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

[This is the second part of a two part article. The first part can be read here].

Conforming to group emotions

In a happy room, most people get happy. In a sad room, most people get sad. People conform to the emotions of the group or environment. That is why casinos and top retail outlets try so hard to create an emotional atmosphere of carefree spending or something similar that will cause emotions that lead to spending.

Have a look at your site. What emotion does it convey? A site's text, prose, colours, graphics and quality can make or break an online business just from the emotional angle. Same thing with banners and other ads that you do.

Needs satisfaction

Whenever people buy something, they do it to get some need fulfilled and/or to eliminate some problem. Simple. Even if you go out to buy a boomerang, the principle is the same. There is a need you wish to fulfil, such as exercise, amusement, discovery, fun. You may also be looking to eliminate something else such as boredom.

Examine your products and services and forget all the hype that you enjoy about your product. Forget the way you love that super-cool feature you built in. Just think on the needs level and find out what needs a buyer wants to fulfil and what they would want to eliminate. Needs are not features. Needs are things like saving time, spending time with the family, knowing something, or achieving success. That is what you will be selling all along. You only mention the features as a side item to seal the decision logically, but the decision to buy will be based on emotions and needs.

Surprise, free and casual works

Most people ignore advertising or direct calls to buy something. They get defensive initially. They even learn to automatically 'not see' advertising. I am sure that your brain somehow blocks out all those banner ads and only very rarely do you even really notice what is really on those banners. Why? Well, because your brain can see the ad coming! It has all the cues that make it look like an ad and it is shut out. What if it did not look like an ad. Perhaps it looked like content that you would be interested in reading, or a cartoon you like? You would see it and read it!

What this means is that your Web site, your banners, and everything else should have nothing that smells of advertising. Eventually you must ask for the sale (yes, you must clearly ask your client to buy, but only at the right time). But until the point where all your prospects emotional and logical requirements have been fulfilled, you must look like a free information service or at least provide useful information along the way even in your product information sheets. You must be the opposite of an advertisement. An ad tells you quickly about the product, its features, and screams at you to buy. The opposite is a useful information resource. That keeps the prospect calm, gives them something useful, while subtly leading to the sale. Only at the point of sale is the sale asked for very clearly and bluntly. With this strategy you will be ignored far less and the client will read your material much more. Give people free, instantly useful information and entertainment and let that lead subtly but persistently to the sale. Keep it casual.

You should also try to use something that people have never seen before. Surprise them in this way and they will pay attention. For example, when making a banner, don't do it like everyone else does. Use a design trick that people haven't seen before. One trick that used to work very well and still works quite well is to make the banner look like one of those Windows 95 OK and Cancel buttons in response to a warning message. Or you can have a banner that appears to fall and shake (like in an earthquake). Anything surprising and unexpected works better because it bypasses the brain's filters.

By the way, a good reason to offer something free and useful is that it allows you to be a part of your prospect's life. Once you have entered their life, you will be more readily accepted and can then work up to the sale.

Putting it all together

Well, there you have it. Now go back to your Web site and re-examine everything about it. If you find that it really is very far off from what we have talked about, then you might want to re-build all of it. Whatever you do, make sure that you fully grasp what we have talked about here and apply it in full to your site. You cannot go about applying these selectively. That will only work half the magic. For example, a lot of Webmasters are lazy or reluctant to offer free content and tools. Well, you must because most of these tactics depend on it. If you would like an example of how to apply this knowledge, have a look at www.positionweaver.com. Without free and instantly useful free content that induces return visits, it is going to be very hard to effectively get people to return the required 5 to 7 times, make small yes decisions, and correct their cognitive dissonance. Like we said in the beginning, people run on a common psychological framework, rules that you can live and succeed by.

David Gikandi is CEO at SearchPositioning.com. PositionWeaver.com features tools and resources that get you top positions for your Web site on AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light and other search engines. It also has forums, articles, links, and other resources useful for the Website owner and marketer. You can also download free trial copies of the PositionWeaver Gold and PRO software packages for Windows 95/98/NT from this site.