Bart Schutz, the Chief Persuasion Officer at Online Dialogue, is a psychologist that studies the science of persuasion and how it impacts conversion. In his session at Conversion Conference, he shares his 200 techniques for winning customers.
Bart begins by discussing how the tools, data, and science are only part of the equation. The other part is PEOPLE. Bart argues that your job as a conversion optimizer is to focus on people’s brains. But how do you convert a brain? Science!
And the best thing about science, is that it’s very cheap (or free) and you can take advantage of it to make money by increasing your conversion rates. By applying psychology and data to conversion, you can take actionable insights and turn them into ROI.
Some of the persuasion techniques you can use to increase ROI are identified below:
1. Needs & Motivations
Compare intrinsic to extrinsic motivations; people who are intrinsically motivated are more likely to come back pleased and provide repeat business. As an example, if you offer an extrinsic motivator (such as an iPad), people are actually buying the motivator, not your product. If they come back and their isn’t a similar offer, do you think they’ll buy again? Probably not. In the long run, you’re best focusing on the intrinsic motivators.
Make sure you test the life-cycle ROI for your customers to determine if they are coming back. Customer retention is much more efficient than customer acquisition.
How do you boost intrinsic motivation?
Autonomy: Basically, people want to feel like they have a choice. For a CRO, this means giving people options. Simply giving options boosts sales. Provide a minimum of 2 choices and a maximum of 5 choices to maximize conversion rates (choice paradox). In reality, people presented with multiple choices oftentimes don’t consider doing nothing as an option.
However, this is not an absolute rule. Sometimes too much choice can negatively affect quality. One size DOES NOT fit all. Always be testing to find out what works for your business and end users.
2. Attention & Perception
We only see what we pay attention to (inattentional blindness). The brain only pays attention to a small amount of detail at any one time. It’s totally subconscious, but we inadvertently focus on certain types of details, such as faces. But when you use faces online, you don’t want people to look at the faces, you want them to look at your offer or copy. If you are going to use faces, make sure the faces are looking in the right direction, that is, towards your offer or what you want people to pay attention to. That allows you to take attention from the eyes towards what you want people to look at.
Visual cues can elicit desirable behaviors. Arrows and shapes can result in increased page scrolling.
3. Decision Making
Decision making is done through two systems:
- System #1: Emotional, instinctive, fast, subconscious
- System #2: Logical, Rational, slow, conscious
People love the slow part of the brain, or System #2, so marketers tend to focus on that system. We use post-rationalization to support our user’s behavior, which is problematic, because System #1 is much more impactful in decision making. System #1 is essential to ANY decision we make. If a person’s System #1 and System #2 are disconnected, people get analysis paralysis and are unable to make a decision. Pure information cannot result in a decision. Only weighing that information with System #1 enables us to make choices.
In reality, we FEEL our choices, then we post-rationalize.
4. Anchoring & Adjustments
Where you position offers relative to one another makes a difference. Listing a more expensive option to the left and then the cheapest to the right can actually result in higher conversion rates. Test the position of your offers to take advantage of anchoring. Oftentimes, setting an “anchor” price can make other offers seem better by comparison, incentivizing behavior.
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