.

Speaker 1 0:40 I'm pumped to dig in and share some good stuff here. Man, cool.

Robert Plank 0:43 I'm excited too. And so I understand that you guys have this sort of web app called proof. Can you kind of explain to us what that is? Yeah,

Speaker 1 0:53 so, you know, I've been in internet marketing for about three years now. Love funnels. Live and die by the funnel. You know, you get a really great funnel. Life's good. You can also spend a lot of time building a funnel that you kind of start running traffic to. It doesn't convert at all like you thought it would. I think we've probably all been there before. And what I found, you know, probably about two years ago, a really easy way to get a higher converting membership or higher converting website or funnel was by adding social proof on there. And it was by adding, you know, testimonials or screenshots of, you know, past case studies or videos from other customers that were really happy and started putting this on there. And it was like a shortcut, like a cheat code, I feel like, to getting a higher converting lead magnet or sales page or whatever. And that was all well and good. We're kind of running the game. And I noticed something that, you know, hotels.com and booking.com These other websites that were selling hotels, like, really huge websites were doing, and they were displaying little notifications when you were on the site that said, you know, so and so just booked a hotel room. You know, 10 minutes ago, or eight people watching this room right now, booked soon. And it wasn't just social proof, like a static social proof, it was like, really live and engaged. And I'd seen this a little bit on some Shopify kind of E commerce sites. And I thought, gosh, like, I want this for my funnels. Like, what if my funnels could just display notifications that said, you know, so and so just bought my course. So and so just bought my course. And I was like, that would be killers. I started looking around for it. Couldn't find, really, anything that did what I wanted it to do out there. And so, luckily, my partner is a software developer, one of my partners, but there's three of us and, and so he kind of built a little bit of an MVP version, where, in about two weeks, we had a little notification that would pop up on our order form and click funnels that said, you know, Matt just bought eight minutes ago. Dave from Annapolis, Maryland, just bought 12 minutes ago. That's kind of cycle through and, and that was kind of where proof came about. And so we put it on that order form. We set it we're like, you know what? We don't even know if it's going to work. Maybe it's not going to increase conversion rate at all. Maybe it will. I was thinking it would. So we put it on there and waited, and about three days later, we came back and looked at the conversion rate, and the order form was converted about 20% without that, which is fine, we're making money. We came back the door from was converted at 42% by using proof and displaying recent customer activity and recent sales. That's when I think we knew we were really onto something. So that's kind of backstory to how proof even came about.

Robert Plank 3:12 That's pretty crazy. So you're saying that you went from 20% on that order, from conversion to 42% so you doubled it just by like you said, adding that cheat code, adding that quick little sort of copy and paste and for everyone sort of following along. Can you tell us, like, is there a website where people can sort of see this live right now in action?

Speaker 1 3:30 Yeah, if they go to use proof.com that's that's our website, and that's we actually see it in action. Look at the bottom left. Or if you're on your phone, you can just pull you know, it'll show up at the bottom, and you'll start to see these little notifications pop up with, sometimes a map of where a person's location is. Sometimes a, you know, actual person, you know, there, maybe their social profile picture will be on there. And I'll start telling you how many people have signed up here recently for our website. Super

Robert Plank 3:55 cool. And so like, Yeah, you said you've seen this on on travel sites and things like that. And I this makes me think of seeing this on, like, a Weber site maybe, I mean, five or 10 years ago, just like, you know, saying, like, same exact thing, like, such and such, 16 minutes ago from this city and state sign up for a Weber. And that's just a really cool thing that, like, I've kind of sort of like, you I've seen it all over the place, but never really made the connection that, like, oh yeah. Like, someone can make sort of a plug in where someone can sort of put that on any sites. And you mentioned Click Funnels. So am I sort of writing assuming that this can appear on any site, like, whether you host it or not, pretty

Speaker 1 4:32 much. I mean, they were kind of always kind of working on, like, fringe cases, but for the most part, anybody with a website can use proof, again, as occasional, like, if you're using one of the mainstream ones, though, then it's going to work for you and work well. So that's kind of the key for us, is to make this really easy to install for all of our users. And I think maybe what we've seen is that people use a ton of different stuff. Like, there's 1000s of softwares out there that people are trying to integrate with. We're trying to keep up with all those, but, uh, but luckily, we've knocked out. Most of the big ones,

Robert Plank 5:01 super cool and so and so look. So I get the idea that, okay, if someone is about to buy it, sort of flashes different people who have, maybe, you know, bought recently. And can this be used for other things, like, Can this be used for, say, like, opt in forms and things like

Speaker 1 5:15 that? Yeah, so kind of question that we had in our minds, okay, cool. Well, this worked on our order form. You know, we went test on other order forms. It was working really well on order forms, and still, to this day, it works the best on order forms, because I think at that point, like you're pulling out the credit card, the buyers are trying to, like, take in as much information as they can about whether or not this is a good deal. I think, like, what, what proof? Or why proof works so well is because, you know, people don't know what's a scam, what's not, you know, you look at some picture of, you know, somebody as a testimony. Is that even recent, like, is this site even live now, you know? But then you see, like, Joe bought two minutes ago. You're like, wow. Like, Joe's on the site right now. He just took that action and and then move forward. But I think our question was, well, is this gonna work kind of further up the funnel where, you know, you don't really need as much social proof. I'm to give you my email address. I'm not all about work. All that worried about it, like I'll do it or not. But what we found is, yeah, that you can, you know, one technically, you can put this on, you know, any lead magnet, anything like that, using the software. But it also increases conversion rate quite a bit. We found it's not as much the further, you know, the further down the funnel that you go to, like the sales page and order form. It works better. But even on, like, you know, lead magnets, webinar registration pages, ebook downloads, things like that, it works well, too. Super

Robert Plank 6:28 cool. So, so we can, you can use it on any of those things. Like, I hadn't even thought of webinar registrations, but I was just sort of thinking that in terms of, well, if someone is saying, like, you know, I just set up a Shopify store, or if I have a site that doesn't have a ton of traffic, I've sort of seen that, uh, that with your your proof sort of tool, that, if that, some things can sort of flash by and say, you know, such and such bought. But am I right in assuming that say, if someone hasn't bought in like, a day or two or a week or even longer, it'll, it won't. It won't give that negative social proof, right? It won't say, like, oh, well, you know, Dave bought six months ago. It'll only show, like, the recent purchases, yeah. So

Speaker 1 7:06 that's just saying that we're working on right now to be able to kind of stop it after a few days. Most of our customers have, you know, some action being taken, you know, on a regular basis. And so we'll tell people, like, say, you listen to this, like, well, I don't get this many orders, you know that that frequently. But I would say, well, we'll move up the funnel, you know, like, what do you get more frequently? Do you get more email addresses? You know, a certain point? Do you get more lead magnets? Maybe it's webinar registrations. Maybe you want to get a few purchases a week of your course or something. But, yeah, just put it on a place that you do get more opt ins. And you know, if someone's not getting any, any, you know, opt ins or anything for like, weeks at a time, like, they're probably not gonna afford the software in the first place, you know. So it hasn't really been too much of a problem for

Robert Plank 7:48 us. Okay, just curious and so and so, sort of, can you, like, walk us through? Like, what are the sort of steps that someone goes through when they when they grab your your proof, your proof tool, like, they log in, and then I'm assuming that they grab some kind of code and, like, somehow hook it into their kind of system. And so, like, I mean, what are the steps involved with that?

Speaker 1 8:07 Yeah, so we really try to make it as simple as possible, but first thing people need to put our little JavaScript pixel in the header of every page of their site. And the reason we do that kind of every page allows us to track everybody, allows us to get better location data from the person, because we'll actually pull the location of the visitor. And so when they opt in, you know, we might say again, Dave from Annapolis Maryland, well, they didn't type in Annapolis Maryland. We just pulled their IP address. And so having that really helps. And then you got to decide, kind of really two things. One, where are you pulling the information from? And so for that, that's like, what's the form that they're actually entering or submitting? And so for a lot of people, it's, you know, an order form. And say, I want to pull information whenever somebody submits an order, I want to grab that. I want to display that notification somewhere. Then the second thing is just, where are you going to display that? And so a lot of people will, you know, display on the order form. So you pull from the order form, you display on the order form, but maybe you want to pull it and you want to display it on a sales page. And the sales page doesn't have any forms on it, but you just want to show so and so just bought. Or maybe you want to take it and you want to put it on, you know, way up the funnel, and on your home page, you want to say somebody bought, even though you're not actually signing up on the home page, just clicking through a button. So these are just two things, you know, where do you want to grab it from? And then what do you want to display it on? And like you mentioned, webinar registrations. I mean, it crushes on webinar registrations. We get really, really crazy opt in conversion rates just from putting proof on there. So yeah, most pages, it works well,

Robert Plank 9:29 cool. And I like the way that you explain that we're like, there's you can place it wherever you want. That's one part of it. Like webinar, opt in sales form, whatever. And then you can also choose to place it in any other point. So like he said that you got a really huge boost putting it on the actual order form. But then he also had a lot of success with putting it on, like the very front page of the site. So it's really cool kind of going in, knowing that it can, it can go in different places, and so, so, you know, we've seen sort of the proof pop up. And so it kind of pops up and shows, like you said, like Dave from a. Annapolis Maryland, and sometimes shows their picture and like, where does that sort of stuff come from? Does it come from? Like, their Facebook profile or Google Plus? Or where does it like, grab the the picture of that person? Yeah,

Speaker 1 10:10 so we grab like, exactly public profiles that they have available. You know, we can't find it for everybody. And if we can't find their like, publicly available profile, then we'll just put a map in place, and we'll just show, like, a little pin on Annapolis, Maryland, but yeah, we just pull up from their social profiles, cool,

Robert Plank 10:26 and then so so after people get get proof set up, I've logged in a little bit. I've noticed that I can sort of see, like, some of the more, like recent, I guess you like entries or, I'm not sure what what the term is, but like, what I mean, what other sort of interesting things are there to do after the proof pixel was set up? Because, like, for example, one thing that me and my business partner did was we set up the proof pixel, and we immediately set up a split test of it with the pixel and without it. And I went back to him later. I think we had to, we needed to redo it because we had some some test data. But I mean, are there any sort of actions like that, like split testing it, or anything sort of similar that people should be doing after they get this pixel in place.

Speaker 1 11:05 Yeah. So really, we prefer to have people split test. A lot of people split test just because, you know, they're marketers, and they get that and like, what did you guys use for that? Like Optimizely or VWO or something? Just use the built in Click Funnels, split testing, okay, because these put on different URL one on one on one there, exactly. That's like a lot of people, you know, do for do for us and so, but what we found is, like, a lot of people don't split test. And that's kind of an interesting I think even some of these, like, really, like high net, you know, high level people, and we've got, you know, probably 20 or 30, like, pretty big name people that are using it here now, you know, people would recognize and what's funny is a lot of them just say, Oh, I get it. You know, I'm not going to split test this because I don't want to lose the sales. And I know it's going to work. I know it's going to be better. And it's kind of cool to see people that, like, really understand market, understand what's going on. They say, Oh, yeah, we're actually just going to launch it because, you know, we're in a big launch right now. We're trying to make as much money as possible, and I know I'm going to lose on the split test. And so I'm not even going to do that, but I really like people split test. We try to run our, you know, by the data and by the actual numbers here, and so split testing, I mean, people have all sorts of, you know, decisions to make, as far as you know, where they want it, what kind of settings do they want, you know, the notification do they want? It showing up on mobile, not showing up on mobile. It's kind of a variety of different things there. But yeah, that's kind of the challenge for us, is thinking through, you know, how can we even can we even do split testing inside of our app where you have to, like, set it up and click funnels, you can just press launch split test on this one page, and kind of, we'll take care of it from there. So there's kind of new features like that that we're coming out with here, down the pipe. That's

Robert Plank 12:34 a pretty good idea. I'm looking forward to that. And so, um, are there any features that people aren't making use of with proof, or is it just, like, just that simple that there's not a lot to miss out on, there's

Speaker 1 12:45 not a lot to miss out on. I mean, I think the biggest problem that we kind of overcome, or trying to trying to overcome here, is getting them to use it on lots of different pages. And so, you know, I want it to be part of everybody's like, just set up flow where, you know, you create a new page, you're creating a new webinar, kind of, you know, quickly, I want it to be where proof is on that page every single time. And what we found is that people might set it up once, they might set it up on a couple pages, but then, like, they kind of go back to their normal flow, and they're setting up an order form, you know, they don't even think about putting proof on there. They kind of launch it and I'll go, you know, find it a couple days later, if they're kind of a VIP customer, and say, Hey, you should put it on here. But I think it's the thing is that people, people like it, people see great results from it, but then they might kind of forget about it in their normal every day, because it's not totally built in. But yeah. So the more we can do that, I think the more people will be happy about it and make it easier for them to actually set it up and use it a lot.

Robert Plank 13:41 Super cool. So when people see, like, the extra boost they get from having that proof pixel there, then they'll want to make it part of their checklist when they set up all their different stuff. Yeah,

Speaker 1 13:52 you know. And we're gonna start kind of recommending URLs, or maybe, you know, for you, like, you launch a new webinar page, and we see it starts getting traffic, we can actually like, alert you and say, Hey, here's a new page. Proofs not set up on you. Do you want to set it up? Maybe you can even like, one click Set it up, or it's like, yeah, I want on that URL. I want on this URL. All thanks for reminding me. Maybe we'll give you an email with, Hey, we found these, these four new URLs in your flow here this week. Do you want to put proof on any of them and just make it really easy in case, like you forget to just start adding proof to various pages really, really quickly. That'd

Robert Plank 14:23 be pretty cool, especially, yeah, if like, click funnels, or Shopify, or one of those, like, big timers, like, agree to that where just like, one click drops the proof pixel. I mean, sounds like the dream, yeah,

Speaker 1 14:33 totally. Now we're working with that. I mean, we're good friends with the guys from Sam cart. A lot of our customers use SAM cart, and we're gonna talk with them about kind of doing, like a one click. How do I just hook it up where this is, like, standard, all you got to do is hook it up one time, and now it's just going to be showing up on all your pages from there on out. And I think, I think if we can get it easy to set up, then we win. Yeah, I

Robert Plank 14:53 think so. And just like, yeah, just the way that you've been describing proof, it's like, it's really cool, because, I mean, I've dealt with all those same. Issues, both as a buyer and a seller with testimonials, right? The testimonials are like, they're okay, but they're kind of a tough thing to get. And then it always sucks, because, like, there's they write this big, long thing, and then if there's a website that they have in there, I have to, like, check every once in a while to make sure it's not some, like, five years out of date website. And then if it is, like, now, the testimonials working against me. And then if someone does even more research, like they look at, like the way back machine, they look at, like older versions of my site. Next thing I know, I had the same testimony on there, 567, years ago. And then, and also, on top of all that, like you said, sometimes it just says, like, you know, Dave R or something, like, you don't see, like their whole whole name, and it's like, is that even real? So the proof sort of seems like the, like, the updated version of testimonials, right? Because it's like, they automatically update. It seems more real because there's actual, like, a picture and a map and stuff like that, and and it also sort of ties into, like, this whole idea. It seems like everyone has like, shorter attention spans, or seems like there's like, you know, everyone has less time to look at a website. So all this makes sense that, you know, why would you have, like, a big, long testimonial, if you can just drop in proof, or maybe even, like, have the best of both worlds? So, so, really cool idea. And so you mentioned, like, you have a couple of sort of features plan, like this whole split testing thing, anything else new, less sort of exciting that's coming up that people should be aware of and excited about, with proof?

Speaker 1 16:19 Yeah, well, I think where we need to move as a company is, you know, like, proof is not complex as a product, like, if someone is a developer, you know, or maybe you hired a developer, you could go get proof built individually for your site, for, you know, maybe a couple 1000 bucks. But what it is difficult is, is to do it as a company. And so it's difficult for me to make it easy to install on 1000s of people's sites really, really easily. So it's not a really complex problem. It is a very complex business. And I think what we're trying to move to is, how do we we move from kind of having a feature, or a few features, to building an entire kind of social proof conversion platform where you're kind of managing all your social proof, you're kind of managing your conversion in there, where we can maybe automate the collection of testimonials and start displaying testimonials in your flow. We can kind of automate, maybe the capturing of videos. We kind of manage all your videos in there. That's kind of where we want to move to. Is really like social proof as a service, and the social proof marketing platform that everybody uses to kind of manage all their social proof, but always with the idea of like conversion in mind. Like we love conversion. That's the reason we came about this in the first place. I'm a lot more excited about conversion than I am about social proof. It's just that social proof is an incredibly easy way to increase conversion. And so we're going to kind of move into, how do we become a platform here? So, yeah, so split testing. You know, we might make it where you can kind of click on the the notification that pulls up a full map of the world with everybody at the opt in various place. You can see, like, opt ins from all over the world. So it's like, wow, this dude's like, global. This is pretty cool here. It's not just me so things like that, but really a lot of it'll be more in the back end of, how do you kind of manage yourself? Manage your social proof and and keep your up your website updated regularly? Awesome.

Robert Plank 18:07 I mean, I think that this is a really good idea, and I think that everyone should get this app. And it's been really interesting just sort of hearing about your, sorry, your thought process and some of these problems that you're trying to solve. And what's really great about this is, like you said, like you're solving just like a really simple thing. But just the difficulty is in getting it to catch on with everyone, right, getting everyone to use it in whatever sort of platform they use, if it's Sam card, if it's Click Funnels, if it's WordPress, whatever it is, you're just trying to make sure that everyone uses this tool. And, I mean, it's really awesome thing that you stumbled upon, the cheat code, as you put it, where it's just like, this really easy thing that, you know, sort of, like, you know, some people say, like, well, putting a logo on your site increases it by this much, or by, you know, removing this other stuff on your site increases by that much. So it's really great that there's just this sort of, sort of tool that's not really built into any of these other platforms, but it's really needed and is really easy for people to put on their site. So sort of, as we're winding down our discussion here, you know, we've been talking a lot about social proof and things like that. And I mean it, have you seen anyone do the social proof thing, like, incorrectly, like, Are there any sort of pitfalls to avoid when it comes to people adding things to their websites, and any things that they should avoid when they don't want to kill their own social proof?

Speaker 1 19:19 I mean, I'm just a big I really think it's kind of like, you know, I'm kind of a lazy guy when it comes, like, build some stuff out and there's so much to think about, right? It's like, headlines and copywriting and, like, What color should the button be? And, you know, should I do an upsell or down sell? Like, all these different things. There's so much to learn. And I kind of think that social proof, the lazy man's way to get a high converting funnel and so, so I don't really see people doing it wrong often, you know? I honestly, I think kind of the more. If you just took a ton of screenshots from your Facebook group and put it on a page, it would work well. If you just took a ton of pictures from like, all your customers Facebook pages and just put them all on there and say, here's all of our customers. There's like 100 just pictures. Of, like, people's profile pictures, it would probably increase conversion rate. And so, yeah, I don't see it done wrong lot, if anything, I think people just missed out on it a lot. And I'm constantly reminding myself, like, hey, when in doubt, adding social proof makes everything else easier in your funnel and in your in your marketing,

Robert Plank 20:17 cool stuff. And that makes perfect sense, especially with the rise of, you know, Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and all these other social networks, it would make sense that people are looking more for that social proof, as opposed to any other kind of stuff, like see what their friends are doing, or see what other people, just like them, are doing. So makes a lot of sense. And thanks for keeping it simple. And it sounds like just the lazier way works, because you just take a screenshot, put it on there, and you call it a day, you know? Why overthink it? Why talk yourself out of it? Why not just do it? So can you tell us one more time where to get this proof thing for our websites?

Speaker 1 20:49 Yeah, and the way I like thinking about too kind of a line to remember is when I say it, it's marketing. When my customer says it, it's social proof. And so I can Yap all day long about me and how great proof is. But like, again, our website is use proof.com. You can go there. Don't listen to me talk about it. Go look at all of our customers on there. Go look all of our screenshots. Go look at all the pictures of the influencers that are using this. We got Amy Porterfield, Alex Becker and Nicholas, Kuz Mitch and Christian Mickelson and these other people that are using it. Like, let that speak for itself, because that's a whole lot more powerful for people. So yeah, use proof.com you can check everything out. Perfect.

Robert Plank 21:24 Great advice. I love it. Use proof.com that's U, S, E, P, R, O, O, f.com, and I want to thank you so much, Mr. Dave for stopping by the show and talking about proof and all this fun stuff. And appreciate having you on today. Want to listen to more fantastic episodes of the Robert Plank show. Subscribe to us at Robert plank.com/itunes and browse past episodes at Robert plank.com you.