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“The grass is always greener”

“We always want what we can’t have”

…and a thousand other cliches sum up the Scarcity principle fairly well.

We tend to want items that are difficult to attain - the more rare or unavailable they are, the more we must have them!

But just like many of Cialdini’s weapons of influence, the Scarcity principle becomes more effective under certain conditions:

1.  Competition — We tend to want items even more when we think we’re in competition for those items with other people.

You ever watch the Home Shopping Network?

You know how during a presentation they’ll show a counter for the number of items left?

That’s an attempt to exploit this condition (which also leverages Social Proof) and it works pretty damn well!

2.  New — The scarcity principle becomes even more effective when an item is newly scarce.

For example, do you remember that girl in your 8th grade math class that you didn’t pay much attention to…that is, until she got a boyfriend?  Same deal.

Now let’s take a look at how clever marketers employ this strategy…

Limited Time Only - Google AdWords

Thus far, we’ve only gone over landing pages, but I wanted to take a step back and look at some of the ads that actually drive traffic to those landing pages.

Sometimes, the ad is so powerful, it does all the work upfront and people are primed and ready to buy as soon as they hit the landing page.  Check out some of these AdWords campaigns to see what I mean:

Not the sexiest thing in the world, but the Macy’s Towel ad implies that their offer for “Free Shipping” ends today.  Same with the iPhone auction - “Blowout Auctions Today.” — this creates a sense of urgency in the advertisement.

Now let’s take a look at what you actually see when you click through on the iPhone ad — even more scarcity and competition thrown right in your face:

Look at the countdown clock on this page — it’s rapidly ticking down, showing you that your shot at scoring an iPhone for $9.16 is rapidly coming to an end!

Scarcity Through Competition - eBay

eBay is amazing for a whole slew of reasons, but just take a look at the inherent level of scarcity through competition that’s built into their auction model.

You have a couple of different elements on this page that scream: “YOU NEED TO HURRY UP AND BUY THIS NOW!” — limited time left to buy, 25 bids from other people, live countdown clock, etc.

All of these contribute to that sense of urgency that’s allowed eBay to become an eCommerce powerhouse.

Having an e-mail address becomes “exclusive”?

One of the best examples of a taking a commodity-like service and building in scarcity to make it successful was the original GMail launch campaign.

Think about it…who didn’t have a web-based email account at the time?  After Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, it wasn’t difficult to get setup with an account for free.

So when GMail first launched, they had an invitation-only system and each member only had a limited number of invites. 

All of a sudden, e-mail became that girl in your 8th grade math class that just got a boyfriend!

Granted, GMail was appealing for other reasons (LOTS of free storage, great interface, etc.), but it almost became a badge of honor to be one of the lucky few with a GMail address (and those coveted invites!).

Bonus Weapon

As I said in the first part of this series, Cialdini only goes over 6 Weapons of Influence in his book.  However, there’s one more very important weapon that can and should be used to enhance your landing pages: Contrast.

So in my next and final post, I’ll go over this weapon, under what conditions it’s most effective and some examples of how it’s used.

According to Cialdini, a person wearing a lab coat or a police uniform, or someone that goes by the title, “CEO” or “Professor”, or even someone who drives a nice car and wears a nice suit, can command a great deal of influence over other people.

He cites numerous examples of studies done where requests were made by people who were “perceived” to be in a position of authority (e.g. a “fake” doctor, a regular person wearing a police uniform, etc.).  The requests were almost always followed without any attempt to verify the person’s actual level of authority.

One of my favorite examples from the book, is the Sanka coffee commercial, where an actor who played a Doctor on a television series, touts the health benefits of the caffeine free beverage.  The commercial was a wild success…and this wasn’t some obscure actor that people might have mistaken for a real doctor.  This was a well known guy and he was giving out health advice that people actually followed!  Amazing!

I’m sure we’ve all seen countless examples like this in other advertisements.  Let’s take a look at how it’s used on a few landing pages to help bump up conversions:

Authority by Association - BaseCamp - 37 Signals

You’ve gotta forgive me for using this example so many times, but the folks over at 37 Signals really understand landing page design!

So take a look at the screen grab below:

Take a look at what they did here.

They combined, social proof, the law of liking and authority into the same section of the landing page.

As we previously discussed, the social proof comes from the headline and the statistics box on the right.  The law of liking is employed through the pictures and descriptions of those who use the software.  And Authority comes into play with the clever use of logos of major brands who are 37 Signals users at the bottom.

Testimonials - ZenDesk

Let’s take a look at our friends at ZenDesk again.

Not only is ZenDesk showcasing their clients in an attempt at social proof, but these are also marquee clients (other web companies a potential customer would want to emulate), thus employing the concept of Authority as well.  Which makes the whole design much more effective!

As Seen In - Wikinvest

A very popular technique used to boost credibility by using Authority, is to tout the sites, blogs and periodicals that have written about a product or company.

For example, check out sign-up form for Wikinvest.com (a portfolio aggregation and equity research service):

It’s pretty simple:  headline + email form + quote from recent news coverage in Barron’s.

If you’re a regular investor and you see this page for the first time, knowing that Barron’s gave these guys a great review will make you much more comfortable entering your email address.

In the next post, we’ll go over Cialdini’s 6th and final weapon for increasing conversions: Scarcity — “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost” - G.K. Chesterson.

The 4th weapon Cialdini introduces us to is the principle of “Liking”. 

This is a pretty simple concept: we’ll generally want to do things for someone we like versus someone we don’t like - duh!

The real question is, how do you get someone to like you, your brand, your product, etc., on a landing page?

Well, here are some examples of “offline” marketing funnels that capitalize on the Liking principle:

1.  Do You Like Your Friends? — I’m sure your mother (or someone she knows) has thrown a Tupperware party before.  Essentially, the host of the party brings in a Tupperware saleswoman, solicits some friends to come to the house for a “party” where the Tupperware sales rep proceeds to schmooze and pitch everyone in the room to buy these kitchen storage containers.  Everyone knows that the host of the party will get rewards and free products if they buy a lot of stuff.  Because this person is their friend, most folks tend to buy things they normally wouldn’t. 

2.  Association — Michael Jordan puts his name on a pair of sneakers and now everyone thinks they can be like Mike.  Elliot Spitzer puts his name on a…well, nevermind, you get the point.

This is known as “association”, and it’s extremely powerful.  Furthermore, it doesn’t just apply to celebrity endorsements either.

The more closely a prospective customer can associate with others who use or endorse a product, the more likely they are to “like” it and buy it.  This includes taking a recommendation from a friend, seeing an endorsement from a complete stranger that happens to be in the same field you work in, etc.

3.  Looks Matter - Cialdini even goes on to show that we tend to like people that we find attractive.  Physical appearance plays a big role in everything; from who we choose as a mate, to how we choose which dish soap to buy.

As a side note, this is why visual design plays an important role in how well a landing page converts — attractive pages help convert for a number of reasons (e.g. conspicuous consumption, credibility, etc.) but the simple psychological principle of Liking explains a great deal about why they do so well.

Let’s take a look at a couple of landing pages that use the Liking principle to help boost conversions:

Basecamp - 37 Signals

Remember the examples of Social Proof we went included in the last post?

These endorsements could’ve easily been a simple text-based testimonial with a name next to it (ex: “I love Basecamp - Joe Shmo”).  But instead, they show the person, they show the type of company this person works at, they let you hear what the person has to say first hand, etc.

The idea being that if you show cool, attractive and creative people (notice how none of them are wearing a ripped t-shirt, have unkempt hair or work in a field that requires manual labor like construction) using this software - other people that view themselves as cool, attractive and creative will want to use it as well.

Special Guest Appearance - YOUR FRIENDS!

You can visit almost any large website these days and chances are you’ll see something that you didn’t see a couple of years ago: pictures of your friends looking back at you.

Thanks to Facebook, every time I click on a Groupon or a Living Social ad, I can now see which of my friends have visited or joined these sites already:

The hope is that by showing you how many of your friends have also joined the site, you’ll be more inclined to join because if you’re going to identify with anyone, it will be your friends.

Virality & the Law of Liking

I don’t think I’ve ever joined a social network because I was psyched to meet “new people.”

And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Facebook ad saying, “Hey join Facebook now!”

Facebook (and many other social networks) have generated a MASSIVE amount of new users all by banking on the principle of Liking.

If you’re one of the 500 million people on Facebook, then you know how this works.  They get you to send invitations to all of your friends

These friends are then unwittingly becoming victims of the Liking principle — because they’re your friends and they like you (combined with a little curiosity)  they’re convinced to register for Facebook and the cycle continues:

In the next article, we’ll touch on the principle of Authority.  I’ll go back to some examples we’ve already used and show how Authority, Liking and Social Proof work together to help landing pages boost conversions.

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.

This post will cover the first of Robert Cialdini’s 6 Weapons of Influence:  Reciprocity.

The basic idea here is that if someone does a favor for you, you’re psychologically “hardwired” to return the favor.  In his book, Cialdini introduces this topic with a re-cap of an experiment a University Professor conducted:

The professor sent Christmas cards to a bunch of random people.  He originally expected get maybe one or two responses, he didn’t fathom he’d get what he did: “holiday cards addressed to him came pouring back from the people who had never met nor heard of him.  The great majority of those who returned a card never inquired into the identity of the unknown professor”.

The card recipients simply followed the “hard wiring” of their brains and returned a favor done unto them.

So let’s see how this psychological law of Reciprocity can be put into effect on a landing page…

eHarmony.com

Check out the screen cap below.  What’s the first thing you notice (besides the obnoxiously happy couple)?

An offer for a “Free” service!

We’re all smart enough to realize that eHarmony isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their match-making hearts.

Oh no no no…this is an attempt to exploit the Reciprocity principle:  Get people in the door with a free offer to meet the man or woman of their dreams, and then hit them up for cash once they think they’ve found that person.

It’s subtle in the sense that they’re not coming right out and saying, “Hey we gave you access for free…do us one in return and fork over your credit card number!”.  But they let you know up front that this is a free way to find your soul mate, that no credit card is necessary, etc.  They’re tearing down your built in defense mechanisms.

This is all part of eHarmony’s carefully designed landing page and sales funnel:  Give away part of their service for free, get someone’s email address, and continuously pitch them to join as a paying member.  It all starts with the free offer and that relies on the Reciprocity principle.

SouthBeachDiet.com

Ok, so maybe love starved consumers are easier to sell.  Maybe it’s not the Reciprocity principle coming into play, maybe it’s a guy or gal that simply needs a date…badly.

So let’s take a look at another site:  SouthBeachDiet.com.

You’d think that on a diet site, the first thing they’d want visitors to see are pictures of super-skinny models or dramatic “Before & After” photos.  That would really get people excited about purchasing some products, right?

Wrong.

The first thing you see in the screen cap below is a big red arrow pointing to a form on the right side of the page.

And that form is a prompt for a  “Free Diet Profile”.  The call-to-action button even has the word “free” in it:  “Free Profile Results”.

Again, a carefully designed marketing funnel that begins with an offer for something free in exchange for an email address (and ultimately a purchase).

WebsiteGrader.com

Ok fine, maybe dating and dieting are such emotional and personal experiences that people can’t help but get sold on offers like these (whether or not they got something for free up front).

What about something less emotional and more along the lines of cold, calculated business decisions?

Would the Reciprocity principle work on a savvy CEO looking for a new marketing vendor?

You might be shaking your head saying “No way!” right now, but check out WebSiteGrader.com and then tell me what you think.

These guys offer you a free SEO analysis of your site.  They even give you a “score”.

Out of the kindness of their hearts?

Hell no!

Website Grader is owned by the marketing company, HubSpot.  And you can bet this is yet another carefully designed funnel that leverages the Reciprocity principle.  Check out the other “Grader” websites they own:



Bottom Line - Reciprocity is a Powerful Weapon

Industry, product, etc., it doesn’t matter — the psychological law of reciprocity can be used in any marketing funnel or landing page design to make it more effective.

However, this doesn’t mean you should start offering free cups of coffee to visitors on your site and expect them to sign up for your paid product.  There are some additional rules of thumb to employ as you think about your “freebie” offer:

1.  Make sure your free offer relates directly to your core product offering.  A free “diet profile” for a diet system is a logical way to upsell someone (e.g. “Oh look, you’re kind of fat, how about you buy our fat burning system today!?”).  Same goes for SEO services — “Oh wow, your website has a SUPER LOW SEO score…we can help with that!”. 

2.  Don’t give away something of greater value than your core product offering.  I doubt many people would make this mistake, but I have seen it happen.  A buddy of mine was offering a free telephone consultation when he was first getting his business off the ground.  And while that worked when he only had 1 - 2 leads trickling in per day, it became cost prohibitive (from an opportunity cost perspective) when he had 50 new leads coming in per day.

3.  Please be sure that whatever you’re giving away actually adds value to the user.  Don’t think that simply because it’s free they’ll find value in it — sometimes things are free because they suck and folks don’t find it to be valuable enough to pay for it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s rare that any of Cialdini’s weapons work alone.  As you’ll see, the Reciprocity principle employed by eHarmony also ties in with the next weapon we’ll examine: Commitment and Consistency!

Marketing is manipulation.

I truly hate to think about business in these terms, but the sad truth is that if I don’t, then I risk becoming one of the victims to this form of manipulation.

Worse still, I’d miss out on some golden opportunities to attract people to my services and products.

That same motivation is what led Robert Cialdini to study and codify the psychological principles behind “compliance” - in other words, he wanted to figure out how people could be influenced into taking specific actions.

If you haven’t read it yet, I can confidently say his book, Influence - The Psychology of Pursuasion, is a MUST READ if you intend to start a business.

Cialdini’s “6 Weapons of Influence” are the psychological principles you must master if you hope to make money in a marketplace.  Salesmen, copywriters and marketers have relied on this text for over two decades to super charge their sales and marketing efforts.

Designing the Weapons of Influence

What I hope to do over the next 6 weeks is walk you through each one of the 6 psychological principles Cialdini outlines in his book and show you how they can literally be “designed” into one of your landing pages.  I’ll use examples from some of the more successful and well recognized landing pages on the web today.

Here’s a brief outline of Cialdini’s 6 Weapons of Influence:

1.  Reciprocity - The basic thesis behind this principle is that we’re culturally conditioned to return favors done for us.  So if someone were to give us a free book, we might be inclined to donate to their religious organization (you all know how the Hare Krishnas roll).  This same principle can be applied to landing page design.

2.  Commitment and Consistency - This principle basically states that once someone has verbally committed to taking an action, they’ll likely follow through with it regardless of the hurdles that appear.  The trick in marketing is to get someone to commit to making a buying decision before you ever ask them to pull out their credit card.  By committing to the purchase up front, they’ll be less likely to abandon the process.

3.  Social Proof - This is an obvious one: people are more likely to follow the crowd.  It’s a trait we’ve all evolved over thousands of years.  Cavemen had to follow the crowd in order to survive and the way to utilize this in marketing is by showing your prospect how many other people (ideally, people who are similar to your prospect) are purchasing your product or service.

4.  Liking - In a nutshell: we tend to be influenced (or purchase from) by people we like.  This is a little more difficult to incorporate right into a landing page, but there are a few tactics that make it possible.

5.  Authority - Which cook book would you rather buy:  the one that “Mario Batali swears by” or the one “Joe Shmo thinks is the best cook book ever written”?  If you’re like most folks, you’ll tend to go with the Batali bible.  Reason being, he’s an authority figure in the world of food and all else being equal, we tend to give more weight to those in the position of authority.

6.  Scarcity - The scarcity principle is an extremely effective tool.  This can influence both “the angle” of your sales pitch and the price your able to charge for a service or product.  The more scarce it is the more you can charge (basic supply and demand) but it also gives the impression of exclusivity.  And who doesn’t want to have access to something others don’t?

BONUS:  Contrast - This isn’t one of Cialdini’s principles but it’s used in many of the most successful sales pitches and marketing campaigns.  This principle states that it’s difficult for people to determine “the value” of a product by simply looking at its price tag — for the most part, if you’re operating in the tech space, your potential customers have never seen your product or service before. 

With the absence of a point of reference, they won’t know if the price tag you put on your product is low, high or fair.  The way around that is to give them a point of reference for comparison, so that you can demonstrate the value in quantifiable terms. It’s critical that you incorporate this concept into your sales and landing page designs.

So for the next 7 weeks, I’ll write one post per week on each principle along with a few examples.

If used properly, I can personally attest to the fact that these concepts will help increase conversions, sales and profits - guaranteed!