Have you ever held yourself back from buying something, simply because you read some bad reviews? Bought something only because someone recommended it? Or sorted products by “popularity” on a shopping site?
Yes, we all do that. We want to make the right decisions and maximize value, so we rely on the intelligence of crowds. If many other people purchased a product and are happy with it, it’d be a good choice for us too. And that’s how “social proof” works.
Everyone adds customer testimonials on their site. But can you combine email marketing and social proof to build your brand and bring more people to your site/blog?
That’s what we will look at in this post. I will show you five practical (and easy) methods to embed social proof in your emails. But before that, some basics on using social proof in marketing.
3 Social proof techniques that actually move the needle
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that forces us to believe that “If X is doing this, I should do it too.” When we read “1000+ customers across the globe are using our products,” our brains process it as “if 1000 people are happy with this product, maybe I should try it too.”
Social proof is a psychological technique that uses the actions or beliefs of others to influence our own behavior. In email marketing, social proof can be used to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
Some examples of social proof in email marketing include featuring customer testimonials or success stories, mentioning the number of customers or users a product or service has, or featuring endorsements from influencers or industry experts.
The most effective sources of social proof marketing as a blogger are:
Influencers
I follow some popular bloggers. Their writing resonates with me and I want to be like them. So when they talk positively about a product, I (and other followers) want to try it too.
The lesson?
If we can get some influencers to endorse us, our brand, or our products, we will gain good traction. Btw, we can always start with second or third-tier influencers or influencers within a small niche. Top guys are not going to pay attention to us (or are going to be too expensive), so best to work our way up from the bottom!
Client experiences
When your clients explain why they chose you, or why they follow you, or the results they’ve created in their lives by working with you – their experience works as a huge “anxiety removal” for other prospects.
Even if your customers are not influencers or top brands, authentic reviews from real customers (especially the ones that describe the problem and solution) always work. Even negative reviews can work in your favor at times.
Numbers
Numbers used in social proof have a magically positive correlation with conversions. Large numbers (that are not rounded up) work better. If you’re just starting out, focus on representing some aspect of your experience or your customers in numbers. For example, if you are a freelance writer, you can mention “Every 4th article you write this year gets featured on a top 500 website,” or “Working with Fortune 1000 clients since 2010.”
This isn’t just a hunch – the “bandwagon effect,” a well-documented cognitive bias in behavioral psychology, explains why people are more likely to adopt a belief or take an action as they see more people around them doing the same.
5 Social proof hacks to drive maximum traffic through email marketing
Now that we’ve seen the top three social proof techniques, let’s see how we can use social proof and email.
Mention your top-performing blogs in emails
It is difficult to rank all your blogs organically. I have learned it the hard way. But as bloggers, we can try different ways to promote our blogs.
In the Icegram newsletter, I have listed a mix of old and new, top-performing, well-written blogs. Since these blogs were already doing good, I expected to see higher CTR (click through rate) and higher traffic from email.
And the strategy worked well – in the month after I started this practice, our newsletter’s average CTR rose from 3.4% to 4.1%, roughly a 20% lift, and average time-on-site for readers who clicked through from email rose by nearly 30 seconds. Apart from higher clicks and traffic, I observed another interesting result – higher time on site.
Readers continued exploring other content on-site on their own. And higher engagement is good for everything – search engine placement, reader satisfaction, conversion.
Include an inspiring customer success story
Testimonials work on websites. But will they work in email? Yes, adding customers’ testimonials to your emails can drive value. But I recommend going a step further. Use customers’ stories. A bit detailed, explaining the ups and downs, well-narrated success stories can motivate our subscribers and develop a positive mindset towards our offerings.
When you speak with a customer, they will tell you their perspectives in bits and pieces. Then you will need to develop a story out of it and narrate it to readers. But that’s not too hard, as we are already fond of storytelling, isn’t it?
Any customer success story or case study should have three segments:
- The challenges a customer was facing.
- The solution you offered them.
- The results they noticed after incorporating your solution.
Most of my early emails skipped this structure entirely — they were text-heavy and boring to some extent, with no clear challenge-solution-result arc, which is likely why they underperformed compared to what came later.
Use the power of numbers
Adding numbers to our emails can make a lot of difference. Now you may ask, what type of numbers? Well, anything that uplifts our social proof and builds trust for our email subscribers. Here are some types of numbers we can try:
- Numbers of social media followers or email subscribers.
- How many times a blog post was read, shared, commented on.
- Number of blog posts that rank on Google’s first page.
- Numbers of years experience as a blogger, author, creator.
- Numbers of different countries where our readers live.
- Count of customers, or new customers who signed up last month.
A lot of things can be turned into numbers. Be creative and think about what will work for your readers.
Remember, you can use numbers to drive traffic to a page or product. And you can also use numbers to increase subscribers to another list.
Talking about achievement is also a great way to engage your email subscribers. An award, a major client win, a cause you started supporting, a new team member, a new product, an interview with someone, getting featured on a popular website… There may be so many big and small achievements we keep getting.
But then we keep them to ourselves because we’re modest.
You don’t have to be too modest. People want to hear about your progress, that’s why they signed up to your list. So do share your accolades with your readers. It will create a positive feedback loop.
We must learn to harness the power of social media. As a blogger, I always try to balance email marketing and social media to execute successful marketing campaigns. And a great way to balance both is this – add at least three social media icons to your emails. This can result in two outcomes:
- Our email subscribers will visit our social profiles to check what kind of content we post, how much value we add, and how many followers we have. They might as well start following us there.
- If we have a good number of followers, we get to demonstrate social proof and win the trust.
A common execution pattern here: placing social icons in the email footer alongside a live follower count (e.g., “Join 18K+ of us on Instagram”) rather than plain icons with no numbers attached – the count does double duty as both a navigation link and a proof point.
Conclusion
Making social proof a part of our email marketing strategy is the need of the hour. Use any one technique I mentioned here in your next email. Then use some or other form of social proof in your next five emails as well.
To recap: highlight your top-performing blogs, tell a real customer success story, lean on non-rounded numbers, share your milestones without false modesty, and link your social profiles so subscribers can find you elsewhere too. Pick one to start with this week — you don’t need all five in a single email.
Your readers will respond and you will get positive results. Don’t get disappointed if you don’t get results on the first attempt. Keep exploring until you do. By incorporating social proof into your emails, you can build credibility, increase conversions, and drive traffic to your blog.
Ready to put this into practice? Use the Icegram Express to build and automate email campaigns that showcase your social proof!
Excellent guidance and quite accurate information to grow blog traffic through e -mail marketing. Quite practical also to implement.