ExperienceBlogger

The second weapon in Cialdini’s arsenal is called “Consistency and Commitment”.

The basic idea here is that once someone publicly or privately states a goal or belief, then they’re very likely to continue with any actions that are consistent with that initial goal or belief, even when the original incentive or motivating factor behind the commitment is no longer there.

Here are a couple of general examples:

1.  You go to purchase a car.  You’re in the show room, you negotiate a sweet price on the new ride and you’re ready to start filling out the paperwork — you’ve “committed” to buying the car.  So the dealer draws up the contract and then all of a sudden there are a bunch of new charges he didn’t talk to you about when you guys cut the deal.  But since you’ve already “bought the car” (at least, in your mind) a few hundred extra bucks isn’t enough to get you to kill the deal at the last minute.  This happens every day and more often than not, most people go ahead with the car purchase.

2.  Someone approaches you in the street to take a survey.  You answer all sorts of questions about your energy consumption habits (most people will usually embellish a bit and talk about how they always turn the lights off when they leave their homes, etc. because they believe in conserving energy).  The next thing you know, you’re being asked to donate money to a local effort to educate citizens on the importance of energy conservation.  Since you’ve already publicly declared how energy conscious you are, statistics show you’re MUCH more likely to donate money as your brain is hardwired to be consistent with this “energy conscious self image” you’ve publicly committed to.

This same logic applies to MANY other purchasing decisions.

Let’s take a look at how some of the landing pages in our previous post use this principle to increase conversion rates.

eHarmony.com

Let’s go back to our example of the eHarmony.com landing page (click here to read the original post).

Take a look at the form on the left side of the page — look at the sequence of form fields.



First, I’m asked to say who I am, where I’m from and declare that I’m a man looking for a woman.  That final part is extremely important: declaring my intent to find a mate, in writing, up front.

The button copy is also important: “Find My Matches” — this is another form of “committing” to the match-making process and leads right into the next critical juncture in the eHarmony conversion process: a LOOONG survey.  If the button had simply read “Submit”, I’d bet completion rates for the survey would drop.



eHarmony uses the results of this survey to find matches for people, however it’s unlikely they’d have much success if they presented this survey when I first landed on the page.

But now that I’ve committed to finding a match on the site, I’m much more likely to complete the entire survey.  If you bother going through the survey you’ll also notice several other “commitment inducing” questions peppered throughout (e.g. “How important is your match’s age to you?”) that will help eHarmony on the final step of their conversion funnel: getting you to open your wallet.

Let’s take a look at another example we used in our first post:

SouthBeachDiet.com

In the “Free Diet Profile” form, the user is asked to enter their “Target Weight”.

The site is betting that by making a declaration of how much weight you want to lose — in fact, simply declaring that your goal is to lose weight is probably enough but they take it a step further — you’ll be more likely to purchase their weight-loss programs in the next step of the funnel.

Also notice the fine print at the bottom of the form, “We’ll send you follow up emails”.  This is important — the company is hoping that you’ll buy other products from them down the road, even when the initial motivator (e.g. the free diet profile) is no longer present, as you’ve already committed to losing weight.

The Same Principle Applies to Job Sites

Jeff Gothelf - the Director of User Experience at The Ladders - has a FANTASTIC post on his blog about how TheLadders used some simple copywriting experiments to dramatically increase their paid conversions by leveraging the principle of Consistency and Commitment.

Click here to read his post now.

In my next post, I’ll go through the ways in which you can use “Social Proof” to bump your conversions on your landing pages.