|
|
|
|
|
Comments or Suggestions?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Share this Article
|
|
By David Gikandi, CEO, SearchPositioning.com
People run on a common psychological framework. Learn how you can use this to boost online sales.
So you have a web site. No matter what it is all about, it was built for use
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.
Give free stuff
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. Give people free and
useful information and let that lead subtly but persistently to the sale.
By the way, a good reason to offer something free and useful is that it
allows you to be a part of your prospects life. Once you have entered their
life, you will be more readily accepted and can then work up to the sale.
Listening to authority
We all know it - people listen unquestioningly to authoritative figures. If
you hold anyone in high regard, you will usually listen to and do as they
say. Like your doctor or lawyer. 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.
Conforming to groups
Peoples' judgment is highly influenced and dependent on the collective
judgment of groups. What this means is that you will often make judgments
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.
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. 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.
Needs satisfaction
Whenever people buy something, they do it to get some need fulfilled.
Simple. Even if you go out to buy a boomerang, the principle is the same.
There is a need you wish to fulfill, such as exercise, amusement, discovery,
fun.
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 fulfill. Needs are not features. Needs are things like saving time,
spending time with the family, knowing something, and 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, needs.
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 up 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 spaced out within your sales pitch and those questions are the
type that have a yes answer. They must be questions related to the product
or service. They must be they kind of questions that almost always have a
yes answer. That build up of several related but easy yes answers make it
much easier to get the final yes to buy.
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 useful
free content that induces return visits, it is going to be very hard to
effectively apply these principles. 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. AboutWebmasters.com is a large interactive webmasters portal featuring everything an e-commerce professional needs. It also features tools and resources that get you top positions for your web site on AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light, Google, iWon, AOLSearch, MSN, FAST/AllTheWeb and other search engines.
Printer-friendly version
|
|
|
|
