What Cialdini Taught Me About Adwords & Ecommerce
Today I want to share with you my ‘offer’ and copywriting checklist. It’s built around many of the experiments that legendary Influence professor Robert Cialdini wrote about in his book’s.
I use this list when I am trying to increase the conversion rate of an AdWords client focusing on the buyer journey on the ecommerce store. I hope you enjoy and feel free to swipe and deploy
1. Are we using the law of reciprocity? What small item can we use to trigger this law. Can we use free samples or give something unexpected away with the first order?
2. The reason why. Are we giving them a reason why they should do what we want. Even ‘because’ and repeating the obvious is better than nothing. Don’t just have an offer, have a reason why there is an offer.
3. Law of comparison if you show something hot first the next thing will be considered much colder than it is. E.g. show expensive items first to make items appear better value. Estate agents show crappy houses first. E.g. can you have one expensive item in the category, how does this effect AOV?
4. Can we trigger the ‘expensive’ equals good rule and then discount to make them want a bargain? (Does not work with commoditised products only own brand)
5. If we offer something much more expensive and they reject it. Then we offer what we want them to accept they will more likely accept. E.g. offer three-year support plan then one-year support plan.
6. Consistency. Can we get the person to make a small step in the area we want? I.e. then later changing direction will be hard for them. E.g. getting them to fill out a survey telling us what they like about our brand. Mental commitment subconsciously.
7. Like point previous. During the sales process can we ask them questions like ‘why are you considering purchasing from us’. They will create a rational answer and want to be consistent with it. Or even if the sale takes a while to close ask ‘can you tell me why you have chosen to do business with us’
8. Can we get them to write down their consistency statement and get them to share it publicly? Once public they will change their image of themselves to be consistent with the statement even more. Could be part of a competition.
9. Low ball offer. Make an offer that’s likely to be accepted to make the person convince themselves that they are now a customer of the store. Once they have bought something, even something tiny they will be much more likely to make a bigger purchase.
10. Social proof. If we can show that others are doing what we desire the visitor to do, then others will follow suit. People look to others to see what to do.
11. Social proof heightened. People will must more likely copy behaviour of people like themselves. Even similar names, living in similar addresses, doing the same jobs etc.
12. When the buyer is in a moment of uncertainty can we employ opera claqueurs. I.e. the first people that get the crowd going. We have all seen those market stall people use ‘fake buyers’ to start a buying frenzy at the end of their pitch.
13. Can we show that we dress like the target audience and share similar values to them? Politic views. Hobbies.
14. Can we associate ourselves even loosely with something cool going on? E.g. during the moon landings everything sold featured the ‘space race’. Or in Olympic years everything focuses on this.
15. People are more favourable to things whilst eating or drinking coffee.
16. People are more favourable to things with a pleasant smell even if the smell is so subtle that they are not conscious of it.
17. Click wurr effect of authority figures. Uniform. Titles. Name badges. Back stage passes. Can we add elements of this to increase the sale?
18. If we offer them something that is against our interest that builds trust early on. E.g. don’t buy this buy our cheaper one if xyz. Or show them some bad reviews on our site for some products so that they believe the good reviews.
19. Double scarcity. People who were told beef is going to be in short supply doubled their orders. But people told beef supply is going to be in short supply and told this information comes from an exclusive source bought a huge amount more. So how can we create scarcity on our stores and make customers believe that they are getting inside information about the scarcity – premium buyers’ clubs etc.
20. Can we trigger the scarcity trigger by getting all potential buyers to show up at once onto one product and show how many people are looking at that item? Or even get them to reserve a buying spot, where they get 10 minutes to decide on the product before the chance is offered to someone else.
If you want to see how we use these ‘laws’ of influence to benefit some of our clients watch of our Google Shopping case study video here – http://go.markhammersley.co/get-started/#go-go
Thanks
Mark (Influencer) Hammersley
