Psychology and Ecommerce – How To Happily Marry Them

Every web site we build is optimized for 6 critical psychological triggers.

Use these triggers to inspire visitors to become leads and leads to become customers.

Note: With this power comes great responsibility.

Making sales online can be challenging if you’ve never made lots of sales before, so we thought we’d share some of our strongest strategies with you.

There’s a $474,500,000,000+ holiday pie to be split over the next 35 odd days. Here’s to making your cut a big one.

Psychology is an essential element of modern selling. Understanding what triggers people to buy makes the difference between a sale and a failure. A desire to buy involves more than logic – it involves emotion as well as deep human psychology.

According to master copywriter Joe Sugarman, 95% of buying decisions are subconscious and “knowing the subconscious reasons why people buy and using this information in a fair and constructive way, will trigger greater sales response – often far beyond what you could imagine.

“Much of the knowledge in this tactic comes from two experts in the science of psychological persuasion. The first is Robert B. Cialdini, a Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. Cialdini’s book, Influence: Science and Practice is perhaps the single most important book on business one could read.

The second expert is Joseph Sugarman, the best-selling author and top copywriter who achieved legendary fame in direct marketing and ran a highly successful mail-order company in the 1980s.

Joe learned on a mass scale which ad approaches worked and which ones didn’t. He studied the ads that achieved a high degree of success, and discovered that they were clearly successful because of certain underlying psychological triggers.

He identified 30 of these triggers that activate psychological forces buried deep within the subconscious brain, and cause people to buy. His book, Triggers, is also highly recommended.

You can check it out here:

http://www.psychologicaltriggers.com/

Before we build or launch any new website we analyze our business concept to see how well our idea will sell.

Our framework for this discussion is based much on the works of Cialdini and Sugarman. In this tactic, we’ll share with you how we think about products and how to design websites that convert based on the understanding of human psychology.

How powerful can these factors be? In the words of Joe Sugarman: “I recall a time when I applied one of these subconscious devices by changing just one word of an ad, and response doubled. I refer to these subconscious devices as psychological “triggers.” A psychological trigger is the strongest motivational factor any salesperson or copywriter can use to evoke a sale.”

The Six Factors of Influence

When designing a new site and business model we develop our site around 6 elements of influence identified by Cialdini. These are psychological factors that help make a product desirable and push people to want it.

Is it unethical to use these factors? It depends on what you’re selling. If your product is flaky and useless and you refuse to honor guarantees and refunds, then you’re being unethical. But if you sell a product that’s of high quality, you provide a fair way for consumers to return the product if they are not satisfied and only make claims that you can meet – then you’re being fair. These 6 factors, however, can be manipulated.

When you read about these tactics and understand how they work, you’ll also help make yourself immune to unethical businesses that chose to use them to unfairly sway buyer behavior.

Here are the six factors of influence. As you read this, we want you to think about how each of these factors can be used to enhance your site, product or service

• Commitment and Consistency
• Reciprocity
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity

Learn to start incorporating these 6 psychological triggers into all of your marketing and you’ll find that selling comes easier, because you are using powerful strategies that have scientifically been proven to influence the buying decision.

Enjoy making money online and please remember to promote and market products which actually impact people’s lives in a positive way.