Internet marketing today has been the big driver of growth for an online business. While there are many ways to increase your online visibility and improve your web traffic, to be able to stand out and turn your visitors into customers is an ultimate challenge that businesses face in the growing market.
As a marketer, the need to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes is essential. As it is one of the best ways to understand how they think, what they need, and challenges that may arise when they plan to purchase your product or service. The more emphatic and understanding we are, the more meaningful will the results be.
Have you ever wondered what makes your customer purchase your product or service? Is it because of their experiences they have with you? Benefits that you offer? Or because of the trustworthiness and reputation? The answer is, you need not know! One size doesn’t fit all, as your customers are different and their opinions, interests keep changing too.
Also, the good news is that the marketers are not born, but they are made. It is essential that you understand the underlying thought process of your customers, grab their attention and act accordingly. Though consumers come from different walks of life, their minds work in a similar predictable way.
In this post, we will share 5 psychology aspects that influence your website visitor’s to turn into customers.
1. Priming:
Priming is a non-conscious form of human memory which is concerned with the perceptual identification of objects and words. In other words, priming is something that occurs below the surface of the conscious thought when something occurs on the surface in the form of words or objects. This form of action will further influence response and affects the behavior of a person in a certain way under the specific environment.
Let’s Play This Game:
Priming can be as simple as this, a person who sees the word Yellow in the below picture would recognize and imagine of the object ‘Banana’ which are closely associated in the memory and exercised to work that way.
In fact, yellow could have also meant sunflowers or roses. Logically as the pictures were of fruits, it’s only reasonable for the brain to think of a fruit.
If the images were replaced like below instead, what would you have thought of?
Maybe a sunflower or a yellow rose? It’s likely that you made a decision, because of the way your decision was expected or framed.
Priming today has been a core part of marketing. It is a way to attract visitors and make him/her want to buy even before they see a CTA.
Some practical tips of priming in marketing may be to introduce a higher price for your product before showing up the actual price. For instance, if the actual cost of the product is $500, whereas if you show your website visitors that the product is worth $2000 or $4000. This will make the buyer buy the product as it is much lower than what he thought it was.
2. The Principle Of Reciprocity:
In general, Reciprocity means the practice of giving or exchanging things in the form of privileges, which can mean the unexpected mutual benefit between two people or groups.
Let’s consider the below example to see how reciprocity has a considerable role to play, how the principle influences the psychology and how they respond to it.
A restaurant which tried different aspects to improve their sales started implementing the principle by merely giving away mints (peppermints) along with their checks after their dinner. Some of them were simply given mints with no reason and no explanation. In the above scenarios, the tips improved by 5%.
Whereas in another aspect of the experiment, mints were given to random customers and the waiters stopped by customers, looked at them and told them that they were especially for them.
Here, the tips increased by 20%, and at the same time, the sales went up by 30%.
Similarly, in content marketing, solely giving the right PDF, eBooks at the right time while making sure that there is value in it, could reciprocate anything from buying a fuller version of eBook, PDF or writing a testimonial.
3. Visual Salience:
Our brains highly compute visual Salience. We always tend to spot something which is different from others.
Let’s consider the simple example by glancing at the below picture.
Though several birds are sitting over pipes, we are naturally attracted to the one which is lying backward.
And to relate this with marketing, CTA which is an essential factor and the King of marketing is the one which can encourage users to act upon. Almost all the websites are created with a purpose, either to promote their brand, sell their product or services, to get sign up forms filled and more. So it is necessary that your CTA stands out perfectly so that you have more visitors responding with more prospects converting to become customers.
4. Using Minimalism As A Tool:
It’s a human tendency to get distracted, and distraction is a part of marketing life. However, you don’t want to influence that factor with your web visitors when they are on your website. It affects your conversion and hinders your brand’s presence.
You must have seen Apple’s home page, and its service pages are aesthetically pleasing and appealing, the reason is that they follow the principle of cognitive fluency by using minimalism as a tool.
Apple doesn’t overwhelm its visitors with excess information. It keeps its site clean, white and simple, allowing its users to see what the company expects them to see.
5. Fear Of Missing Out:
FOMO marketing is a technique used to influence your visitors with an eagerness to buy from you. It is a Psychological phenomenal and an age-old concept which was used by marketing industries even before the existence of social media or smartphones.
Let’s have a look at the screenshot fetched from one of the social media sites:
The term FOMO came into existence in the year 2013, when people started being open about sharing it on social media sites.
Today’s internet users are more likely to express their “Fear Of Missing Out” on social media channels. This indeed is used by marketing companies to encourage and make purchases influenced by their fear.
Some of FOMO tactics can be to create scarcity and urgency, encourage social engagement and proofing, promoting the product by showing what the other people are buying, highlighting on what a customer missed, indicating a countdown timer, displaying what is left in the stock and more.
Wrapping Up:
Online marketing is an opportunity to discover new ways of determining responses from the people. And psychology is an essential aspect of online marketing as it is all about understanding the influence that it would have on people and their buying decisions. As a marketer, it is necessary to get to the grips of psychological traits which can influence a customer’s perception about your brand, products or services.
Using the above-mentioned psychology principles along with the standard marketing practices can help build slightly a different messaging, helps understand the needs of the customer which in turn helps convert your website visitors into customers.
