When it comes to persuasion, human nature is very predictable. There are certain conditions in which we all react similarly. When the right conditions are presented to us and the right persuasive buttons are pushed they act as automatic compliance mechanisms that, once set in motion are very difficult to resist, this is just the way our brains are wired.

In the classic book on persuasion, Influence: The Physiology of Persuasion, Dr. Cialdini, who is regarded as the world’s highest authority on persuasion and influence, masterfully examines six principles of persuasion that are universal across all cultures and circumstances. Among the six principals are the principle of scarcity and the principle of commitment.

Both of these persuasion principles as well as others can translate online in the form of persuasive design and conversion rate optimization. Let’s examine how Totsy.com expertly applies the principal of scarcity and at the same time solves the problem of choice as discussed in a previous post.

Totsy is an Ecommerce website that adds a level of exclusivity through private selling and requires you to create an account before you ever see a single product for sale, creating a form of exclusive access for savvy moms.

Exclusive access alone is in itself a form of persuasion, by wrapping membership around the language of exclusivity on the home page. The button copy used to become a member fully supports the exclusivity of the site. Rather than simply saying, “Join” the button, says “Request Membership” which is congruent with the private access they promise for brand specific sales of up to 70 percent off.

Once a Totsy member the principle of scarcity is in full effect. Totsy features products on it’s site for a limited time, up to three days and typically at 40 – 70 percent off.

You can only buy 3 items – and preview upcoming items for the next 9 days. The limited choice of only 3 items is actually a good thing and encourages members to become repeat visitors, creating a behavior pattern in their customers to remain in a constant bargain buying mode.

The perceived scarcity that is created by limiting sales to a specific time with a countdown clock generates more demand and taps into the limiting factor of scarcity for every item.

The time for the sale is very prominent on the detail page and throughout the browsing visit. What is more interesting is the use of the principal of consistency. The persuasion principal of consistency states that if people publicly take even a small stand towards something, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Totsy capitalizes on this principal masterfully by adding a timer to the shopping cart. After you have added a product to your cart an Attention message warns you that your cart will be emptied in 9 minutes if you don’t check out or resume activity on the site. This creates a form of persuasive pressure for the buyer. They have committed to adding an item to their cart and now the pressure to remain consistent with their action of adding an item to the cart begins to build over the next nine minutes.

The factor that has the most impact on weather a visitor to your website buys or bounces is their individual level of motivation. Everyone has their own individual motivations for finding their way to your landing page or website and there can be literally millions of different levels and types of motivation that get some one to click and buy. For a refresher read the post on the 21 reasons why people buy. An understanding of your visitors motivation is vital to improving your conversion rates, which is why I recommend starting with your customer by creating user persona documents before you begin to design or write any copy. Understanding the exact motivation or combination of motivations from your visitors’ perspective is where the mouse meets the click. But selling online is more complex than just matching motivations; we’re not really all a bunch of pavlovian dogs although we’re not far off. Different people prefer to buy in different ways and the key to better conversion rates is not a heavy-handed persuasion fist, it’s a combination of tools of which persuasiveness is only one.

The problem with most websites is that they start and stop with only one way to communicate to everyone. A mass media broadcast strategy in a one to one Internet world. That works on TV and in print but not on the Internet. On a website you can literally tap into the exact way your visitor prefers to buy rather than forcing everyone to buy the same way.

The key to tapping into this power is the humble little link. But before we get into that let’s first take a look at how to help different types of visitors buy. No matter what you sell online or who your potential buyers are, it all goes back to the human brain. Every human brain is wired the same way and therefore we all process information the same way. When in a buying or browsing mode, no matter what our individual motivations may be, we all fundamentally process information three basic ways. Visually, auditorally and kinesthetically. These are the different modalities of learning and processing information before we decide to buy.

Every individual usually prefers one of these modalities over the other. The visual modality person learns best by seeing. The visual cortex of the brain is larger than all of the other sensory cortexes of the brain put together. The auditorial modality person learns best by hearing. The kinesthetic modality person learns best by doing.

So how does this tie back into selling online, optimizing your conversion rate and the humble little link you ask? Well, remember that each modality is connected with the processing of information and processing of information is directly tied to how we choose and make purchases.

Visitors on your website move through the online space, from one page to another page by following text, images and links. Each modality is an indicator of how that particular person prefers to buy. Quite literally each modality is attracted to a mirror of itself. The visual person is attracted not only to images but to words that resonate with the visual. For example words like see, and look. The auditory person is more attracted to words that key in on the auditory senses like hear, listen. And the kinesthetic person is drawn to tactile words like feel.

These different modalities are keys to how each person prefers to be sold to. Remember websites don’t’ sell, they help people buy and if you can tap into how different types of people prefer to buy you can sell more online.

So let’s tie this back to the link now that you know what motivates the different types of modalities and what each prefers. You can apply this to increase your conversion rate by weaving in the different key trigger words for all three modality types into your sales copy and linking each to a different buying path, that is a different page and flow that is specifically designed to sell to that particular modality.

Because the prospects that visit your site don’t all fall into only one specific modality type you’ll need to apply your linking strategy to all three. By tapping into how each visitor’s brain is wired and allowing them to flow through your website at their own pace and through a path that they create for themselves through the links you’ve provided you’re helping them buy from you.

Running into my local supermarket to buy a few items before a vacation should have been easy. Just grab a few travel necessities and head to the 10 items or less checkout line. The problem wasn’t what to buy, I already had a short list in my head, the problem was which ones to buy. There are so many different options of every type of product available today. Foe example, in the 1970s there were only two types of Colgate toothpaste, today there are thirty-two different varieties to choose from. How do we decide which one to buy?

This problem doesn’t just exist at your local supermarket, it also exists online and is perhaps worse their because shelf space is not limited on an e-commerce website. Online buyers are constantly inundated with choice, so much that if the selling process is not designed correctly it could cripple a buyer from taking any action at all and you will loose the sale.

A classic study was conducted back at the supermarket with jam. Perhaps because that’s where choice is overly obvious. A small table was set up at which a woman was offering jam samples. In the first study group 6 different flavors of jam was offered. With 40% of customers stopping to taste some sample jam. Out of those who stopped for a taste, 30% purchased one of the flavors they sampled. In the second study group 24 different jars of jam were available to sample. More jam choices resulted in 60% of customers stopping to taste some jam. From which only 3% purchased.

When faced with more choices the brain actually has additional trouble deciding. That’s just simply the way the brain is wired. We think we want more choices but more just make more difficult to take any action. Our brains literally shut down in the face of more options.

It doesn’t matter if the different choices are in front of us at the supermarket or online. The human brain is wired the exact same way for everyone in every choice situation. We all go through the exact same steps when making a choice. If we as designers and marketers can understand the way the human brain works and how people choose, then we can design not only the look and feel but also the selling process. When e-commerce web design and an understanding of the brain are in-line we can sell more online.

Here are the steps that our brain is hard wired to go through when we are confronted with choice.

Step 1 – When confronted with several different choices our brains begin to choose by winnowing, or narrowing down our choices. On a website we begin by looking at the top-level navigation. This first step happens entirely in the mind of the prospect and this is where the taxonomy of your website is important.

Step 2 – After winnowing our choices down, our brains go into selection mode. On a website this is the stage where our minds enter the gallery page, or category level page. This step happens on the screen. We look through the visual choices offered and click one to move to the next step in our minds.

Step 3 – The final stage our brains go through when making a choice is validation. At this point a buyer has clicked through to the detail page of the product they choose in step 2 selection. They are deeper into purchasing and they are looking for only one thing, to validate that their choice is the right choice for them. The details of the product are important here. If the buyer is unsure or if you didn’t do a good job of designing the buying experience, remember the jam example earlier, then the buyer will resort to pogo sticking. Just like a kid on a pogo stick, your visitor will bounce back and forth from gallery page to detail page searching desperately for validation trying to make the right choice. They won’t be blaming you the marketer or the web designer because they do not know how their brain is wired to go through these same steps every time, but only you have the power to help them buy.

The human brain goes through these same three steps, Winnowing > Selection >Validation for every multi choice decision we are confronted with. As web designers and marketers we need to understand how the mind works in order to help visitors buy online. By tapping into your newfound knowledge of how the brain is already hard wired to work and choose, you can leverage that in your online selling cycle to help people buy and optimize your online conversion rate.

When improving website conversion rates through testing and optimization, understanding the why is critical. The why is at the top level of insight that we as designers and marketers need to continuously strive to get to. True insight from any testing and optimization comes from an understanding of what specific variable in your test made the difference. What was it that caused the lift in conversion rate, or the dip? Was it the headline, the button, the product image? What was it that you can point to and bring to your boss and say – Here. This did that and the impact was this in real money to the bottom line.

Knowing the why in any conversion rate optimization test for both positive gains and decreases means we can then begin to get closer to predictability. We can make changes in the future to generate consistent results. This is the holy grail of conversion rate optimization, but it is not always what we should be striving for. Often times when it comes to testing and improving conversion rates, businesses do not have the luxury of time.

Sometimes a business needs results and they need them fast. In such a situation it may be less important to know exactly which particular test variable contributed to the impact of improvement and it may be more important to just simply increase results. This is not the dogma of the scientific method but from a business perspective it makes sense.

Sometimes the business need outweighs the needs of science. We’re not living in a lab with white coats and precise measurement tools. We’re building e-commerce sites and living in the trenches of online conversion rates. To get closer to understanding the why we need to conduct systematic tests, changing only one element at a time or conduct very strict multivariate tests, which require a considerable amount of traffic in order to be statistically valid and a disciplined thought process.

For such a situation, where traffic in terms of visits is not all that high to conduct anything other than an A/B test. The business pain is high and results are required fast. Or upper management buy-in to the idea of conversion rate optimization or testing is low and you need a quick win. It’s OK to enter the world of testing and improvement without solving for the why. In such a situation you’re strictly solving for improvement. Your conversion rate optimization philosophy needs to shift in order to focus on the biggest gains possible. The best chance of reaching those big double, and triple digit improvements is to approach your testing in a radically different way. Changing one element at a time will beyond a shadow of a doubt tell you if that particular element improved your goal or not but you’ll most likely experience minor gains at best, in the range of a few percentage points. Taking a different approach however can lift your conversion rates in the triple digit range and beyond. To get the 100+% improvements your test page needs to be drastically different from your control page. Think of your test variable in this case as your entire page rather than simply 2 versions of the headline. There is a time and place in your testing plan to get more granular and bring it back to understanding the why but in the situation described previously your best chance for wind improvements is going to be found in wildly different test pages.

If you’d like to further discuss conversion optimization testing philosophy please contact me, (bobby @ creativethirst dot com) I’d be more than happy to chat.

When it comes to web analytics, there’s always more to learn, and the best place to learn is from your peers. The majority of my web analytics learning these days comes from a select group of web analytics masters. I’ve put together a Twitter list of people and organizations that I follow that I thought I’d share with you.

Web Analytics Twitter List  http://twitter.com/Bobbyhewitt/web-analytics

If you follow any let them know I sent you and happy learning.

In no particular order:
@Madison_metrix, @lunametrics, @brianclifton, @jonnylongden, @vkistudios, @immeria, @webtrends, @omniture, @jimsterne, @garyangel, @jimnovo, @erictpeterson, @googleanlytics, @YwebAnalytics, @waworld, @WAAorg, @anvinashkaushik

If you know of any other great web analytics gurus to follow on Twitter, please leave their @handle in the comments, I’m always looking to expland my knowledge and i’m sure the Creative Thirst blog community would appreciate it also.

For years Internet marketers have spent time on search engine optimization (SEO) which focuses on driving more free traffic to your website by improving the likelihood of people finding your website through an unpaid search result. In the early days of the web and even to some degree today, the mentality has been once you have web traffic the rest would take care of itself. Unfortunately this is not even close to being true. Very few marketers have spent any where near the time and devotion on conversion rate optimization (CRO) as they have on SEO, although the number of smart marketers concentrating on conversion is growing more and more.

Traffic is only one component of success, getting people to your site is necessary but if 98% (based on an average ecommerce conversion rate of 2%) of those people are just getting there and not buying or signing up or completing whatever your conversion goal you have for your website, you’re leaving money on the table. Money that could be yours, by improving your website conversion rate.

Conversion rate optimization is the process of scientifically changing elements of your website in an attempt to make your website more effective. These elements can include but are not limited to web pages, landing pages, images, words and processes used on your site, or simply taking away what does not work. Conversion rate optimization is powerful because it increases your website conversion rate without increasing the number of visitors to your site. By increasing total conversions you should increase overall revenue, depending on the specific definition of what your business considers a conversion. For example an ecommerce website would consider a conversion a sale, a lead generation website might consider a conversion as some one who has filled out a request for information form or downloaded a white paper, etc.

The practice of conversion rate optimization has evolved out of two main schools of thought. One school is focused on jumping straight into testing various elements and pages of your website to discover the best version that will increase conversion rates. The second school of thought is focused on first understanding your visitors thought process and then moving onto the testing phase.

Neither school of thought is better or worse than the other. Each has a place depending on the needs of the business. However, they both come down to scientifically testing and letting your customers choose what works best. There is no room for ego driven decisions when it comes to conversion optimization, it always comes down to your customers and consistently rigorously testing, over and over again. Any test is better than not testing at all.

For more information on how to optimize your website for higher conversion rates, please contact bobby @ creativethirst dot com.

The core principles of persuasion have always intertwined in all aspects of life, face to face interactions, websites and all aspects of technology. Why should gaming be any different? Well it’s not. Psychological persuasive triggers have been part of games since they were invented and played using rocks and sticks. The only difference now is that games are more technological but persuasion has not changed.

This inspiring video is from the (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) 2010 DICE Summit on how games use principles of persuasion and what the future of persuasion might become.

When often faced with a choice, any choice most people choose to do nothing. Our brains are hard wired through evolution to protect us. Our deep-rooted caveman brain sees change as unsafe and keeps us from doing anything different that what we have already done in the past. When we need more online results we do what we have always done, buy more traffic.

Wasn’t it Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and expecting different results?

This is what most marketers do every day. They buy more traffic, through different means of acquisition and expect different results. More traffic means more potential sales right? The part of our brains that protect us is afraid to do anything different. Marketing acquisition is what we have always done, and more traffic is fundamentally good right?. It has become a natural reflex for most marketers at this point. Your marketing budget has been allocated to traffic building and you’re probably doing a lot of other tactical stuff on the SEO traffic driving side, so why stop? More traffic will always be a part of Internet marketing, without traffic there are no sales.

What our caveman brains are not letting us see is that there is a better way. There is a way to work smarter not harder and increase sales without increasing traffic. That answer if you haven’t guessed it by now is conversion rate optimization. The art and science of improving and testing your website to deliver higher returns and more profit by increasing your conversion rate not your traffic numbers.

Let’s take an honest look and peel back some layers of fear, uncertainty and doubt and try to reason with the caveman brain.

Let’s say your website converts visitors at a rate of 2% any you’re currently bringing in 5,000 unique visitors through paid traffic with an average of $100 revenue per conversion.

At a 2% conversion rate you’d have 100 conversions that would generate $10,000 in total sales. Now let’s say you increased the amount of paid traffic to your site by an additional 1,000 unique visitors, with all other things being equal. A 2% conversion rate would give you 120 total conversions with $12,000 in total sales. Not too shabby, but remember the extra 1,000 unique visitors came at a cost, and that cost is a recurring cost if you want to keep those sales figures up each, week.

Now let’s look at an alternative to spending more and more money on traffic.

What if you increased your conversion rate but kept the same amount of traffic? If you just increased your conversion rate by a half of a percent 0.5% with the same amount of  unique visitors as before 5,000 and an average of $100 in revenue per conversion, that small lift in conversion rate of 0.5% would generate a total of 125 conversions (5 conversions more than getting 1,000 more people to your site) and a total of $12,500 in total sales. Even if you paid twice as much than you did on bringing in more traffic to improve your conversion rate by a mere half a percent, you would sustain that higher conversion rate over time. Giving you more conversions and more sales over and over, month after month without the cost of continuously feeding more and more traffic, over and over again. But imagine what your total sales would look like once you added more traffic to a site that was converting sales at a higher percentage than you’re converting now.

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s bad enough that our brains are hard wired to keep us in the dark and resist change. Not all change is good and jumping into conversion rate optimization with your eyes closed is no way to expand your mind or your conversion rate. You deserve to know the full story. There is a dark side to conversion that very few people talk about. Again let’s peel back another layer and take a look at some hard truth.

Truth #1 - Conversion rate optimization is not a quick fix. It is not as simple as turning up traffic. Conversion rate optimization deals with the mind of your visitors. Conversion does not happen on web sites, it happens in the mind of your prospect. It is critical to understand your prospect and the psychological triggers of the buying process to get it right quickly.

Truth #2 - Conversion rate optimization may take time. If you jump in blind without knowing what to improve or how to properly conduct a valid test that will tell you with at least a 95% confidence level that the improved version of your web page will consistently perform at that higher level then you may be increasing your conversion rates temporarily. It is vitally important to understand how to conduct a proper conversion test.

Truth #3 – It may sometimes take one step back to take three steps forward. You may not always get it right the first time, no matter how well you think you know your customer. There are a lot of factors involved in conversion rate improvement, including usability, design, motivation, etc. with so many moving parts you are not the best judge of success before something is tested. The final outcome is in the hands of your visitors, it is up to them to decide. However, with every test you learn something that can help you improve the next time.

Truth #4 – Conversion rate optimization requires consistency and dedication. To truly implement a conversion rate optimization strategy takes a commitment to testing and continuous improvement. Improvement and testing is not a one time fix. Each website is different and how high you improve your conversion rates is up to how much time and dedication you are willing to put into testing and improvement.

It is now up to you. Will you continue to settle for the same conversion rates you currently have? Will you overcome the part of your brain that wants to keep the status quo and continue to do what you have always done, bring in more traffic and hope for the best? Or cay you resist your own brain and gain improvements you never thought possible? The choice is yours, but I vote for conversion rate optimization.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blatantnews/ / CC BY 2.0

Why should someone buy from you? That is one of the top three vital questions every website needs to answer within the first five seconds of a visitors arrival on your site.

According to Ellen Langer Harvard social psychologist it is a well-known principle of human behavior that when people ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we give them a reason rather than just simply ask. In fact Langer conducted a study in which the conversion rate was a whopping 94% in favor of providing reasons. 94% of people in the study complied with the favor asked compared to 60% when no reason why was given for the same favor.

The persuasion principle of providing reasons why applies to improving your online conversion rates as well. From the perspective of a product that is being sold online. It is not enough to simply list the benefits and features of the product and hope your visitor clicks the buy button. You have to give reasons why your prospect should buy.

So how do you do this online?

The answer that just about every single marketing book out there gives in answer to that question is that you have to develop a strong USP.

USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition, which means you should promote a benefit of your product that identifies you as being different from all your competitors. USP is what makes your product different.

But just being different is not enough anymore in a world of so many products to persuade visitors to buy. Consumers have infinite choices and options to choose from online and even more websites that sell that same product.

We all want to be different, but the problem with simply developing a strong USP is that it’s not in-line with the buyer. A USP is focused on you, your product or your website. USPs are seller driven. As the name implies, they boast the selling of your product. They push the sales message and shove the reasons why your product is different down the wallets of your prospects. Providing reasons why is a common persuasion tactic, and as the study reveals it does have a positive impact on conversion rates which is why so many marketing gurus raise the USP flag and tout the importance of developing one. But there is something even stronger and more powerful than a USP. The VP sometimes referred to as the UVP or the Unique Value Proposition.

The reason why the UVP is more powerful than a USP is that a value proposition shifts the focus from the seller to the buyer. The value proposition is not about what makes the product unique, it’s not about pushing the message. It’s about pulling the buyer into the process. The process of buying vs. selling.

Your prospect has one main concern, them. Not you. Not your product. Them and only them not what makes your product unique. A Value proposition puts the focus on them. What value will your product provide to help them solve their problem?

Here’s an example
A USP might be – Contains Dual Acting Stain Remover, To Get Tough Stains Out.

That sounds great but it does not add value for the buyer. It speaks about the product alone with a feature that makes it unique, it contains dual acting stain remover. The USP tries to add a benefit statement that qualifies the feature with – To get tough stains out. But this USP still, like all USPs focuses too much on the selling side and not the buyers side.

You need to sell the value not the benefits or features. Lets take a look at how we can save this and make it a more powerful value proposition.

A UVP might be – Remove Tough Stains With Only 1 Wash

Do you see how that shifts the focus to the value the customer will get with the product rather than what makes it different than the other products?

To create value propositions you must start with a few questions.

1. What problem is your prospect trying to solve?
2. Does your value proposition speak directly to the problem?
3. What is the impact to your customer?
4. Does your value proposition show evidence and support in the form of quantitative information?

Photo Credit: by Sir Millard Mulch. Used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spine/ / CC BY 2.0

Even if people are not fully aware of it, they think about things based on what surrounds them, like a picture in a grand elegant gold frame. Suddenly that picture becomes more elegant and takes on the characteristics of the frame around it. If this works for pictures would it work for other things?

For years advertising agencies have been trying to tap into the mental models of customers by focusing on the old marketing acronym AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. There is certainly a time and place for that tried and true formula. Every website needs to capture the attention of qualified visitors, peek their interest and desire and get them to take action and convert to a sale.

However, where agencies and marketers usually fall short is only focusing on creating awareness and framing. Awareness is a necessary part of any marketing strategy and every website needs visitors to be aware of them in order to get traffic. Framing aligns your product or service with a certain feeling or a particular set of attributes, which is also important in the grand scheme of your brand.

Focusing on just awareness (getting more traffic) and framing (look and feel) will only match your offline marketing campaigns which is far too often all any web designer has to work with. The marketing department is so caught up in a command and control environment they often can’t see beyond just matching the offline print and or television campaign online.

Online marketing however is a different beast entirely. Simply harmonizing your website with your print campaign only deals with framing your product in a certain light and is only one of several powerful tools that can be used to get more sales and conversions. In other mediums like print and TV framing is simply all that you can really do effectively. Other mediums are not interactive and can’t take the ball and run with it to further the sale or even close the sale like a website can.

Because marketers just want to match the offline campaign for brand consistency sake, they are missing out on more sales and higher conversion rates. Don’t get me wrong I fully support brand consistency but there is a lot more that a website can do than simply match the message along with the look and feel and add a call to action button. It’s sad that most websites are still thinking like online brochures. Brochure websites are still an epidemic and so many websites are leaving money on the table because they see the web as a magazine or TV ad with a buy button.

Websites need to do what ad agencies and marketing campaigns can’t do to fill the gap. They need to move beyond look and feel and help visitors make decisions to take action. This is the heart of what conversion rate marketing and persuasive web design is all about, help visitors buy.

This is a completely different approach than simply concentrating on just look and feel or framing. Persuasive web design pulls directly from consumer psychology and mental models, which is where framing comes from but it goes much deeper. It’s more than just visual, it’s verbal too, more in lines with an internal dialog with the visitor and your website in the form of links that pull visitors through an optimized path for buying. By combining design with psychological triggers like scarcity, social proof, reciprocity, consistency and more websites can begin to design the buying process not just the colors and look of your website.

Photo Credit: Gold Picture Frame by Goldener Bilderrahmen. used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eriwst/ / CC BY-SA 2.0