Selling Health Products Online To Jaded Buyers Is Easier Than You Think

When selling health products online, our research has found that prospects make buying decisions based on just four factors.

To learn more about the first two, DESIRE and HOPE, see the last article. Desire and hope are both pushing forces, that come from the health prospect and move them closer to buying.

They are not created externally, but rather amplified from what already exists within the prospect’s own head.

Knowing the internal hopes and desires of your prospect is key to tapping into the pushing force. Any conversion rate optimization initiative needs to consider these and other forces when developing a hypotheses. The best way to do that, in our opinion, is through in-depth customer research.

Buy that’s only half of the forces at play. There is a second set of forces – TRUST and BELIEF.

Where the directional force of desire and hope act only as a push towards your product, Trust and Belief act as both pushing and pulling forces.

Pull forces keep you grounded. And if they are not aligned with the buyer and seller, they can hold one back from moving forward.

In contrast, Push forces propel you forward towards a decision.

Push is the story that the prospect tells themselves. It’s the relationship they have with the product or the desire and hope for the new future.

Marketing is about the push of education to help people make buying decisions. But, the negotiation of that buying decision is in the consumer’s own mind.

If the prospect can’t overcome the pulling forces of trust and belief, or be propelled by them, there is no sale. For a health product, all four forces need to move the prospect to buy.

The Dual Push And Pulling Force of Trust When Selling Health Products Online

If your prospect doesn’t trust your brand, what your product claims to do and what it’s made with, in the case of a supplement, they won’t buy.

I can’t blame them. It’s a marketplace problem.

When the audience hears the same claims made over and over in marketing messages across multiple products they lose trust.

It’s the classic boy who cried wolf story. They hear the same promise, even if it’s an implied promise, so often that they don’t trust it. They may fall for it once or twice, but after that, their skepticism is off the charts and believability drops.

This is why most health products reach a glass ceiling they can’t break past. Their offers and sales pages work for a little while but then suddenly stop. They are forced to move on to the next hot ingredient breakthrough or hook or product launch.

The failure to exponentially grow their revenue and get to the next level is due in part to an untrusting audience.

Trust is built in part on believability and logic. If the message makes sense, i.e. it is logical and believable then the prospect is on the path to trusting you enough for the initial purchase.

We look at trust like this…

Trust = (Logic + Belief) – ((Anxiety x Credibility) – The Other Party’s Self Interest)

Any message first passes through our logic filter. For example the science that backs up the reason why your health product works is part of the logical argument that builds trust.

Once we trust the logic, we determine if it matches our existing beliefs. The combination of the two, create momentum which is added to the combined sum of anxiety and credibility minus the sellers self interest.

Anxiety is the psychological concern brought about by an element of the sales page or the sales process.

And credibility is a factor of how the prospect perceives the trustworthiness of the information, or sales message.

Credibility and anxiety together amplify the pulling force away from trust. Meaning if those combined forces are too strong, logic and belief won’t be able to overcome them and the prospect wont trust you or buy.

The weight of other party’s self interest also reduces trust. We can’t eliminate all of self interest, if we do, we eliminate the sale completely. In the case of a health product, we can only minimize it through the company mission, the story and the reasons why.

The key is to understand how to reduce those elements of the formula and increase the weight of logic and belief. In order to amplify trust.

Which brings us to belief…

The Push and Pulling Force of Belief When Selling Health Products Online

“To put it plainly, seeing is not believing – believing is seeing. We see things not as they are, but as we are. Our perception is shaped by our previous experiences.”
~ Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Belief comes from within ourselves. We first believe and then focus on things that support our belief. Not the other way around.

Rather than create, or change the prospects belief, which is a futile game. The better way to influence is to tap into existing values.

Belief is the foundation that you build on top of for selling health products online.

We look at belief through the lens of this formula…

Belief = (Desire x Self Story) / Challenges

Belief is based on our individual desire and self-story. Put simply, we believe what we desire. Desire is the end state of what the individual wishes to achieve, do, become, feel, or have possession of.

To get to a buying state, we seek alignment with desire.

Some of the time, those desires are not functional desires composed of features. Desire is almost never what your product does.

Instead they are the social struggles and emotional struggles the prospect faces.

That desire amplifies the prospect’s self story.

It is the narrative we tell ourselves, about us as an individuals and our situation. These combined forces are a multiplier to belief. One’s self story can either amplify desire or diminish it.

The combined force of desire multiplied by self story is then divided by the challenges one faces against the desire. Even if they are holding themselves back from what they want to do, become, or have. These can be real challenges or perceived that do not align with how we see ourselves, i.e. our self story.

Selling Health Products Online

The combined forces of both push and pull create momentum towards or away from a buying decision.

For us, Trust and Belief is a very important force to understand when optimizing for health sales. Because if that is really strong in the opposite direction, you’re not going to break it. No matter how much pushing force of desire and hope there is, it doesn’t matter.

But both the push and the pull work together.

When it comes to trust, it’s not enough to just remove anxiety and friction. A few trust symbols like a security seal on your website might help a little but it’s not enough.

You need to understand how your prospect looks at all of the pieces of the trust formula and what they have seen and heard in the marketplace that makes them think that.

Why should we trust you? Why should someone trust your solution?

When it comes to belief, it’s not enough to tell people what you stand for.

You need to make it clear what you stand against.

What does the prospect desire to change to?

When selling health products online, the thing we need to change to is what your product or company stands for. The thing we need to change from is what you stand against.

Selling health products online takes an understanding of all four forces of DESIRE, HOPE, TRUST and BELIEF. They are at the core of how buying a health product online is different.

But it’s really about the proportions between the push and the pull combined.