By David Gikandi, CEO, SearchPositioning.com
[February 23rd, 2000]

See Also   Want A Sticky Website That Sells? Forget Content!   Giving Customers What They Want   Rule Busters Lose   Building Your Web Site's Sales   Abandoned Shopping Carts: Enigma or Sloppy E-Commerce?   The Only Visitor That Counts Is A Repeat Visitor   Three Steps to Get More Customers   Your Web Site - Do It Yourself? or Get Serious!   How To Make Them Buy Now   The Future of E-Commerce Stinks!   Beware Overload   Does Your Site Have Stopping Power?   Online Sales Psychology That Works   And the Broadband Played on, and on...   How Your Web Site Can Learn From Newspapers   Promise Not to Tell   Where's Your Community?   Understanding Your Visitors   The Seven Deadly Web Site Sins   The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - Part 2   The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - Part 1

So you have a Web site. No matter what it is all about, your site was built to be used by people. The good news for you today is that people, no matter how complicated they may all seem, run on a common psychological framework. They use this framework to do just about everything, including use and buy from your Web site. Let us look at seven standard psychological phenomena that work beautifully when it comes to online sales. Learn and apply these and your online success will definitely soar.

Conforming to groups

Peoples' judgement is highly influenced and dependent on the collective judgement of groups. What this means is that you will often make judgements that you believe are entirely your own but in reality they are based on what other people are doing! For example, you may go out and decide to buy something or take a trip somewhere but that decision is most likely highly influenced by your observing or reading about or hearing about other people doing the exact same thing. And you will often avoid things that most other people avoid. In fact, there are very many instances when you will adopt a group's judgement over your own!

What this means is that you should have as many features within your site as possible that allow users to contribute to, feel and be influenced by group opinions. For example, you must have testimonials. Have one testimonial on every page placed well, and have a testimonials page holding a bunch of them. Depending on your site, other things you should consider adding are voting, forums, statistics and surveys. All these allow users to contribute to the group thought and be influenced by it. Very powerful.

Listening to authority

We all know it - people listen unquestioningly to authoritative figures. If you even hold anyone in high regard as an authority, you will usually unquestioningly listen and do as they say. Think about your doctor, lawyer, and sports coach. These people can tell you to do what most people can't and you will almost always do it without questioning it.

This means that your site should have someone or some organization of recognized authority in that field saying something positive about your product or service. It doesn't have to be famous people, just authority heads. For example, a travel service can have a review by some magazines and a vitamin store can have some comments from some doctors.

Small agreements lead to bigger ones

If someone came up to you and asked you for your agreement on some major issue, they are more likely to get a no from you than if they came up to you and led you on with a series of much smaller issues that you can easily agree on, building to the major issue. Getting people to agree to a major issue is a lot easier if you first give them related but smaller issues that they can automatically agree to.

One way to use this in your business is to provide a free trial. It is easy to get someone to try something free. After that, it is much easier to get them to upgrade to a retail version. Another thing you could do is to ask questions that most people will answer “yes” to, spread out within your sales pitch. They must be questions related to the product or service. That build up of several related but easy yes answers make it much easier to get the final yes to buy.

Incomplete tasks

Most people are quite disturbed by tasks or events that are incomplete. You know how you hate it when those TV shows stop somewhere in the middle of a juicy plot, only to tell you that they will be continued same time next week? It disturbs your mind so much that you make it a point of catching the next show. And on the next show they do the exact same thing! Even in your life, when you have incomplete tasks, you keep thinking about them until you complete them. It is easier for people to remember and stay focused to incomplete tasks.

There are many ways you can apply this to your marketing. Your Web pages could lead people from one page to the next using this phenomenon. Your banners could start to give a series of 10 tips, only to stop after the third and ask the viewer to click on to get the remaining 7. Use your imagination!

A bonus use of this phenomenon is that you can figure out ways to get people coming back to your site. You need this to happen because most people only buy something after the fifth to seventh time that they get in contact with it. Therefore, getting repeat visitors is the most important thing you can do for your online business. As a matter of fact, you should use as many tactics, freebies and technologies as possible to get repeat visits.

Cognitive dissonance

In plain English, this means that people hate it when their beliefs are inconsistent with their actions. They won't rest until they resolve that conflict by changing their thoughts, beliefs or actions.

One way to use this in marketing is to get someone to make an easy decision, and then get them to take actions on their own so that they can prove to themselves that they made the right decision. People usually want to validate that they made the right choice. Another way to work this is to give them that validation early on so that when it came to the sale, they will have already eliminated their dissonance and they will buy to reinforce their belief.

More sales psychology tips...