3 Tips on Psychological Triggers to Help Increase Your Sales

There is one thing every online business owner should keep in mind, and that is, the success of your business relies on people and how you deal with them.

Due to the nature of the online world, website owners can sometimes forget the fact that the stream of traffic which comes to their site consists mostly of people with certain psychological expectations, needs, desires, beliefs, conditioning etc.

This fact is easy to take for granted due to the faceless nature of the people visiting your site.

Hence it can be tremendously beneficial to the success of your Internet business if you take the time to be receptive to the psychological qualities of the average person who visits your website.

By being aware of some of the common human traits you can tweak your site to better cater psychologically for your customers and in the process make it conducive to increasing the success of your business.

Note: It is important to keep in mind that you have to be ethical about your practices and genuinely sell a good product.

1) Do not overwhelm your customers with too many choices – less is more

Humans don’t really cope well with choice. It might sound counter-intuitive, but people are usually happiest in situations with less choice.

There was a psychological experiment conducted in Harvard where a group of students were taught how to take quality black and white photographs and were given access to the best equipment and shown how to use the dark room to develop their photographs.

After a few days of taking many photographs they chose their best two snaps and were allowed to develop them into eight by ten glossy prints.

At the end of the exercise each student was told that they had to give up one of their photographs but they could keep the other one.

Half of the group were given a choice of being able to swap their photograph up to 5 days later if they changed their minds, and the other half of the group were told that their first decision is final and that they would not have the choice of swapping their photograph if they changed their minds.

The results of this experiment revealed that the overwhelming majority of the students who had less choice were most happiest with their photograph. The other group who had more choice, were virtually all dissatisfied with their photos and were in anguish about their choice for days and weeks after the experiment.

The above experiment shows how people don’t cope well with choice and by knowing this, we can use such knowledge to apply it to our online business to increase our success.

For starters, in your product pages, limit the amount of choices you give your readers and focus on your best product(s).

If you have many products, you should try to group them in relevant categories and deliver them in smaller chunks which will help focus your would-be customers to one particular product group instead of overwhelming them with 20 or 30 choices.

The same psychology applies to your landing pages.

You should try to limit the amount of choice you give to your readers with regards to navigation and things which can be a cause of distraction, and focus your readers on the message you are trying to convey and the call-to-action you want them to carry out.

2) Fear of “missing out” is a strong psychological trigger point

How many times have you seen sales pitches which go something like:

“Save 20% on xyz for a limited time”

Advertising messages like the above example are used widely simply because they work.

The reason they work is due to the fear-based psychological trigger which most humans possess, which is essentially the fear of missing out on something.

Therefore when applying this to your business, you should not only spell out the benefits of your products, but you can also increase the impact of your sales pitch by adding an element of urgency if possible.

In other words, if you can also tell people what they’re missing out on in addition to what they are gaining, they will most likely respond more favourably to your sales pitch.

3) Humans will willingly pay for something based on perception

Another interesting psychological trait of humans is the role which perception plays when they are looking to buy something and also how this perception is affected by the price of a product.

People appear to place more value on something if they have to pay for it. Paying for something gives the feeling of accomplishment.

Of course it is your responsibility to ensure that what you are selling genuinely provides some kind of benefit to people and if you are able to demonstrate that your product produces results, you will most likely have no problem selling your product.

Another thing which increases positive perception is how well you can paint the picture of the auxiliary benefits of your products.

For instance when Apple sells their computers they not only tell you about the computer specs and features but they also cleverly paint a scenario of a cool and trendy person who uses their computers for enjoyment and business.

The positive perceptions which people have of Apple’s products is one of the main reasons for the company’s success and people have no issues willingly paying more for Apple products.

About the Author: This post was written by Peter Petreski who is an author for Tips and Tricks HQ.