9 Weird Psychological Tricks to Get Customers to Take Action

Great marketers are also great observers of human behavior. They pay attention to their own behaviors and figure out what it is that gets them to buy or make decisions. It’s something that business schools just don’t teach. This is what gives the best marketers in the world the edge that everyone else just dreams about. These are the 9 weird psychological tricks they know.

Contrast

Have you ever bought something because the original price was $100, but was now just $50. This is because everything is either a great deal or an awful deal based on what you compare it with.

What this means to you? You should have a bad offer on your website. Yes, I’m serious! Every time we’ve tested it, it has proven true. It makes your main offer look great. One of our clients was selling 4 bottles of his product at $89. We added an option to the site for 1 bottle at $75. His sales (for the 4-bottle package) increased by about 60%. Decoy offers make “the real offer” look very, very good.

Consistency

In his book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, Robert Cialdini talks about an experiment he did.

Group A was asked to put a huge sign in their yards that said “Drive slow; kids playing”. Most of the people in Group A said no.

Group B was asked to put a tiny sticker in their windows with the same text. Almost everyone agreed. Then they were asked to put the giant sign in their yards. A large percentage in Group B agreed.

The takeaway? People want to be consistent with previous actions. If they said yes to something in the past, they’re more likely to say yes in the future.

What does this mean to you? You need to get your prospects to say yes to something. And the best way to do this is by asking for a tiny micro-commitment. For example, if you sell a $2,000 coaching program, you can have a funnel that looks like this:

1. Download free report (only 3 pages; it can be read in 10 minutes)
2. Get my free videos (total 45 minutes)
3. Get my DVD (only $19.99)
4. Free 10-minute phone consultation for people who bought the DVD (deliver a lot of value here. Provide “useful but incomplete” information. Keep them wanting more.)
5. Group training ($499 and includes a 110% money back guarantee)
6.  Private coaching ($2,000 and includes a 200% money back guarantee)

High Price = High Quality

A $500 tennis racket is always going to be better than a $100 racket, right? Isn’t a $400 office chair always going to be better than that $100 chair? No, of course not. But as the buyer perceives it: “If it cost that much, it must be good.”

What this means to you? You are hurting yourself by charging too little for your products. Raise your prices and increase the perceived value of your stuff.

Exclusivity

People want what they can’t have. Do you want the new phone that’s sold out everywhere or one you can get anywhere? What restaurant would you rather go to: the one that is fully booked for the next 3 months or the one that’s empty?

What this means to you? Let your prospects know you don’t take just anyone as a client. Tell them they need to apply and that you only select those clients that are a good fit. This will make them want you even more!

If you sell products, try this: in your copy say who SHOULDN’T buy your product. For example, if you sell artisan bread try saying “this bread isn’t for people looking for mass-produced loafs of blandness. If you’re the kind of person who appreciates hand-crafted bread that’s full of flavor, you’re in the right place.”

Social Validation

Everyone wants to be liked and they want others to think they make smart decisions.

What this means to you? Explain why buying your product is a SMART decision. People will need to justify their actions with others and they’ll repeat whatever you say. Make a compelling argument so people feel good about buying your stuff. (And, make sure your stuff is extremely good!)

Too Many Choices = No Action
Don’t you hate when you want to buy a laptop, you go to eBay and they have 2,000,000 laptops to choose from? You think “OMG! I’ll be here all day!”

What this means to you: narrow down the choices you give your visitors and you’ll increase your sales instantly.

Scarcity

If an offer may be gone tomorrow, than a person is more likely to take action today.

What this means to you: don’t just give people reasons to act; tell them why they need to act NOW! Some ideas:

• This offer expires on Sunday
• I’ll take only one client this week
• I’ll only be teaching this to 8 people
• Only 6 items left. When they’re gone, they’re gone forever.

Risk Reversal
Risks = “Reasons Not to Act”. Therefore; the less risky an action is, the more likely someone will take action.

What this means to you: Go beyond the standard “money back guarantee”. Some ideas:

• Offer FREE shipping on returns. (It has worked wonders for Zappos.com)
• Offer a FREE trial and let them keep something, just for trying it out.
• Ship the product now but don’t charge them for 30 days. If the customer returns the product within 30 days, then they never get charged!

Guarantee results, not just “satisfaction”. Get very specific.

Note: Depending on your market, about 1% of the people will rip you off, but your sales will double. Do the math for yourself and you’ll see that it’s still worth it! Remember: your market is going to be taken by the boldest marketers. This could be you or it could be your competitors. Don’t let the fear of losing stop you from winning. If you’re afraid of things going wrong, start by testing your guarantee on 200 sales and keep some reserve cash just in case. Then compare the extra sales with the refunds you had to give and see if it makes sense to keep doing it.

Sex Sells

This one isn’t weird but it is 100 percent true. Sex sells. That’s why models are hired to sell products.

What this means to you: you need attractive people to show your products. Don’t just use your cousin Joe (the one with the beer belly) because he’ll do it for nothing. Use stock photos or if you need a model put an ad on Craigslist and you’ll get very attractive -although not famous- people to feature your products.

Email marketing that works

This is a guest post from Denise Gabbard. It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

Most people think that spam, Facebook, blogs, and other social media like Twitter killed email marketing as a means to communicate online.  However, most people are wrong. Businesses today engage in email marketing because it gives them a return on investment hovering over $40 per $1 spent, and outperforms all direct marketing channels. In a Forbes Media survey in the February/March 2009 issues, it was reported that business owners and executives say email marketing is second overall to SEO when it comes to converting lookers into buyers. Impressive, and tells you why businesses use it—it just works!

An email campaign is an ongoing marketing venture whereby you send out regular communications to customers and potential customers. The traditional email marketing approach was to build a huge list and push lots of messages out to the masses. This doesn’t work anymore, as it brands your company spammers, and can get you booted from your domain, and facing government sanctions.

The new way of doing things is targeting those who want to hear from you. Put together your list by asking your customers if they’d like to receive ‘newsletters’ from you on a periodic basis. You can ask them in person, over the phone, or on your website by embedding a “Sign Up” button for convenience. When you invoice a customer for a project or product sale, always include a CTA (call to action) for them to sign up for your newsletter, and even put a sign up link in your email signature. You can convert that happy customer into a lifetime customer if you keep in touch regularly. The point is making the effort to create a targeted, personalized list for your company will pay big dividends.

There are a number of online business tools that are useful for your email campaigns. Sites like Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, and Campaigner can help you set up your campaigns quickly and easily, and most offer a free trial so you can compare functionality.

When designing your email templates, readability should be your priority. Keep your paragraphs concise, with just a few sentences for each, and write compelling contact to encourage them to finish reading.  Another great idea is to keep your design less than 620 pixels, so that it can be viewed in email preview windows. (Also, large images take too long to load and can be abandoned easily.)   An important step is validating your code before mass mailing it. Email types interpret code differently, and you want to be certain there will be no glitches on their end and they can open and read your message.

Clearly, increased sales, brand loyalty, and reputation are the goals of email marketing campaigns. Your aim is to have a high percentage of recipients open your email and click-through any links that you placed in the email. Average rates of opening marketing emails have been shown to float around the 20-30% range, so do not expect everyone to open your mail. However, do continue tweaking your messages to appeal to more people and get a higher open rate.  For instance, a great graphic and web design company can create and execute a stunning email campaign that will make people take notice.

SEM, SEO, Social Media and their Connection to Each Other

This is a guest post from Melvin Dichoso . It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

Most people who have just got started in their online ventures usually focus too much on SEO. It’s no secret that its really one of the biggest misconceptions most beginners and even experienced guys run into as far as their online businesses are concern. Today in this blog post, I’m very much hoping I can address this by writing about SEO as well as its connection to SEM and Social Media.

First and foremost I’m not an SEO guru or whatsoever. Heck, my blog is even PR0 up to now, although I have managed to reap a lot as far as  the blog’s traffic is concern. Just consider me as you’re typical online entrepreneur and blogger.

Setting up some Initial things

So what does these three things I mentioned above have something in connection? When building a website or any online-based project, you want to build SEO in it from the get-go. You want to optimize it for those key terms that you’re looking into from the start. I know you’re saying, “how can you do that, you don’t even have content yet?” Yes, you’re right but what I mean is that with every websites you can already set up things from the start that would give you a dramatic effect later on. Let me explain.

For example, if I’m building a site based on a WordPress platform, I can start fine-tuning the site’s search goals by doing the necessary things like adding an All in One SEO pack, canonicalizing the domain, setting up the meta descriptions properly and creating a robots.txt (and many more of course). You see, these are the things that you can already do from the start yet it doesn’t take that much to do those. On the flip side, it may not yield that much results for the first few months but its future benefits would be enormous for sure.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t a short-term goal in the first place right? Organic rankings is something that can be achieved over time and if you’re getting lots of traffic from search engines then you know what I’m talking about.

Before the SEO our site picks up

Now we all know that ranking in search engines does not happen overnight, but does that mean we’re going to wait that long before doing anything? No! That means we have to work on something that would alleviate the lack of traffic from our new site.

There are two things that you can do that would offset the need for SEO for short term. One is utilizing social media and the other one is via search engine marketing. Let’s tackle both of those things here.

Social Media

Social Media is something that everyone these days wants to utilize but only few can do it well. With that my tip has always been to focus on one niche targeted network first and forget everybody else. If you’re into Stumbleupon then focus on it, work on it first.

The problem with people is that they try to get everything from each and every social media sites but the truth is its never gonna happen. These social sites have different audiences and you can only target the ones which is the most relevant to what your business is. Also social media has an effect to search rankings. Indirectly you can see that it can boosts links, search rankings and web traffic in particular.

Popular site Mashable has even written an article on how SEO and social media goes hand in hand together.

Search Marketing

Unlike social media, search marketing does not have an effect with your search rankings. Instead this can be a quick way to boost your site’s traffic immediately from the start.

Let’s go back to our WordPress Site example. After we’re able to set up all the basic SEO-related stuff to our sites, we can immediately focus on running search campaigns for our sites via Pay Per Click. The way I do it is I focus on the top three networks, Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Ad Center. These three have the biggest market share and there’s no reason to go to other 2% of small search engines that can give you almost no traffic.

Running pay per click campaigns can be really tricky and hard. You need to focus on a lot of things like Ad copy, keywords, targeting different demographics, quality scores and a whole lot more. I had learned all of this for quite some time and to be honest, I spent a lot of money testing things but  I could say it’s all worth it.

I know not all of us can run PPC campaigns so there’s always an option of hiring a search marketing person or a team to run your campaign for you. This can be an investment on your part but the way these guys could do the job for you could later on offset the cost.

The logic behind running search campaigns is to immediately drive traffic to your site, find the top markets and top demographics for what you’re business is about and penetrating that market. We could also experiment on our campaigns and as a return this could only give us the whole pie of what we’re trying to achieve. We could forever do these campaigns until our search traffic starts picking up. In short, SEM is for short term and SEO is for long term.

Conclusion

Driving traffic to our website, more generally our business is an unending cycle. We as business owners continue to tweak and test things and try to find more sources that could give us the maximum return for what we spend.

These three components that I mentioned namely SEM, SEO and social media play a key role for that. They have their own ideal time to get implemented and it’s all about connecting them and making  them work harmoniously.What do you think?

6 Kick-ass Ways To Market Your Blog

This is a guest post from Devesh. It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

If you are trying to market your new blog, chances are you’ve already looked into search engine optimization then here are 6 Kick-ass ways to market your blog:

1. Building Mailing list

My single biggest mistake was not to build a list from beginning. I did not realize the power of list building until later on.
Building a list is an extremely popular aspect of the internet marketing industry. Everyone says repeatedly all the time, “the money is in the list!” And it is totally true.

Here are 5 reasons why you should build your list

• Connect – Emails give you an opportunity to make your fans feel more closely connected with you.
• Referrals – Put you in a position to receive regular referrals.
• Easier – Make your sales process easier and more productive.
• Sart conversations with people you are targeting.
• This gives you a chance to build a good relationship with them and to show them that you will only provide them with quality products that can really help them

2. Blog Commenting

Blog commenting, one of the easiest and most effective way to market a new site/blog and get targeted traffic and backlinks. If people can see you being so active and commenting everywhere they end up, they will be more inclined to comment on yours, because you become memorable.  Take the time to leave a useful comment often enough, don’t just write “great post” or “thanks”. Don’t SPAM or self-promote when leaving blog comments. Another added benefit to blog commenting is that if you leave useful comments regularly, the blog owner will eventually notice. This greatly increases your chances of establishing a great new business relationship that could result in more links, traffic, and more subscribers to your list.

3. Guest posting

This is one of the best ways of getting website traffic to your squeeze page and/or blog. Make sure it is very high quality, and is something that provides genuine value and your chances of your request being accepted will increase.

Here are 5 Reasons why you should do Guest Posting.

• Drive targeted traffic.
• Build contact with other bloggers.
• Increase your brand awareness? (How to Build a Great Brand for Your Blog).
• Build high quality Backlinks to your blog.
• Get new subscribers.

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6 Shocking Truths About Internet Marketing

This is a guest post from Mark Thompson. It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

Expectations, Expectations, Expectations…I just can’t say it enough.  No matter how many times I try to provide realistic expectations to my clients or myself for that matter, I need to keep reinforcing those expectations.  For anyone who is managing Internet Marketing clients or is working on trying to market their website via the web, it is imperative that expectations are discussed on a regular basis.  Everything from expected goals/objectives, traffic growth, roles and responsibilities (client & agency), marketing budget, communication frequency…the list goes on.

So the following list is not meant to be a scare tactic to anyone, but I will say this, if you are able to communicate these crucial truths to your client/company, you will be trusted, respected, and be able to maintain your strategy for the long haul.

1.  Internet Marketing is Not a Silver Bullet

So many people, especially smaller business owners are under the impression that Internet Marketing is a silver bullet to increased traffic, viability, and sales.  There seems to be something about Internet Marketing that because its a new form of marketing and there is a lot of BUZZ words surrounding it, that is must be a magical source to sales.  Unfortunately that is not the case.  Yes, Internet Marketing is probably the best form of advertising you can do (little bias), has the best ROI if done properly, and can yield some outstanding results, however there are no guarantees.

2.  It Takes Two to Tango

I know many clients feel that because they don’t understand Internet Marketing that they can’t help or think they can hire an agency and they are completely hands-off. Yes, to some degree that is true, but to see the BEST results, you need both parties involved.

Here is Why:

• Content Development: In order to create really valuable content, it really needs to come from someone within the company that has the knowledge and expertise.  If you are looking to outsource the content creation, I would strongly recommend finding someone in the industry that is an expert.  This will prove to be a big part in creating content that is not just the same re-written stuff that everybody does.  It will make your blog/site stand out!
  
• Link Acquisition: The agency should definitely be the driving force behind the link building strategy, however with the help of the client you may be able to gain some high value links just by reaching out to their partners, organizations, and groups that they are affiliated with.
  
• Off-Line Engagements: Yes, off-line marketing is still a great way to build your brand and credibility, so having the client attend conferences, local meetups, and other events can in-turn help your online strategy.  A plus would be if they are able to speak or sponsor certain industry events.
  
• Specials/Offers: As an agency, they can provide suggestions and examples of specials/offers that they feel would entice more people to take action.  However, the client needs to have some input since ultimately it is there business.  Gaining some feedback on what has worked in the past, their margins on their products/services, and what are their “bread and butter” products/services will help to create a well crafted offer.
  
• Industry News: Let’s face it, even if a client hires an agency to help with their marketing, the agency is not necessarily going to be keeping up with the industry on a daily basis.  Hopefully the client is already doing that, so it should be their responsibility to let the agency know of any upcoming events, industry news/buzz, or anything that could affect their marketing strategy.
  

3.  Your Company Has to Buy Into It

So this has happened a few times from my experiences.  Where you start working with a marketing department on an Internet Marketing strategy, then the CEO of the company comes in and is wondering what this charge is for 3rd party internet marketing services.  Not to stereotype older CEOs, but they are typically fans of “old school marketing”, so when they find out they are spending thousands of dollars on a Facebook Campaign, they freak out because its out of their comfort zone.
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