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.

All relationships have one thing in common. It doesn’t matter if the relationship is an online relationship or an off-line, a person to person relationship or a consumer to brand relationship. All relationships start with one single interaction. A single step, one connection and it builds from there. It often starts as a simple “Hi my name is __”.

This simple fact is one that most of us learned in kindergarten but somehow we’ve forgotten how simple it really is. Little things really do matter, and this applies not only to making new friends but also to brands and online conversion rates. Often times we as marketers are so focused on the big picture, the overall conversion that we don’t look at the micro transactions.

Every conversion is composed of a series of smaller micro conversions or small single steps towards a bigger conversion goal. In order to optimize your overall website you need to take a few steps back before you can take a giant leap forward.

Remember the way the web was a long time ago? When committees would argue and fight over the home page and having a spot above the fold, oh wait that was just last year or for some maybe just yesterday or today. Well your website home page is no longer the main focus you thought it once was, sorry to be the one to break it to you, I’ll leave it up to you to break it to the committee.

Home pages should probably get the least focus when it comes to prioritizing effort and ROI. The fact of the matter is the average web user is using the web a lot differently now then they were in the past. With the proliferation of search, social network sites like facebook, blogs like this one, and real simple syndication (RSS) home pages are becoming less important. All of those tools mentioned previously and a host of new ones that haven’t been created yet are driving more and more visitors deeper into a website than ever before and the majority of consumers bypass your home page completely.

The good part of this is that each page of your site, not just your home page will have a wider reach with a longer lasting lifespan, and the ability to attract a new audience like never before.

The bad part is that we as marketers and designers need to adapt to this change, and adapt quickly. The importance of each interior page, your landing pages, your detail pages and category pages has suddenly tripled overnight and they need to do more heavy lifting now. They no longer have the home page to support them anymore. Every page is now a home page.

To capitalize on this, we need to change the way we design those overlooked interior pages. They need to be designed using persuasive web design. Each page needs a strong, clear call to action supported with persuasive influences to drive visitors deeper into your site and closer to conversion and you need to start today.

Quite seriously the best book ever written on the science of persuasion. This book is essential for understanding the psychological foundations of marketing and selling both online and off.

I’d like to also share a great video that was posted on www.captology.tv showing how LinkedIn leveraged several persuasive principal outlined in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion on the web.

Imagine poring gallons and gallons of water into a bucket with a hole in it. No matter how much you pour in, water just seems to rush out the hole. Websites are a lot like that bucket, no matter how much that faucet is pumping into that bucket it just keep springing holes and pouring out until you realize you’re just throwing money in just out of habit.

In the above example substitute water for media spend, content, anything and the holes are your websites usability, the navigation, the persuasiveness of your sites design.

We’ve all been there and it’s easy to justify when we are being held accountable to increasing the numbers on a weekly or monthly basis. But when it comes to online marketing it’s best to take a two-pronged approach. First plug the holes in your bucket. Then bring in new visitors to your site, otherwise you’ll never really make a difference. Sometimes you’ve got to take a step back before you start to run forward or else you’ll start to trip over yourself.

The two-pronged approach to online marketing
First plug the holes in your bucket, meaning improve your website by making it more persuasive so visitors coming in wont fall out the holes before converting to customers. So often is this first step overlooked, with everyone rushing around and putting out business fires on a day to day basis the knee jerk reaction is to redesign your entire site. Now don’t get me wrong sometimes a site can have so many problems that it needs to be redesigned from the ground up either because what it will take to fix it is a complete overhaul of the back end or over the years it has become a victim of just adding fix on top of fix without thinking of the big picture or the users experience. Overtime your site becomes a huge mess with no thought behind it. Almost every website has a few holes in it’s marketing bucket and it’s the job of persuasive design to plug these holes one by one over time. But how can you plug these holes if you’re not quite sure where or what they are? If you’re not implementing web analytics on your site you should start doing so immediately. Getting a grasp on the numbers of your site will lead you towards what’s working and what’s not. For example the average page views per visit which can be calculated by dividing your total page views by the total visits is a great indicator of how compelling your site is and how easy it is to navigate.

But the numbers will only lead you half way, next you’ll need qualitative data gathered from user testing and or surveys to verify your findings and to test your solutions with real users. Once most of the holes in your marketing bucket are plugged then it’s time to bring in new visitors to the site and keep tracking and making continuous improvements.

Practice makes perfect
Any professional athlete spends more time practicing and training then actually playing on the game. That’s how they become so good at their sport and are able to compete at a professional level. What makes them pros is that they never settle for second best, they continue to develop themselves and strive for improvement. Why should online marketing be any different?

What does continuous improvement really mean?

The challenge to constantly improve oneself is what continuous improvement is all about. It’s more of an online marketing philosophy and a way of life than anything else. With a kindred spirit of an athlete strategies and design should be refined based on actual in-market observations of how online consumers respond on your website.

Online marketing discipline

It takes discipline, dedication and patience to implement a continuous improvement process. Online marketing does not end when a website is implemented. Improvement is organic and requires constant change. Dedication requires continuous measurement in order to benchmark improvements. Small incremental steps are key. Each business goal will go through the improvement cycle several times with increasing results each time. Online marketing is honed to gain peak performance with a bit of patience. The biggest mistake online marketing can make is trying to accomplish too much at once or rolling out with a complete redesign without knowing any metrics or benchmarks from the previous website. By jumping in all at once, you will never fully understand what factors were responsible for which result, wasting money and time. That’s not how athletes train and that’s not how online marketing should be done. Success in optimizing your marketing is based on incremental and constant improvements.
According to Shop.Org the average conversion rate of their members is about 1.8%. (State Of Online Retailing 3.0 - April 2000) A top athlete wouldn’t settle for these stats, why should you?

We’re all familiar with the 4 P’s of marketing Product, Price, Place and Promotion but in today’s Internet age of Social media, Web 2.0 and ROI is the old marketing mix still cutting it?

Surely the 4Ps still have some place in the world of marketing if anything as the basis for marketing but long gone are the days of a marketplace where the store vendor knew everyone of his customers personally. Where interaction was on a one to one level with real human voice and physical connection, despite the promise of a one to one website application.

Today the customer is clearly in the drivers seat with both hands on the steering wheel, which is why marketers need to add a 5th P to the marketing mix, Persuasion.

The New P - Product, Price, Place, Promotion and Persuasion

• What specifically helps a user make a choice?
• What information tells your prospect why they should believe your product or service is the best solution for their problem?

This is where Persuasion comes in. But first let me make one thing clear. By persuasion I don’t mean some sort of trickery or manipulation. Persuasion focuses on your prospects experience with your product or service. It’s what makes a Browser into a Customer. Persuasion focuses on making a prospective buyer comfortable and increases his or her trust level with your brand. The greater the trust the greater the likeliness your browser will buy.

Persuasive Design
Visual persuasion removes roadblocks, improving visual communication. Verbal persuasion provides the right content, in the right way at the right time. The combination of verbal and visual is what makes up persuasive design and can greatly encourage your prospects to take action.

Everything Old is New Again
Persuasion is what takes the place of the vendor at the corner store who once knew everyone of his customers personally. That old marketplace vendor was the embodiment of trust and ease of use. Both visual, if he needed to conduct a product demo, and verbal, with his reassurance and commitment behind his product, all at once.

How are you using Persuasion in your marketing mix?

• Is your website strategy integrated with your sales cycle?
• Does your Web site reflect your offline brand?
• Have you clearly defined what you want customers to do online?
• Are customers accomplishing those tasks on your site?
• Can customers find the information they need on your site?
• Do your online marketing efforts have a major impact on your bottom line?

Debriefing as defined by Wikipedia is a one-time, semi-structured conversation with an individual who has just experienced a stressful or traumatic event. In most cases, the purpose of debriefing is to reduce any possibility of psychological harm by informing people about their experience or allowing them to talk about it.

What can Design and Marketing Learn from The Military?
OK. It’s obvious how that relates to the military but how can we as marketers use debriefing? Although most marketing campaigns and some work environments can certainly seem stressful and traumatic and after a long 9-5 workday, psychological harm is often reduced by telling our spouse about our rough day. Does debriefing really have a place anywhere else outside of the diner table?

With ROI on the tip of everyone’s mind and accountability at an all time high, debriefing needs to become standard practice at work not just at the diner table the over lunch with coworkers.
A debriefing evaluation needs to be a part of the design process. Design and Marketing is not a pass-fail event, we need to learn from success and failure. The military has know this for years and it’s time agencies and design firms stepped up and followed the same system.

We’ve Got to Work Together for Improved Results
Debriefing is nothing more than evaluating and testing our creative and the results generated. The secret to any successful marketing effort is test, test, test. If we keep switching agencies and chief marketing officers we create an environment where everyone becomes afraid of making a mistake much less learning from our mistakes and improving. Creativity and success thrives in a culture where mistakes are not seen as a bad thing but as an opportunity to learn and grow.

In order for a debriefing environment to work agencies need to partner with clients and clients need to work cooperatively and creatively with their agencies. Both the client and the agency needs to accept responsibility for improvement and continuous learning.

There was an article recently in USA today about value based pricing structures for agencies. The article talks about several potential solutions, from flat fee pricing to performance based pricing. It reminded me of a discussion that was started in the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast by Mitch Joel a few months ago.

There is no question that the current pricing structure between client and agency is broken. A time based price structure and a 30 percent markup is a disservice to both agencies and clients. 30 percent markups make agencies no more than retail middlemen. Fees based on hours puts creative, both design and strategy on the same level as a mechanic. The current state of the industry pricing structure downplays creativity and ideas. Ideas are what clients are going to agencies for, why then do agencies give them away for free and charge based on markups and time? Is a an idea that took forty hours to come up with any more valuable than one that took only 10 hours?

I believe a performance based price structure that is based on value would be best for both client and agency. However, to accomplish this type of pricing a true partnership based on trust and common goals would need to be established. I’m not quite sure if clients or agencies are ready for that level of commitment and trust although I believe that is where the industry needs to go to elevate ideas and creative strategy to where they deserve to be. Giving away ideas for free and just charging based on time and markups devalues the big idea and the industry as a whole.