Your Rational Customers Are Making Irrational Decisions
And your product/service has nothing to do with it!
You offer a solution (whatever it is) that solves a real problem. So, in an ideal world, it should be super easy to convince your consumers to buy into whatever you are selling.
But we don’t live in an ideal world now, do we?
We’re just stuck with consumers make purchasing decisions — fueled by emotions and cognitive biases. And this is something that not many businesses consider when formulating their CRO strategies.
CRO is regularly talked about and rightfully so. It is something that applies to multiple aspects of a business — be it at a strategic or a transactional level.
Let’s Talk Cognitive Biases
“Cognitive bias” is just a fancy term for irrational thinking.
Understand this one thing about the human mind: All our actions are influenced by our unconscious biases, whether you realize it or not. You better not underestimate the power it has over you.
If you ever felt like you end up following the footsteps of the majority when it comes to making your own decisions (ordering food, choosing a career, or anything in between), then you have something called the “herd mentality”.
If you believe you’re immune to these, then imagine if one day you find out that the combination of the colors red and yellow somehow makes you feel hungry, and the next thing I show you is this:-
Remember those times you could’ve avoided eating that burger but you somehow couldn’t?
Well, these big corporations are using these tactics in the least expected areas goes to show how powerful it is. That’s right. We’ve all been victims. Now it’s your time to be the culprit.
Conversion Rate Optimization Through Psychology
You can read the list of cognitive biases in detail. What we’re essentially going to do is study some of those biases that are relevant for business conversion rate optimization:-
Anchoring Bias
Your brain sees the first piece of information you saw about a product/ service and makes it your opinion, and it’s way more rigid than the counter information if it were to be presented to you.
How many times we have fallen prey to the schemes that show us a price like $100 which seems too much for something but then you see that it’s been slashed down from $199, all of a sudden you feel like it’s a steal.
What you just did was act on the basis of the information that drew your attention, put things in perspective (which was anyway an illusion), so that you’d end up feeling like it’s a great deal.
Now, that could really be true, but when you see all the products on Amazon being displayed at a lower price than the MRP, you might just realize it, but you can’t escape it.
Application in Business
Well, anchoring can be achieved in so many other ways. For example, look at Mailchimp’s pricing below:-
In the above image, what Mailchimp did by highlighting the “Standard” package was put a message in your head that if you buy any plan less than 14.99/month, you’ll be short of some basic necessary features, and by showing the premium $299/month plan, they’ve used anchoring bias to show that $14.99 is a steal.
Attention Bias
It has been theorized that the more often your eyes meet something, the more you’re inclined towards or refrain from it, depending on whether it’s serving or disserving you.
It’s the principle of familiarity at play, presenting itself to you as a possibility you can encounter.
For example, if you search for a Digital Marketing course on Google, you’ll see a bunch of PPC ads on top. It doesn’t matter what ad that may be, if you open any of those ads, you’ll see a landing page that prominently displays a sign-up form, as shown in the image below:-
The popular Stroop Test was a breakthrough in establishing how attention bias works.
There were 3 experiments, one of which was where the participants with anxiety were presented with several words in different colored fonts. They were supposed to read the color of the text and not the word itself.
What was found was that the words that were threatening (eg. spider, tarantula, arachnid, etc) received a delay in response compared to non-threatening words. This was termed as the “Stroop effect” and it concluded that emotionally dominant stimuli are harder to mentally refrain from.
Application in Business
Inducing familiarity with what’s important is key in conversion rate optimization.
For example, your company name, logo, and call-to-action are all going to grab their attention enough number of times that pays off in the form of increased conversions. Design elements play a crucial role here.
Depending on what service you’re advertising, you can either ask for contact details or create an interesting call-to-action button that stands out.
Wherever you want to direct the visitor’s eyes, place that thing at various points across the landing page.
Availability Cascade
There are several interesting cases of mass hysteria, which always remind me how susceptible we are to our surroundings. An availability cascade is defined as an occurrence where a collective belief or a statement gains more credibility because it was repeated enough times.
Below is an example of how the news of the punk music famed star Avril Lavigne broke out that claimed she died by suicide, was replaced by a clone, and whatnot:-
The news was propagated to a point that everyone started throwing around the weirdest conspiracy theories about her, which later got to Avril herself and she had to step up and dismiss it all.
This goes to show how people can believe something that’s being collectively thrown around.
Application in Business
In order to witness improved conversions, you have to get people to believe that your business is the best, and what better way to do that than by having a chorus of people singing praises about the product/services you’re offering them?
But how do you get people to do that? Well, get them to write reviews and give ratings of your product so that other people see it in a positive light, buy it, and even recommend it to others.
You can even get influencers and media houses in the equation who will recommend your product in exchange for some $$. How much you’ll spend will be directly related to how much reach you can expect.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is a concept that theorizes that humans have a tendency to only retain, or focus on information that confirms what they already know.
Our bias is towards our own anecdotal experiences which may or may not be empirically proven. If you want to grow your business organically, you can use this bias to your advantage.
Keeping the euphemism aside, we’re all egomaniacs to different degrees. Therapists often try to reveal this bias to their patients who are paranoid about something that has no life-threatening implications. In some or the other form, this happens to all of us.
Applications in Business
Let’s say you’re launching something that aims to disrupt a particular line of products. You can use confirmation bias to effectively market & improve its conversion.
Apple’s way to market iPad Pro is a classic example of how to effectively use confirmation bias for conversion rate optimization in your business.
Here is SEMrush’s stat on — “Can iPad Pro replace laptop?”
And the official tagline of iPad Pro — “Your next computer is not a computer.”
What Apple did through their tagline here is sending out information that confirms the suspicions that an iPad Pro can replace your PC.
Curse of Knowledge Bias
One of the most iconic things comedian Dave Chapelle said, “If you stand too close to the elephant, you won’t know it’s an elephant. It’s only when you step back and you realize that that’s what it is”.
He was implying the fact that zooming in on one thing would mean that every other possibility will be out of your sight, which also reveals something about the “curse of knowledge” bias. It states that highly informed people have a hard time comprehending the problems of the lesser informed ones.
You’ll see the curse of knowledge bias in action when you see people comparing art forms like comedy, music, and movies. The taste differs so much among people that at times, what’s enjoyable for one, is cringeworthy for another.
Applications in Business
If you were a politician, you’d have to convince people to buy your ideas about what you’ll do for them. Since you’d need a majority of them on your side, you’ll talk about things that are simple to comprehend and easily induce a favorable response from your audience.
You’ll see even the most knowledgeable politicians employing simple and basic statements like “Unemployment is high. We’ll bring hiring surges” instead of presenting some complex statistical evidence and actually show how. It’s called “meeting people where they are”.
Similarly, if you have an online clothing store and you want to make changes to the website for conversion rate optimization, you can make multiple pages and split test them all to see what generates the best response.
You can even take a survey asking people what their biggest inconveniences are when shopping for clothes online and use those basic pointers to be implemented on your website.
Over to You
What most businesses are focused on is rationally presenting their solutions to the real problems of their target consumers. This worked fine when the competition wasn’t as fierce as it is today.
Psychology in marketing is definitely not a new concept but not many effectively use it for conversion rate optimization. This leaves room for achieving great results by triggering these cognitive biases.
Without understanding your consumers’ psychology behind their purchasing decisions, your efforts of selling your products/services are as lost as Alice in Wonderland.
So, what cognitive biases are you using for your business?
