You’ve already done the hard work of building your online store. Now it’s time to squeeze out sales from every opportunity on your site to grow your profits.
Naturally, you’ll be looking at crafting multi-faceted marketing strategies and effective sales funnels to boost your sales.
But while you do that, I want you to consider complimenting your marketing plans with a low-effort but powerful strategy: leveraging your existing customers for social proof.
Think about it. Wouldn’t you feel persuaded to complete a purchase from a store if you have proof of other customers also doing the same with live notifications appearing on your screen?
That’s exactly what I’m going to show how to achieve in this article — creating live sale notifications for WooCommerce.
How to Create Live Sales Notifications for WooCommerce
Here’s how to set up live sales notifications for WooCommerce (or any WordPress site).
In This Article
Step 1: Sign Up for TrustPulse
To create notifications about sales as they occur on your site, you need a tool called TrustPulse.
Visit the TrustPulse website and click the Get TrustPulse Now button to create your account.
On the next page, select which plan you’d like and click on Get Started under that plan.
Next, fill out your account info and enter your payment details. Once you complete your checkout, you should see a welcome message.
Click on Add Your First Site to proceed.
Congrats, you’re all signed up for TrustPulse. Time to make your live sales notification.
Step 2: Create a Sale Notification Campaign
The first time you log into your account, TrustPulse will require you to enter your website domain name along with a name you want to give it for internal reference only.
You can name your site whatever you’d like, but you’ll need to enter the actual domain name of your site such as www.example.com.
Once you fill out these details, click on Save Site.
On the next page, you’ll be prompted to create your first campaign. Click on the Create Campaign button in the top right corner to get started.
On the first campaign creation page, you’ll have to give a name for your campaign and select your site (if your plan allows you to use TrustPulse for multiple sites).
After filling in these details, scroll down to see different campaign types. Social proof comes in many forms. It could be statistics about recent purchases, aggregate user activity, visitor analytics, or even a custom action message.
For displaying live notifications about purchases made by an individual customer, select the Recent Activity campaign type. After that, click Next Step to continue.
And if you’re curious about what’s happening on your WooCommerce site? You can check out this post on how to enable WooCommerce conversion tracking.
Step 3: Customize Notification Appearance
After selecting your campaign type, it’s time to customize the appearance of your notifications.
Among other things, you can easily edit your language, set up a default notification, how you want to refer to your visitors, notification icon, and more.
Some of these settings will be overridden by more precise product-related notification settings when you use the WooCommerce integration with TrustPulse. I’ll discuss this in a later step.
You’ll even see a live preview on the screen as you change it.
You can expand the advanced settings area if you’d like to adjust the background color, drop shadow, border, and more.
Adjust these settings to your liking and click Next Step when you’re ready to move on.
The next step will require you to set up a method for capturing user activity on your site.
Step 4: Set Up Activity Capturing
In order to display your live sales notification, you’ll need to let TrustPulse capture activity from your site that it can display.
On this next page, you can choose between 3 ways of capturing site activity:
- AutoMagic — Automatically tracks and records user activity and submissions on your WordPress site (good for form submissions).
- WooCommerce Orders — Captures new WooCommerce order notifications upon checkout.
- Zapier — A separate tool that lets you capture visitor interactions from over 7,000 web apps.
For this tutorial, we’ll select WooCommerce orders because the goal is to track live sales notifications.
Next, scroll down and click on the Connect TrustPulse button to integrate your WooCommerce site with TrustPulse.
Once you’ve done that, a new window will open where you’ll be required to approve the connection request. Click on Approve.
At this point, you should see a success message confirming you’ve set up the integration between WooCommerce and TrustPulse.
With the integration ready, TrustPulse will need a webhook configured with WooCommerce in order to track order notifications.
It will automatically create one for you if you don’t have it already. Just click on the Create New Webhook button.
After you’re done with that, you can scroll down and edit settings for how the product-related notifications should appear.
The advantage of capturing data using WooCommerce is that you can include the product name in your sale notification text. All you need to do is add the {{product_name}} Smart Tag along with your custom message.
Other than that, you can:
- Set product priority: If the customer ordered multiple products, you can display only the first product in their cart, the most expensive one, or choose a random one.
- Use Product image: If available, TrustPulse will display the product image in the notification, overriding the default icon.
- Link to product: Enable this setting to automatically insert the link to the product in the notification – convenient for visitors interested in buying the same product.
You can also add your Google Analytics ID and set up a custom dimension in your analytics dashboard to track TrustPulse campaign data.
When you’re ready, press Next Step to move on.
Let’s take a look at the notification display settings now.
Step 5: Set Up Notification Display Rules
Next, you want to give your live sales notification some rules as to where and how it will show up and display orders to your visitors.
Use the dropdown to select where you want these notifications displayed on your site.
You can choose between displaying on:
- Any page
- Exact URLs
- URLs containing specific text
- And more.
You can also adjust the settings for display duration, delay before showing the first notification, and other related settings.
The default settings are a good place to start, but you’re free to make edits as needed. Once you’re done, click on Next Step.
We’re almost at the end of the line now!
Step 6: Launch Your Live Sales Notification
The last step is to launch your live sale notification so that you can start leveraging social proof to boost your sales.
If you connected TrustPulse with WooCommerce as we showed in the previous step, TrustPulse would already be connected with your site and ready for launch.
Simply click Launch your TrustPulse campaign to publish the live notification.
Now, every time a product is purchased from your WooCommerce site, your visitors will see a notification pop up, effectively creating a FOMO effect to persuade more people to convert!
Alternatively, if you’re using the AutoMagic capture method, you can connect your site with TrustPulse using the TrustPulse WordPress plugin, which eliminates the need to add any embed code.
And that’s it! Now your customers can see live notifications when other customers purchase items from your store.
FAQs on FOMO Notifications
Here are a few common questions asked by other store owners interested in using social proof notifications on their site:
Why should I use live sales notifications on my WooCommerce site?
Live sale notifications can boost sales, upsells, and cross-sells by tapping into consumer psychology to trigger the FOMO effect. People rely on the actions and feedback of other people. A live sale notification can often mean the difference between an abandoning user and a converting one.
Are live sales notifications intrusive to site visitors?
Theoretically, live sales notifications can be intrusive and distracting. This is why it’s important to use a tool that’s designed to be easy on the eyes and confirms best practices for ensuring a good user experience.
TrustPulse notifications are super compact, taking up a small space at the bottom of the screen, so they’re not intrusive at all to site visitors. And you can set the delay and duration of each notification so that it doesn’t impinge on the visitor’s attention negatively, along with controlling which pages of your site a notification can appear on.
Using notifications sparingly prevents user desensitization, and you have all the controls you need in TrustPulse to eliminate the overuse of your sales notifications.
Is it possible to measure the impact of live sales notifications on my sales?
Yes, TrustPulse provides essential analytics for your sales notifications with statistics like views and clicks. For deeper insights, you can also integrate TrustPulse with Google Analytics to measure your sales and conversions.
Can I customize the appearance of live sales notifications?
Yes, you can customize the appearance of live sales notifications quite easily. When editing the design of your notification, TrustPulse gives you a bunch of advanced settings that allow you to choose the fonts of your notification text, background color, styling features like drop shadows, and more.
Next, Track Your eCommerce Stats
Want to see who’s coming to your WooCommerce site? You should head over to our tutorial on how to use Google Analytics in WordPress.
To make your contact form more useful, you can auto populate fields with the name of your products. You can also receive SMS notifications for your contact form so that you don’t miss any customer inquiries.
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