Trustisto Review: Nudge marketing tool for ecommerce stores
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TL;DR
Trustisto's nudge marketing popups boost conversion within your ecommerce store. The nudge marketing toolkit takes popular visitor actions, views and purchases and turns them into even more of them. It does so through tiny, unobtrusive social proof alerts. Think of them as helpful signposting on popular products, how many people have bought it so far, when an offer ends, or any other reassuring words a potential customer might need to hear.
Trustisto Pros
- Nudge theory popups
- Made for ecommerce stores
- Super quick install
- Easily customized
- Based on actual behaviour
Trustisto Cons
- Fewer app integrations
- No round-up actions
The Story
What is Trustisto?
Trustisto is trust in a bottle.
Much like Fomo, Trustisto captures popular actions on your site and re-uses them as sales aids. A simple yet effective white hat conversion technique.
Other nudge marketing features up Trustisto’s sleeve include overlays to persuade exiting users to stay, automated upselling suggestions and dynamic message bars tailored to each unique visitor.
You decide when each nudge shows, what it looks like, the action it tries to encourage and any incentive to be used. You set the nudge theory rules and Trustisto does its thing.
What is Nudge Theory Marketing?
Nudge theory is a concept in behavioral economics that proposes small instances of positive reinforcement and suggestions to influence behavior change. It was the core concept of the 2008 book Nudge, by Richard Thaler (a revised edition was published in 2021). Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in the field.
Applied to marketing, Nudge Theory Marketing uses tactics such as social proof popups, app notifications and even Smart meters in homes to reframe choice architecture to influence purchase decisions and other behavior.
Meet the Maker:
Marta Mierzyńska
We spoke to Marta, Trustisto’s Business Development Manager, earlier this year. With a career rooted in tech and startup culture, she was drawn to the buyer psychology side of Trustisto and applying it to help fellow small businesses grow.
Trustisto’s founder is Wojciech Grześkowiak. The lightbulb moment came to him when using a travel site to look for hotel rooms and a little pop-up informed him of others who had also booked it that day. It worked on him and he was hooked. Wondering why more stores didn’t have the same functionality, Wojciech decided to create it.
Started in 2017, the nudge marketing software has an impressive feature roadmap of what’s to come.
The Product
How we tested Trustisto for this review
I’ve got good form in this space. A Trustisto alternative, Fomo, is running on Surges. Fomo picked up an impressive 89% in my review, so I was keen to see how Trustisto compared.
Trustisto comes with a free 30-day trial. Plenty of time to sign-up, set up a few dummy campaigns and get to really know the full toolkit.
Getting started with Trustisto
Trustisto is nudge marketing made easy. Own an online store and it’s simply a case of using their Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce or whatever plugin. There’s also easy install for Wix and Squarespace.
Add your store using the ‘Add website’ button and select one of their template nudge marketing events (e.g. ‘Page View’, ‘Homepage View’, ‘Basket’ or ‘Buy) to get going. Of course, you can setup custom events too. Non-ecommerce websites will require a lot of code, so try to avoid it if you can.
You create these events and alerts in Trustisto dashboard, which will also show how effective they are at converting recipients. It really is that easy.
Trustisto features you’ll love
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💬 Social proof pop-ups
‘Trust info’ is the name given to real-time notifications triggered by other user actions. Be that page views, purchases, trending products, subscriptions or low stock. These are your social proof used to tempt others to do the same.
These tiny nudges are reported to increase sales by 20%. It’s not hard to see why.
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🤖 Customize rules and branding
You can easily customize both the style and position of notifications, meaning they can blend into your site or stand out as much as you like. The level of customisation is very impressive.
You might want to hide smart notifications on specific pages, show only once to certain users, reveal a buyer’s first name and the price they paid, include the product picture, or none of this. How you nudge consumers up to you.
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📣 Unmissable smart bars and overlays
These sit at the top of your page and can be programmed to serve the right content to the right contact. Tailor your content or offer (e.g. free postage or a discount code) by referral source, location, basket content or their actual behaviour on your website. You can even use it to grow your database with an embedded form, reclaim abandoned carts or get feedback from users.
These types of bars are a bit overused now, so you’ll want to grab the attention with an added element, such as countdown to claim or show the most relevant products to each user.
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💻 Browser tab takeovers
The average web browser opens 14 other tabs while shopping. Guilty as charged over here! Trustisto’s Trust Tab feature gives you an unfair advantage by changing the tab name to something that’ll undoubtedly regain their attention. Display an offer, a greeting, emoji or anything else of your choosing and you can even make it flash. A very subtle form of nudge marketing!
Things to consider
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Impact on site speed
When it comes to embeddable social proof tools, speeding up buyer behaviour isn’t the only consideration. All plugins slow down the stores they’re on, and this is no exception. I’ve even noticed it with Fomo on Surges.
Trustisto try to keep the impact minimal. The tests we have carried out confirms that Trustisto does not significantly affect the results from website performance tools such as Google Lighthouse.
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Impressive roadmap
Trustisto has a long list of ‘coming soon’ features to encourage desired behavior. Some are a bit mysterious but the standout ones all related to personalized emails – whether that’s to recover abandoned carts or recommend new products. Standard affairs for some toolkits but hopefully included in the low price and high usage allowances that Trustisto charges for its core nudge marketing features.
Trustisto Pricing & Offers
from $19 per month
Once your free 30-day trial is over monthly fees start at $19. The starter package holds you only to a single site and 25,000 nudge marketing notifications. You get more of both with each tier up you go. Anybody without a budget may want to consider Sumo.
10% discount
Exclusive saving on all pricing tiers. Mention code in live chat.
Trustisto Alternatives
I’m a back fan of Fomo, Unbounce and Sumo, two of which are installed on Surges.
The first and last of which are a very similar to Trustisto, with realtime pop-up notifications linked to all your top actions and apps. Fomo has the edge when it comes to integrations, languages, round-up events and customisation, however Trustisto’s roadmap could see it soon offer a lot more including automated personalized emails in response to actual behaviour.
One thing I think about both Trustisto and Fomo is their focus on ‘honest marketing’. There’s no dummy data in notifications to trick visitors, with viewer/buyer counts reflecting real user actions. The way it should be!
Trustisto Support 👍 or 👎
Trustisto is tailored to ecommerce sites. If this is you, you’re in for an easy ride.
The integrations mean you can get going in 10 minutes or so and the premade templates cover the most common use cases.
Should you need support Trustisto support is via a live chat with decent response times. The support documentation is a little light but easy enough for non-technical marketers to follow.
The Verdict
Surges score
73%Trustisto is nudge marketing best practice in a box.
Its social proof notifications act as a helpful tap on the shoulder or whisper in your ear when you’re standing in store on the cusp of buying. Use them to show page view counts, trending products, new subscribers, low stock or any other eye-catching metric of your choosing. Nudge theory being that these mini-endorsements speed up customer decisions and reassure them to take the same action again. The power of a mere nudge!
Trustisto has plugins for the big ecommerce platforms, ensuring the data shown is based on real user actions, making them even more persuasive. A regular flow of honest reviews and votes for your top products. At the time of this review, there’s only a small number of nudge marketing formats to choose from but they’re typically highly effective and customisable to your brand and objective.
Because Surges isn’t an ecommerce store, Trustisto can’t tempt me away from Fomo… yet. I’m really excited by the features on the horizon as it looks to double-down on conversion and venture into automated email marketing. I’ll be sure to revisit this review then and update their score accordingly.
For now, it’s a great-value option for any small-to-medium online store, wanting to multiply their customer base a few times over through nudge theory marketing.
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