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.

Which do customers find more attractive, 40% OFF or $5.00 OFF? A study conducted in the July 2007 issue of Journal of Marketing research asks that exact question.

The research discovered that customers are more persuaded by a percentage off vs. a dollar amount. This makes sense from a persuasive design perspective. Simply put, the number 40 is bigger than the number 5 in 40% off vs. $5.00 off.

Yes it really is that simple.

Offering a specific dollar amount off of a product with a coupon can change a customer’s perception of the product’s value. When buyers are presented with a percentage discount, a specific bargain price doesn’t ever enter their mind. Where as a specific dollar amount off like, the $5.00 OFF offer creates a specific dollar amount comparison to the total cost of the product. The discount could be the exact same dollar discount, but the percentage will be perceived as bigger. (Obviously that is dependent on the total price of your product.) Customers simply won’t do the math (with the exception of 10 percent or 50 percent offers, where the calculations are easier) and therefore, the percentage off seems like a greater savings to most shoppers.

We can also see the same persuasion perception happen on offers that are stated as a percentage range like. 20 – 50% OFF. Psychologically people have a tendency to assume they will get the lowest discount and think they will get 20% off not 50% or any range in-between. Perhaps consumers have developed a thick skin from years of being marketed to or maybe most people are pessimists, I’m not sure. Either way there are some significant insights you can take away and apply to online conversion rate marketing.

Don’t believe me? One easy way to apply this principle online is to conduct an A/B split test for an adwords campaign. Simply run two separate consecutive ad tests through ad words.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Choose a one week 7 day period that does not have any holidays in it and run version one of your ad copy with 20 – 50% OFF.
2. Immediately follow up that test for another 7 days again with no holidays in this 7 day run and be sure to include the same days as the previous test (Thursday through Wednesday vs. Thursday through Wednesday, etc.) and run version two of your ad copy with the 50% OFF offer.

Your success metric for this test will be the (CTR) Click Through Rate. CTR = total clicks / total impressions. Think of the CTR as a visitor converting from your ad to your landing page. CTR is a the proper metric for this test since your testing variable is the ad copy not the landing page or final sale. You simply want to find which offer drives the most traffic to your landing page.

Here are some examples on how to use the percentage discount offer in your ad words ad.

20 – 50% OFF Shoes
Great Deals on Clearance Items. 20 – 50% OFF Sale items won’t last. Shop Now.

Vs.

50% OFF Shoes
Great Deals on Clearance Items. 50% OFF Sale items won’t last. Shop Now.

In this example the only variable was the discount price since we are testing to answer both the which and the what. Which AdWords Ad will generate the highest CTR and What element can we attribute the difference to. Depending on your test goals, time, resources and business goals you may not always be concerned with answering what element attributed to the difference. Some times the most important thing is getting the highest conversion rate increase as quickly as possible.

You can also conduct the same test with a percentage discount vs. a dollar amount (40% OFF vs. $5.00 OFF) as the variable. You may be surprised at what works for your prospects, it’s not always the most obvious or what would be the best offer to you. Remember, your customers don’t think like you do. As I say to all my clients, let’s test it.

In a previous blog post we spoke about the monkey see monkey do principle of online social proof  As the web moves more and more towards a social tool with social media sites popping up like zits on a teenager I thought it might be a good opportunity to take a look at how the principle of social proof is being applied online.

First let’s revisit the concept of social proof

Social proof, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior to take. Basically we all just really want to fit in, we’re hard wired that way. Most people will follow what the crowd is doing just to be considered part of the group. When in a group situation we make the assumption that the surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, than we do and we deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed, so we follow them and do what they do. If you don’t believe me just look at the stock market.

Social influence in general can lead to conformity of large groups of individuals in either good or bad choices. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as herd behavior.

Social proof works offline because we are around other people and their behavior influences us, but online we are acting mostly alone without the pressures of a crowd to guide us or tell us where to click, yet the power of social proof online is as clear as in the real world.

When you are offline and among other people, hey you’ve got to step away from the Internet at some point right, unconsciously you are assessing subtle clues and instinctively processing information about the exerting behavioral force of others around you. i.e. the person next to you or the group itself.

But come on, you’re smarter than that. Right? Could we really be subconsciously assessing how credible or how much we trust in the guy to the left while deciding if his decision was right and if we should follow it or not? Years of Social Psychology studies say we do.

The Principle Of Social Proof

The principle of social proof is activated by similarity: it operates most effectively when we are observing the behavior of people just like us. This explains why testimonials by “ordinary” people online are so powerful vs. the paragraph of marketing about the product written by the company. People use the actions of others to decide on what is proper behavior for them-selves, especially when we view those other people as similar to ourselves.

Offline you’re subconsciously assessing how close the crowd or the guy to your left is to your beliefs before assessing if you should follow the crowds actions. You do this by assessing their outward appearance. Are they summarily dressed to you? Do they belong to a group that best represents you or a belief you identify yourself with? In short do you trust them? The same questions are asked in the mind of your prospect when they arrive on your website.

According to the Social Psychology Quarterly in an article titled Leading the heard astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market by Matthew J. Salganik, of Princeton University says:

Consumers’ decisions about cultural products can be influenced by popularity (Hanson and Putler 1996; Senecal and Nantel 2004; Huang and Chen 2006; Salganik, Dodds, and Watts 2006), in part because people use the popularity of products as a signal of quality—a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as “social” or “observational learning” (Hedström 1998)—and in part because people may benefit from coordinating their choices such as listening to, reading, and watching the same things as others (Adler 1985).

Online social proof supports a persuasive approach to web design and focuses on your prospects. Not everyone is at the same point when they are visiting your site. We would all love it if each visitor was ready to make the purchase or eager to enter their email address or what ever conversion goal your site may have. Social proof is just one element persuasive designers can use to make your prospect feel comfortable before clicking that buy button. The key is putting the prospect at ease.

Visitors can be influenced online with social proof by clearly showing what other people have done before them. We’ve seen some examples of this In the image at the top of this post. Just by showing the actual number of people that have taken action social proof is being exerted online. The best way to use this online is to align the social proof action you want your prospect to take with the action of what others have taken before him. In this way previous online visitors are influencing new prospects.

Trust and credibility are two very powerful persuasion principles that are rarely talked about in relation to a website. Any good salesman knows that people buy from people they know, like and trust. But an online buying experience is about as far away from this principle as you can get, yet people are still hard wired to buy this way online or off. The human need for buying from someone they know, like and trust still needs to be satisfied in an online buying situation.

Trust and likability play an important role in boosting your online conversion rate despite the distance from an in person experience. Your prospects need to know, like and trust you before he buys online still needs to be satisfied it’s just interpreted differently online than in person. We as a species have hundreds of years of burn in with direct face to face interaction we’ll need a bit of time to catch up online.

In order to successfully use the persuasive principle of likeability as part of your conversion rate optimization strategy, your website first needs to be trustworthy and credible. Simply stated the more we like someone (or a company or a brand) the more we want to say yes to him or her.

Do Your Prospects Trust You?

Do customers feel one way towards your brand and product and another way about your website? Or do they see your company and your website as one in the same? With technology becoming more and more pervasive in our lives, it is my belief that customers carry feelings they have of your company and transfer them to your website and vise versa. If your website looks old or is difficult to use your brand takes on those characteristics. The connection between your product and your website is more akin to an integrated marketing approach. Just take a look at the apple website to see how it’s in-line with the brand not just from a design approach but also from a usability and personality point of view. This is a lot harder to get right because it is a soft touchy feely kind of right but it is worth it to spend the time to get right, your conversion rate will be the proof of that.

Just as the company we keep and the books we read and the possessions we own are extensions of ourselves so are similar factors about your brand. I like to think of brands as an individual. We associate ourselves with the brands we are truly passionate about. If a brand that we are raving fans of were a person, they would be our friend, or perhaps our best friend. That’s why brands often reach beyond the product and take stands on the environment and other causes.

So if brands are individuals then they are complex and multidimensional, just like people. There are multiple factors that represent them and in which we can associate ourselves with. An example of this is the Hell’s Angel Bikers, they are simply extensions of the Harley Davidson brand, as much as the distinctive sound of a Harley engine or the spirit of the open road is. The brand and the website have to match in imagery, copy and usability.

So How Do You Use These Principles To Get More Visitors Buying?

As with any conversion rate optimization strategy the more conversion principles you use in combination the larger gains you will see. There is a multiplying effect here but in this particular case – the trust, credibility and likability combo have a compounding effect and all three need to work together in order to support your conversion rate marketing strategy.

The combined conversion punch of trust, likability and credibility online can be broken down into 4 main components.

1. What You Already Know
2. Look and Feel
3. Content
4. Customer Service

What You Already Know
All your prospects have baggage. We already know something about every company or at least we feel something about an industry even if we don’t know anything about it. Visitors have already mentally decided the level of trust and likability about you before they even get to your website. If you’re an offline brick and mortar store like Home Depot, Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, people already have a certain feeling about you that they are bringing to your website. If you have no offline presence or are a smaller site that’s not well known then visitors bring a level of trust with them about your industry. To design an effective lean mean converting machine you have to be aware of what baggage your prospects are bringing with them before the click in order to effectively use persuasive web design to reinforce or counteract that baggage.

Look and Feel
First impressions are everything. Not only does your site need to look professional but your overall site design needs to match what you are selling. If you’re selling safety and security your visitors have to get that in the first 2 seconds without reading a single word of your copy. The look will set the stage for your brand. There’s no room for dissonance here. Your site needs to match the brand and reinforce trust.

Content
Your content supports all the other elements in establishing likeability, trust and credibility online. This is the glue that is held together with transparency. There is no better support for likability and trust than being completely transparent and honest in every interaction you have with your customers.

Beyond transparency likability, trust and credibility extends to your value proposition and of course your products and services. Generally people want to be reassured and don’t want to be lied to. Tell them about the history of your company, the company values, the people behind the curtain. Make your content human and it will naturally be more transparent.

Customer Service
What happens after the sale? Is it easy to locate who and how to contact your company if there is a problem after your customer has made a purchase? Are there resources online that can help? Do you answer your customers with a personal email or one that is clearly a stock message? The availability and ease of locating and contacting you after a purchase all contribute to trust, likability and credibility.

There are a lot of elements that build on trust with online interactions, this is by no means a complete list. And this is not something that you do once and forget about it. Trust is built slowly one small step or interaction at a time. There are hundreds of ways to build or destroy trust online many of which don’t even need to be on your website. Social media sites such, as Facebook and Twitter are excellent places to start to build that relationship, which ties back to the first component of what your prospect already knows about you before ever arriving to your site.

You should follow me on Twitter here to continue our relationship.

The Web has come a long way since the 90’s. Connection speeds are faster, pages load quicker, screen resolutions have expanded and visitors have become more web savvy. These and other factors contribute to the death of the page fold.

What is a Fold?
The term “fold” and “below the fold” come from the newspaper industry. Newspapers were really thick back then, most of them are still long and are folded in half to display. The concept was that you kept the most important elements above the fold since everything below the fold is not visible on the newsstand display. On the web the fold translates to any content that the visitor needs to scroll to in order to see it.

The Fold is Not Really That Important
Now you don’t need me to tell you that the web is different than a newspaper, but I’m going to anyway. The old mentality of the fold for a newspaper is based on catching your attention to get you to buy that particular paper among the stacks of others on display. In a world that’s moving away from disruptive advertising and more towards search driven awareness grabbing the attention of a web visitor is shifting beyond the awareness step and straight to the interest and possibly directly to the desire step of the AIDA formula. (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) In this new marketing world the fold is becoming less important.

cxpartners, a user centered design agency in Bristol UK has recently posed an article on their blog with evidence from user testing that proves the page fold is a myth. We’ve been telling our clients that for years, thank you cxpartners for qualifying this for us.

According to cxpartners: “Over the last 6 years with over 800 user testing sessions on only 3 occasions has the page fold been a barrier to users getting to the content they want.”

As a side note cxpartners eye tracking study supports a previous blog post of ours on how to Get More Sales With Effective Web Copy using an F pattern layout for maximum conversion rate marketing.

The Fold Is Kind Of Important, A Little Bit
The fold still exists on the web, it’s just a limitation of the height of your prospects monitor and screen resolution. Scrolling down on a web page is easy, so the barrier to scrolling is not as big as the second half of the front page of the newspaper that you can’t see on the newsstand.

However, scrolling below the fold will always be tied partly to the motivation of the visitor, how good your content is or how closely it is matched to their needs and how persuasively designed your page is.

The design of your page is connected to your conversion rates and that brings us to designing for conversion.

The Principles Of Designing For Conversion & The Fold
People are inherently lazy so you shouldn’t always count on them scrolling. You need to bake persuasion into your design to help your prospect get to the information they need in order for them to feel comfortable to convert to a customer.

Principle 1
Peek out a bit to let them know there’s more.

Let’s take a look at an example from Homedepot.com There’s a dangerously large amount of white space above the product details on this page. For a decision maker that is about to spend $800 on a snowblower you’ll want to know a lot more than just the information that HomeDepot shows you above the fold here. There’s so much white space at the fold line that a prospect may not feel there is more information below the fold.

How Can This Page Be Designed Better?
Building on the first principle of designing for conversion and the fold this page can easily be adjusted to take advantage of persuasion and help the future owner of an $800 snowblower to make his purchase with a bit more confidence and reassurance that he’s spending his money wisely.

I’ve redesigned some elements to reposition the product description as well as other tab information that a methodical decision maker who needs to think through his decision with all of the information presented to him to appear to peek out above the fold. By breaking the image at the fold line this persuasively lets him know there is more content down here that is important. Additionally by repositioning the customer rating box below the add to cart button, this design is also appealing to the skeptical decision maker, who needs to hear things from credible sources, such as third party non biased customer reviews. By aligning this element below the Add to Cart button we created a linear thought hierarchy in the mind of the visitor at the right point within the metal dialog of their online shopping experience.

Designing For Several Folds
You can’t ever be 100% sure where the fold will be on everyone of your prospects experience with your website. A good place to start however would be your web analytics data. Even in a free analytics tool like Google Analytics will tell you the screen resolution of the majority of your visitors. One strategy you could take is to design the fold for the largest segment of your traffic with this data.

Another approach, would be to design for several fold lines depending on various screen resolutions, which could very well drive your web designer crazy. The bottom line is you can’t control the online experience and you will never know exactly where the fold is for each of your prospective customers. With this in mind here are a few more guiding principles to design for conversion and the fold.

1. Use horizontal design elements sparingly, especially bold ones. See cxpartners Hotel Tropico Playa example for this. Psychologically horizontal lines cause web visitors to mentally stop, which could cause them to not scroll.

2. Use vertical design elements, especially for longer content pages. Vertical design elements will draw the viewers eye down the page. This can be accomplished with images, colors, shapes, copy, etc.

Has a friend ever asked to borrow something that had a high personal value to you? Maybe you kept that object in pristine condition or maybe it was somewhat rare or maybe it’s just sentimental to you because of who gave it to you or how you got it. I don’t doubt this situation has at one point happened to you and at the time I’m sure you were very concerned for what condition the object would be returned to you in. The reason why you had such concern about this transaction is because you own the object and your friend does not. So you start to worry and wonder. Would he or she treat the object with as much care as you do? Would they damage it?

This situation describes something called the endowment effect.

The endowment effect states that people place a higher value on objects they own over objects that they do not.

It’s easy to see how the endowment effect has been present at one point or another in our lives and it’s quite easy to see how this effect exists in the offline world. But let’s take a look at how the endowment effect relate to websites? And specifically how it relates to your online conversion rate?

Online the endowment effect extends from things we own to things we feel an ownership towards. Any website where you have to sign up or create an account has the potential to use the endowment effect to increase conversion rate. The single act of signing up is only the first in a series of future conversions. Think of this customer or member as now entering a post conversion funnel. After a prospect gets over that first hurdle of membership is where you can take advantage of the endowment effect.

Now this may not work for all types of sites but with a little lateral creative thinking it can be applied to almost any website as long as you frame endowment around your conversion goals.

Here’s an example. Amazon.com has gotten me over the first conversion hurdle yeas ago. I frequently purchase from them and I have an Amazon account. Over the years they have taken me further down the post conversion funnel and got me to create a wishlist, a gift organizer, rate over 200 items so recommendations will be more relevant to me and even create 2 Listmanias, one on web analytics and one on persuasive web design. With each addition to my Amazon account I have gained more and more ownership over the Amazon website, and the endowment effect has made me place a higher value on conducting transactions on Amazon vs. bareness and noble.com.  (bn.com) thus increasing the amount of sales and conversions I complete on Amazon.com

Let’s take a look at another example, this time using Netflix.

Netflix, does a great job of creating a sense of ownership through the endowment effect. Similar to Amazon’s wish list I have my Netflix queue of movies and countless movies I have rated all in the effort for Netflix to become more valuable to me. So much so that I would not switch and have blockbuster.com deliver movies to me, even if it were cheaper. In order for Netflix to keep me as a customer I need to continue to fill my movie queue

The key to using the endowment effect online is to develop tools that make your product or service more valuable to your market that is also in line with your micro conversions.

Both of these sites much more valuable to me personally because they gave me a sense of ownership of them. More importantly they both built tools to enforce the endowment effect around key conversion goals of their sites.

Every tool I’ve described from Amazon (the wishlist, the gift organizer, rating items and lists) all support a conversion. When I’m ready to buy I start my browsing at my wish list. During the holidays I start my browsing at the gift organizer and search for similar items that I have bought family members in the past. Both actions lead to a conversion. Similarly on Netflix my movie queue is what keeps me from switching to another movie mail order company. Presumably my queue will never be empty and thus I’ll have no reason to look to blockbuster.com. Each movie I add to my queue is a micro conversion that supports the endowment effect and increases my sense of ownership of their service.

How can the endowment effect be designed into your product or service to increase your conversion rates? 

There is a lot going on in your prospects mind when he or she is surfing your site. A lot of what goes on in their head keeps you from getting a sale and most of it is the fault of your website.

Often times a website is designed with too narrow of a view of what design is. There are several people to blame for this, web designers, programmers, copywriters, marketers; the list can go on and on. Each making changes and decisions based on color or something personal. Everyone is usually focusing on a subjective aspect of the look of a site or page. The subjective look and feel is what most people call design, but very rarely is anyone thinking from the perspective of your potential customer.

Web sites need to be designed around the thought process of your prospect, not just around your brands color and logo. This is why using personas to design is so important. Design needs to start in the mind of your prospect and be built around their goals, fears and desires if you want your website to do the hard work of closing a sale.

Lets take a simple example of an e-commerce site’s shopping cart page. Your prospect has added an item or two to the cart, notice the visitor is still a prospect not a customer yet since they haven’t entered their credit card info, shipping address, etc and clicked the complete purchase button yet. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that design has stopped at this point, this is when design needs to do some serious work. If you don’t believe me just ask a few million abandoned shopping carts scattered around the web. - Forrester Research reports shopping cart abandonment rates at 25 percent. eMarketer’s research shows the abandonment rate at 32 percent. NetEffect and Greenfeld Online report shopping cart abandonment as high as 67 percent. Shop.org research goes as high as 75 percent.

There is a lot going on in the mind of your prospects at this point and the design of the process on your site is directly weighing on their mind even though they don’t fully realize it. Don’t worry your web designer and marketing team didn’t realize it either. Yet your web page has to carry the weight of this success or failure to your company’s revenue.

External factors and internal factors, both of which are the responsibility of your web design to correct, are at the forefront of your prospect mind adding anxiety to their purchase decision and keeping you from a sale. Your prospect is wondering about quality, reliability, price, and security.

One way to reduce the anxiety your prospect faces at this moment is to use trustmarks to reduce some anxiety in the mind of your prospect and support their decision to buy from you. Trustmarks can include credit card security seals (Is this  a safe place to give my credit card information?) Credibility images like a better business bearer seal, Trust-e, Hackersafe, (Is this a legitimate website? Will there be a problem before I even get my product or after?) testimonials, guarantees, etc. These types of trustmarks all help to lower the anxiety level of your prospect but it’s not enough to just have them on your web page. They need to be designed into the thought process that is going on in the mind of your prospect at the right time, when they are concerned about it and in the right place. It doesn’t help to have them stuffed in the footer of your site on every page or in an area where your prospect needs to scroll to see them at the exact point in their buying process when they need them. These trustmarks need to be in close proximity to the area in which the anxiety rises. They need to be designed not just into the site but into the buying process. A single trustmark image at the right time and place can dramatically increase your sales and decrease your shopping card abandonment rates along with other cognitive psychological factors that should be at the core of all design.