5 Sale Psychological Triggers to Make People Buy More
By: Emma Ardern
Tags: Tips, Marketing Strategies, Business Development, Sales, Marketing

Experiment one — The power of peer pressure

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A team of behavioral science researchers decided to do an experiment, they went around hanging messages on people’s doorknobs that asked people to turn off the air conditioning and fans.

25% of messages, so people should turn off the fans to help save the environment.

25% of messages, so people should turn off the fence so that they could save $54 over the summer.

25% of messages, so people should turn off the fans so that they could be socially responsible citizens by preserving energy.

And 25% of messages, so people should turn off the fans because 77% of the neighbors were using less power than them.

The first three groups of houses saw no difference in power usage. They kept using their fans and AC like normal. But it worked on the last group that would give the message about the neighbors, the power usage drastically dropped.

Turns out it is true, we do indeed want to keep up with the Joneses. As the study showed, possibly the biggest reason why people take action in life isn’t because of themselves. It’s because of others.

That is why I recommend that other people do what I do, which is following up with the customer after the sale and getting them to leave a review. And if you’ve gone on business, be sure not to just encourage them to leave a text review, but also allow the option for them to submit a photo with it. That way when other prospective customers see another customer enjoying the product, they will want one soon. Because they will want to keep up with others.

And luckily there are lots of apps available online that you could integrate into online businesses to help customers leave reviews.

Experiment two — The jam paradox

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In 1995, Professor Iyengar decided to try something in the California market. She set up a store with a selection of nice jams for sale, customers could come and taste them before buying. After they tried a jam, they would all be given a $1 off coupon. Every few hours, she alternated how many jams were available. First, she started with 24 jams.

A few hours later, she switched to showcasing just six and alternated between these two amounts. And she discovered something when they were 24 jams customers would on average taste tests two jams. And then even after switching to just six jams, customers would on average again, taste two jams. When they were 24 gems, she’d gone at a large crowd more people stop by. But out of all the people that taste-tested the 24 jams are only 3% decide to buy one.

But when she switched to showing off just six jams, despite the smaller crowd, they spend far more money. 30% of taste testers ended up buying a jar of jam.

This is an example of the Paradox of Choice. And the reason why it’s referred to as a paradox is that generally, people think “Well if you’ve got more options, that’s better, right?” Well, clearly that isn’t true. Over time, the Paradox of Choice has been extensively studied. And what the studies have shown is that it’s not quite a clear cut case of “Oh, this option good, more options bad.”

Instead, what has been shown consistently is that if we purchase a product that has lots of different options, such as lots of different colors, lots of different flavors, then the overall satisfaction after purchasing the product is usually much less. And the reason is obvious.

Think about it. Let’s say that I have 10 jams for sale. And all of them are a variety of different similar flavored stone fruit. I’ve got an apricot flavor jam, I’ve got a peach flavor jam, I’ve got a jam that’s apricot and peach flavored, and so on. Some fruits often have similar flavors. And so for a lot of people, they like the more but in this case here you can’t buy all the jams. You can only buy one jam, so you simply choose the apricot jam. Well, what tends to happen is that consumers who bought the apricot jam go, “Gee, I wonder if I would have preferred the peach jam. I wonder if I would have liked that one more.”

Basically, they experienced FOMO the fear of missing out and so that is why while offering choices isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Smart businesses careful about when they offer them. When you choose to offer a choice to a customer, you need to make sure that each choice is meaningful. That is why if I give you two choices, a white t-shirt or a black t-shirt, both options are so drastically different that it makes the choice more meaningful. You’re more likely to feel confident that you made the right choice and not experienced FOMO.

Experiment three — The violinist at the Metro

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Grammy Award-winning Joshua Bell is one of the most famous violinists in the world. Today, he is the music director at the Academy of St. Martin’s in the Fields, one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world. In 2007, The Washington Post conducted a behavioral science experiment for 45 minutes about performed a busking performance at the entrance of a Washington DC metro station in a baseball cap and plain clothes.

Now, keep in mind that just two days prior Bell had hosted a performance at a theater in Boston, that completely sold out with tickets costing on average $100 each. Not only that, Bell was performing with his signature violin. And this violin is over 300 years old, and it’s worth millions of dollars.

Bell performed six very complex pieces of music. And as he performed 1097 people passed him by and as they did, only seven people stopped by to listen. While 20 people tipped him money but keep walking by. In total, he made just $32. $20 of that coming from one woman who recognized him.

This is one of the most famous behavioral science studies, and it shows us something very important. Every single day, we have so much stuff that is coming into our brains, so much information, so much content, just so much stuff. And the only way that our brains can handle this overload of information is by making assumptions based on the context that it comes in.

If you saw a bunch of kids drinking alcohol at a frat party, you probably assume it was cheap liquor. But if you saw a group of young professionals drinking a cocktail exclusive speakeasy bar, you’ve probably assumed the opposite. And so what happened was, even though Bell was playing astonishing music that would normally be extremely expensive to get the privilege to listen to, busy commuters saw where he was playing, how he was dressed, and use the context to determine that he wasn’t any good rather than actually evaluating what he was offering.

And this can be applied in many ways, such as with Instagram influencer marketing. On Instagram stores and brands can purchase Instagram shoutouts from Instagram pages. Then those pages will post your ad on their page for the agreed amount of time. At first, everybody was obsessed with buying shoutouts from general mass appeal pages like Instagram meme pages, because hey, they had a million followers. That’s good, right?

Well, actually, if you were selling this nice travel product, you probably have much greater success posting your ad to micro influences, who only post travel content, even if you pay the same price.

A micro-influencer is someone with just tens of thousands of followers who usually focuses on something specific like travel. And more and more businesses are focusing on micro influences rather than big general pages because they now understand that where the ad is placed is very important. After all, consumers are going to judge that ad based on its context.

Experiment four — The Ross’ false consensus

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In 1997 Professor Lee Ross from Stanford University decided to conduct an experiment. He took a group of participants and had them read a story in which a conflict occurred. Afterward, they were told that there are two ways to resolve that conflict, option A and option B. And they were given three tasks.

Task one decide what option they choose Task two guess what other people will choose Task three described what type of person would choose option A or Option B.

The results were clear, most people said that others would choose the same option that they chose. And when describing what type of person would choose the option that they didn’t, they would make extreme judgments on their personalities.

And I bring this trigger up, not because it’s happening in customers, but because it’s actually happening in business owners. And if they’re not aware of it, you know what, they could lose a lot of money. For example, I and several other successful marketers sell products in our own stores without price matching our competitors. And whenever I say that this is possible, people always saying, “Oh, Dan, I always go and research the lowest price for the products I’m buying, stop giving bad advice.”

But you know what? Those people are wrong. A huge percentage of the population and positively purchased products without price shrieking. Especially Generation Z over 80% of them admitted that they are prone to impulsively buying products.

And so successful businesses are aware of this cognitive bias that we have. That we think that people do the same things as we do, and make sure that they tailor the marketing to what the customer wants, and not what they want.

Experiment five — Memories control our choices

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In 1965 a study was done on a group of 152 participants, they were asked a question if you open up a book and choose a page at random, what is more likely?

In scenario A, that you will find more words that start with the letter K.

Or scenario B, you will find more words where K is the third letter, rather than the first.

The participants were also asked to guess the difference as a ratio. How often does scenario A happen compared to scenario B?

The hypothesis of the study was that it’s much easier to remember what would start with K, like a kangaroo, or kittens or kites, therefore people would overestimate it. And the researchers were right, 105 people guessed that more words started with the letter K, with the median ratio being two to one for words that start with K, compared to words where k is the third letter when in reality, it’s the opposite.

You’re far more likely to find words where K features as the third letter rather than the first. This phenomenon has a name, availability heuristic, and it’s a mental shortcut that most of us do every day that smart marketers and businesses take advantage of every day.

If we can remember something, we think that it happens far more often than it actually does. And here’s how smart marketers take advantage of this to make more money.

Let’s think about an avocado slicer, the most successful video ads for it, always start with something important. They start off by reminding the prospective customer about how in the past, cutting, slicing, and dicing avocados have been annoying. And the reason for that is because this will trigger most people to think back and remember an incident where they found cutting an avocado to be frustrating. And this is a curious trigger on our brains because even if we usually find slicing and dicing avocados to be absolutely fine, the moment that you remember an incident you did find it frustrating, the availability heuristic mental shortcut makes you think that it happens far more often than it actually does, which of course means you’re way more likely to buy this.

And so that is why successful marketing campaigns will usually start not by talking about the features of a product, but rather highlighting how the product could have solved a past issue or made something even better to trigger you into reminiscing about it.