37signals.com blog has an excellent example of how social proof can be a conversion catalyst. Am sharing their post snippet–
There’s a flash flood warning for all of Chicago today. Unfortunately there’s water in my basement (like other Chicago home owners)…
The flood fixing company U.S. Waterproofing has a cool feature on their website. Look at who we’ve helped in your neighborhood–
Back to my post …
See U.S. Waterproofing interface live– http://www.seepage.com/getreco.php?zip=60606
Now, U.S. Waterproofing is a Chicago based company so they are using their Google Map mashup to attract Chicago customers. But you could do the same for your ecommerce business. You could export a list of addresses shipped to in the last X years and create a Google Map mashup that places a pin over each shipped destination. Then, shoppers could zoom in to see different locations in their state where other shoppers have bought your products.
Don’t think it’ll work? A/B test it. Don’t know how to A/B test? Post a comment and I’ll help you out.
Like this idea?
Would this raise any privacy concerns for the shoppers?
In the U.S. Waterproofing example they don’t reveal the actual address, but you bring up a really good point. I hadn’t considered privacy angle. One option is to only export city level data into Google Map.
Thanks for the comment, Karthik.