How to use consumer psychology to increase conversions

Marketing expert and business coach Miriam Van Heusden shares insights into how you can take some basic principles of consumer psychology and put them to use to boost your conversions.

So, you’re bringing in visitors to your website or to your physical store and they’re buying from you. That’s a great start, but your next move is simple. You need to maximise the returns you get from the traffic that comes in.

That’s where consumer psychology comes in. You can take some basic principles (no psychology degree required) and put them to use to boost your conversions. Here’s how.

Solomon Asch’s conformity principle

It’s a classic experiment of consumer psychology. Dr Solomon Asch brought in people who were asked to look at a pair of cards.

The first card showed one line, the second card had three lines on it. The test subject was then asked to point out the line on the second card they thought was the same as the one on the first.

Easy, right? Except, they didn’t do this alone. The room was full of other people. The test subject thought these people were just doing the experiment like they were, but the truth was they were all stooges. They’d been briefed to behave badly.

On the first run of the experiment, the stooges all indicated the correct answer along with the test subject. But on the second, they were asked to pick the wrong answer.

And what happened was very peculiar. Under the pressure of social conformity, the test subject  would change their answer to the wrong one.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you sneakily guide your customers into purchases using a herd of fake customers. However, do remember that social conformity is your friend.

Showing pictures of happy customers, written testimonials and good reviews, can help influence a sale. That’s because social impact makes your customer feel safer in their decision making – humans like going along with the crowd.

The behavioural insights reciprocity test

This one’s easier to understand. A behavioural insights group asked a bunch of bankers if they’d give up a day’s salary for charity. Mostly, the bankers said no, though quite a few did say yes.

Then the team tried again with a different group of bankers. This time, before they were asked the question the banker was given a bag of lollies. This time, twice as many bankers said yes than before.

This consumer psychology insight is known as reciprocity (giving something back, because you’ve been given something), and you can easily take advantage of it in business. In a store situation you could give out free lollies, same as with the banker experiment.

Online you can offer a free coupon or book before asking for the sale.

I’m not saying that it will double your sales, but it should significantly increase them.

Creating trust

You already know that trust is important when selling anything. You don’t need me to tell you that. But did you know that studies have shown it may take up to 13 encounters with a brand before someone feels able to trust that brand?

To create trust during this period of small encounters with a potential customer, you can do two things:

• Learn about your customers. The more you know who your customers are, the more you can communicate with them in the way that they want. The more you use their language, the more they will trust what you have to say.
• Be consistent. I can’t stress this enough. If you’re not consistent, you’re not going to build trust, you’re going to destroy it. Every piece of marketing and branding you use, should deliver consistent messaging.

How do you know if your psychology experiment is working?

It’s all well and good saying that these things will lead to extra conversions, but how do you know for sure?

Well, you get the hard data. You use a package like Maralytics and you see how you were doing before you rolled out the psychology and compare it to the results after the rollout.

Analytics allow you to constantly innovate to bring more conversions to your business. It’s just a question of measuring the results of any given act of innovation.

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