To understand what makes your customers click on the ‘buy’ button, you have to get into their heads. Years of consumer surveys and studies have helped us to understand what drives people to shop, why they choose one brand over another and what makes them more likely to recommend their purchases to friends and family members. Understanding the psychology of the consumer experience will help you to optimize your website.
It’s not a sale… it’s an experience
Let’s face it; almost everyone you know already has everything they need, so why are they shopping online? What they are looking for is an experience. That’s why you take clients out to lunch or give them free tickets to the ball game; you want them to experience your brand, not just buy it.
When your potential customer happens upon your website, it’s your marketing funnel that got them there, but there better be some sizzle if you want them to stay. What is the experience of your website like? Do you entice the reader with appealing design long enough to draw them in with benefits while you dazzle them with promises of a better life before you hook them with desire for an experience they simply must have before they die?
An emotional connection to a really good time
What you need to recreate, in a small but profound way, is the emotional connection we feel to the really memorable experiences in our lives. All the experiences you loved most in life were attached to heightened emotions like your first kiss, the first time you rode a motorcycle or the excitement of getting your first promotion. If you can promise the same experience through inspiration or joy, you can truly create an experience that your customers will want to buy into and improve your conversion rates.
We’ve featured Goldie Blox in our blog before. Here a young woman made an engineering toy for girls. At first, her Goldie Blox weren’t selling because they couldn’t compete with Barbie and other toys that had their own TV shows. So she decided to change the consumer experience of what it meant to buy Goldie Blox. Instead of just selling building blocks for girls, she decided to focus on the fact that her toys were meant to inspire girls to careers in engineering. Now she was righting a social wrong with an inspirational message.
Watch her knock it out of the park with this latest video:
Make it relevant
So how do you create an experience that your clients want to have? You make it relevant to their lives. You need to think about what they need or love and then recreate those experiences for them. Here authenticity is the key so use real people in real situations to portray the kinds of experiences that are relevant to your customers. For example, telephone companies understand that it’s mostly an aging population that uses landlines. Their emotional adverts feature grandchildren calling to speak their first words while a tearful grandma listens. These adverts tug on your heart strings and focus on the kinds of family experiences that everyone enjoys. They encourage potential clients to purchase this particular phone service in the hopes that their grandchildren will call more often.
Your website should convey a mood, a feeling and the promise of a memorable experience in order to optimize the rate at which you turn browsers into customers. The experience can be inspiring, sentimental, exciting, adventurous, or delicious; as long as it inspires a strong emotional connection, you’ll be amazed at the effect it has on your bottom line.
