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Quick, name a vegetable?
It was a carrot, wasn’t it?
This is a handy party trick I learned back in high school that works in 9 cases out of 10 so if your answer Bugs Bunny’s favorite treat – congrats, you really are a special snowflake!
The trick is as efficient as it is because it’s based on something we can’t walk away from no matter how hard we try – human psychology.
So here’s the thing: if something as simple as that thing above works on people, does that mean that there are other ways of tricking us into something? Of course, there are and you may use them to your advantage.
More on the matter – you should consider using psychology, especially while designing the booking platform for your business.
Don’t worry, you aren’t tricking people in a dirty way or anything, but rather you will be using a few brain hacks to help that lovely conversion rate of yours. Just like the cool kids on the block: Amazon or Netflix or Tesla or any other major brand you can name.
Become Desired
What do people desire the most? Everything they can’t get, of course. The very essence of danger you experience at the thought of losing something (even if you don’t yet own it) is killing us from the inside. That’s why the “sense of urgency” brain hack was born.
Amazon is the prime example of this at work with their endless “order before DD/MM/YYYY” deals. This concept was greatly utilized by them to increase the volume of sales before Christmas and provided people with a reasonable sense of urgency.
Here’s the thing though – this hack is overused. We see it everywhere nowadays regardless of the season or even the time of day and night. And, if everything is urgent – nothing is. Our brain just blacks out in denial and rational thoughts start crawling into it – thoughts like, “there will always be another deal tomorrow”.
You can’t allow that!
Don’t worry, even in an urgent world like ours there is a nice way for increasing the thrill: a limited offer. If there are only 100 seats on your next coaching event and 67 are already taken, people will feel the fear of missing out with a whole new catalyst – tomorrow is not an option.
Don’t limit the time, limit the supply and benefit from exclusiveness as that’s what everybody wants. Yes, even the exclusiveness is fictional. That is, after all, how Apple made their fortune.
Point at the stars
There was a time in 1965 when a man just stood in the center of New York looking up and pointing at the sky. There was nothing there. Do you know what happened? Nothing. Not a single person around the man batted an eye.
I mean, why should they? It’s NY city for God’s sake. Why should anyone care about yet another random crazy person?
Would you like to know what happened in the same scenario but with a tiny bitsy change? When a group of people took the role of a single man and started pointing their fingers at an empty sky the crowd around them did the same. Surprisingly enough, the longer the group stood and pointed, the more people followed his example.
This was a social experiment conducted by S. Milgram, L. Bickman and L. Berkowitz. The trio has taught society an important lesson – social proof is of the essence.
The same can be said about your landing page: include a meter of social media shares. Sure, it won’t work if you’ll have a couple dozens of shares but if you were to ensure your social media strategy is on point, that, over time, you’d get an upper edge over all of your competitors. People will pick you because of the “me too” mentality.
What else would you need?
This bright note is the perfect conclusion for part 1 of the “psychology of conversions” series I will be publishing on this blog. Subscribe to our newsletter and don’t miss out on new tricks!