8 Ways To Sell More Online With Behavioral Psychology

One of the most effective ways to sell online is to take advantage of behavioral psychology. In other words, being aware of what subconsciously triggers specific actions can significantly boost the performance of any marketing campaign. While the general idea of behavioral psychology applies to both online and offline marketing, the implementation differs dramatically.
Here are eight ways to leverage psychology to sell more online, with concrete examples you can implement instantly.

Three Ways To Get That Button Clicked

Optimizing the call to action has a huge impact on the conversion rate. An effective behavioral psychology strategy to increase clicks on the call to action is to use visual elements that make it stand out. This can be mainly done using three techniques:

1. Use Vivid Colors 

Using a yellow or a red button will stand out more than any other darker color. When people land on your website they will be naturally drawn to look at the bright color and understand in three seconds or less what they are supposed to do.

Source: Created by the author for the use of the Search Engine Journal

In the example above the red button has several advantages compared to the black one:

• Red creates a more aggressive color contrast to the background of the page and therefore stands out more
• Red increases the heart rate and therefore it is more likely to trigger the need to take action
• Red is the ‘on sale’ color and therefore it is associated with getting a good deal

Black is typically associated with luxury and high prices (think of Dior or Armani for instance) and while it communicates power and suppleness, neither of those things increase the amount of clicks. If your goal is to generate as many clicks as possible a vivid color for the call to action button it the right choice. Testing different color shades is of course a must.

2. Use Visual Aids

Instead of simply letting the call to action button sit there, point it out. According to behavioral psychologists, it is more intuitive to click on a button if one is clearly supposed to. By placing something close to the button, the button itself is subconsciously perceived as less isolated, meaning it is not such a stretch to actually go ahead and click it.
Examples of good visual aids are:

Source: Created by the author for the use of the Search Engine Journal

3. People Need to Look at the Call to Action

Whenever there are photos of people on the landing page, viewers are instantly drawn to the point the people in the photo are looking at. Therefore, the best photos are the ones that look at the call to action button.
A common problem with that is that viewers skip other content and look directly at the photos. In order to avoid that, place photos on the side where people start reading. If potential clients read from left to right, the photo should be on the left. If they read from right to left, the photos should be on the right. 

Make It Feel Like A Deal

Behavioral psychology has proven the way the price is presented dramatically changes the conversion rate of landing pages. A good pricing technique is offering alternative solutions to your pricing that are not actually meant to sell but are only there to make whatever you want to sell look like a deal.
For instance, let’s imagine you sell a subscription service and have the following pricing:

Source: Created by the author for the use of the Search Engine Journal

Looking at the pricing above, people are getting two prices but they do not really know if your price is convenient or not. You are missing something that helps people understand that “video trainings + strategy newsletter” is worth paying $19.99 for. Look at how this third offer (which is likely to have no market share whatsoever) changes the perceived value of “video trainings + strategy newsletter”

Source: Created by the author for the use of the Search Engine Journal

Nobody is likely to purchase the third offer but “video trainings + strategy newsletter” is now perceived as much more valuable than in the previous scenario.

Upsell Before The Checkout

You should take advantage of the fact that people decided to purchase from your website. You managed to break down the barrier between your product/service and the customer. Psychologically, people tend to say yes to something new when they already agreed to something else before. Therefore it will be easier to upsell to the same customer than finding new ones.
Note: it is the timing of the upsell that seals the deal because the momentum has passed after the checkout and upselling is therefore easiest just before the end of the checkout process. 
Effective up-selling strategies are:

• “Customers who ordered this item also bought:”
• “Add product xyz and get free shipping”
• “Add product xyz to get a one time discount of X%”

GoDaddy is the perfect example regarding upselling. For instance, when you look up the availability of a domain you will get an immediate upsell for domains with a different ending to secure the name you just found.

1. First Two Upsells: Above the Fold

This amounts to a total upsell value of €13.55.

Source: Screenshot of Godaddy.com

2. 94 Upsells: Below The Fold

They also include premium accounts for a total value exceeding €10,000. Go Daddy does a great job at pressuring customers in protecting their own name and buying extra domains to feel safer.

3. Move to Page Two and Get an Upsell Above the Fold

Source: Screenshot of Godaddy.com

This page is extremely clever, because you can continue immediately to the cart but they actually write “scroll down to continue to the cart”, which lets you go through three other upsells: Website builder + hosting or hosting and the purchase of a professional email address. In total, we have a total upsell of roughly €15 per month. 

4. Include Two More Upsells on the Final Checkout Page

Source: Screenshot of Godaddy.com

Create a Sense Of Urgency

The more time sensitive your promotion is, the more likely people take action. Creating a sense of urgency quickens the decision-making process even if they are not sure whether the promotion will really expire.
There are several ways to create a sense of urgency: 

• Limited availability
• Having a countdown on the website saying when the promotion is going to end
• Upcoming price increase
• Helping readers understand the importance of receiving a piece of information sooner rather than later

There are of course countless ways to create a sense of urgency and they should be split tested to find the one that is most profitable. This concept applies to marketing material across the board and can be split tested with an online versus offline comparison in mind. 

Take Advantage Of The Power Of The Word ‘FREE’

You might have heard about the behavioral psychology experiment run by Duke University’s Dan Ariely. Two types of chocolate were put on display at the counter: Hershey kisses for 1 cent and Lindt chocolate truffles for 15 cents. Customers were informed that both chocolates were on discount resulting in the just mentioned prices and that they could have either one or the other. 70% bought Lindt even when the price was increased by 1 cent for each of the chocolates. 
However, when the Hershey kisses were offered for free and the Lindt truffles at 14 cents, meaning both were lowered by 1 cent from the initial price, 69% of customers chose the free Hershey kisses.
This test has proven that FREE is sexy and that anytime something is free, people will most likely give it a shot instead of paying for something that is actually the better deal.
If the goal is that people use/read/test something, give it away for free and offer something paid at the same time to increase the feeling of getting away with a freebie.

Give User The Option To Learn More About An Upsell

If you are not a fan of aggressive up-selling, simply offer the option to learn more about an additional product or service during the checkout process.
For instance, you could have a checkbox at the bottom of your checkout button saying “Yes, I want to learn more about how to save 30% on my next purchase”. If people check the box, the offer page opens and they are more receptive to it because of the psychological effect discussed earlier: if someone agrees to someone once, it is more likely that he/she says yes again right after. 
An example of a checkout page using this technique would look like the following:

Source: Created by the author for the use of the Search Engine Journal

Watch The Way You Speak!

Write content as if readers have already decided to go through with the purchase. For instance, replace phrases mentioning “if you buy” with “when you will be using”, “the advantage of our product” with “You will love our product right from the first time you use it” . All scenarios should use phrases that imply the readers are already sure about buying the product.
This concept also applies to live demos and videos. You need to make users feel as if they already own the product and conversion rates will increase. 

Leverage On The Sense Of Belonging

Researchers at the University of California proved that social pressure and a sense of belonging can determine behavior. They randomly assigned one of two cards to several guest rooms. One card had a standard environmentally friendly message and the other stated that x% of hotel guests reused their towels.
On average, people staying in the rooms with the cards with the percentage reused their towels 25% more than people with the environmentally friendly card. 
Based on the results of this study, there are countless options to boost conversion rates. For instance, showcase your most popular package saying how many people prefer it to another solution. People will immediately identify with that and be more likely to complete a purchase. Another example could be upselling an item saying “80% of customers who bought this product also purchased…”. 

Conclusion

In order to master behavioral psychology and significantly boost online sales, it is not enough to implement strategies once and never optimize them again. A common mistake is to make a button red and let it sit there. Seemingly insignificant details like the shade of red for the call to action button can make a difference and should be split tested to maximize the effects of behavioral psychology.

Souces : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/8-ways-sell-online-behavioral-psychology/123921/

Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO - Whiteboard Friday

There are some basic questions about SEO that come up really frequently, and it's often easy to assume an answer that isn't exactly right. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles three of them:

1. Should I put subsections of my site on subdomains or in subfolders?
2. Should I use a rel canonical or a 301 redirect to move content on a separate site over to my main domain?
3. If I have multiple websites all linking back to my main site, does that help or hurt my SEO?

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard

 

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about structuring content, placing content, and placing links, specifically with regards to some things that have come up over and over again in the SEO world, but still seem to be a challenge for many of us who play in the field.
One of the questions that I'm going to start with is around subdomains and subfolders, because this just comes up again and again and again. I think one of the reasons it's emerged in the last few years is, unfortunately, some statements by Googlers themselves -- a statement a few years ago from Matt Cutts, and one, I think last year or two years ago, from John Mueller basically saying, "Hey, Google has gotten much better at identifying and associating content that's on a subdomain with the main domain, and you don't need to worry about placing content on two separate subdomains anymore."
I am sure that Google has actually made strides in this area, but this question still has the same answer that it did years ago. I'll show you some examples.
You're asking, "Should I put my content on a subdomain, or should I put it in a subfolder?" Subdomains can be kind of interesting sometimes because there's a lot less technical hurdles a lot of the time. You don't need to get your engineering staff or development staff involved in putting those on there. From a technical operations perspective, some things might be easier, but from an SEO perspective this can be very dangerous. I'll show you what I mean.
So let's say you've got blog.yoursite.com or you've got www.yoursite.com/blog. Now engines may indeed consider content that's on this separate subdomain to be the same as the content that's on here, and so all of the links, all of the user and usage data signals, all of the ranking signals as an entirety that point here may benefit this site as well as benefiting this subdomain. The keyword there is "may."
I can't tell you how many times we've seen and we've actually tested ourselves by first putting content on a subdomain and then moving it back over to the main domain with Moz. We've done that three times over that past two years. Each time we've seen a considerable boost in rankings and in search traffic, both long tail and head of the demand curve to these, and we're not alone. Many others have seen it, particularly in the startup world, where it's very popular to put blog.yourwebsite.com, and then eventually people move it over to a subfolder, and they see ranking benefits.
But even more telling was a recent example from just a few months ago on the iwantmyname blog. Timo Reitnauer wrote on the iwantmyname blog a piece about how he had moved their content actually from the main domain to a subdomain, which is not usually the way we see things going. But, man, when that happened, ugly, super, super ugly. You can see his traffic graph. He graphed his Google search traffic and showed, from his Google Analytics, a nice snapshot of when they made the move, what happened to their search traffic, how long it took to recover. It actually still hasn't recovered. It's been five or six months now. So very, very frustrating for them, and they're going to move it back over. I think maybe they already have moved it back over.
But this was great in that this piece went to the front of Hacker News. Lots of folks from around the startup and technology worlds commented on it, shared their experiences and opinions as well.
Bottom line is it's really dangerous to put content on a subdomain still. I believe John and I believe Matt when they say that Google has made strides in this direction. The problem is they're not good enough or perfect enough to rely on that factor, and so I'd really urge everyone to keep your content on one single sub and root domain, preferably in subfolders. That's how you're going to maximize your potential SEO benefit. This is one of those technical SEO things that just hasn't changed for many years now.
Next up, a question around rel=canonical, and 301s, especially cross-domain rel=canonical, meaning people are pretty comfortable with the rel=canonical that sits on your own website on your pages and maybe says, "Hey, the print version of this page should actually be considered the same as the web version of this page. Or the mobile version of this page should be considered the same as the regular version." That's fine.
But folks have more questions when it comes to cross-domain rel=canonicals and content that perhaps they own because they own multiple websites, or they have licensing agreements across those, or they have business development or partnerships, those kind of things. So they're wondering, "Hey, I've got content on multiple websites, and I want to move some of that content, or I want engines to interpret it all as coming from my site. Should I put it on the other website and use a 301 to redirect it, or should I use a cross-domain rel=canonical to say the old page is now the new page?"
Well, actually this is one where, from a technical perspective, the engines are doing a pretty darn solid job. Google is doing a very good job. We've seen Bing make strides here with cross-domain rel=canonical. They seem to be doing a pretty good job as well. I haven't tested them as intensely though recently.
Basic story is with the 301, other site.com/a can redirect to your site.com/a, and both visitors and engines, anyone requesting the old page, get the new page. The only difference with the rel=canonical is that when a visitor requests the old page, they're still going to get it. They're still going to get that othersite.com/b. Search engines, however, are going to get the new version of the page, or they're essentially going to consider these to be one and the same.
What we've seen is that, in both of these cases, the ranking signals seem to be passed very similarly, if not perfectly similarly, very similarly. It's hard to detect any difference there. But the rel=canonical can give you an option whereby you say, "Hey, I want to maintain the branding or some unique aspect of something that happens around othersite.com, and so I wish that I could have visitors be able to still go to that page, but have search engines know, hey this is actually just a copied version of this one, and if you're going to rank one of these two, I'd prefer you to rank this one."
That's a great use for the cross-domain rel=canonical. But this is much more a user experience and a branding experience issue than it is a technical SEO one, because both of these work pretty darn well.
Then the last issue I'll cover today are around some of this content and link optimization stuff is: What if you've got multiple websites all linking back to your main site, and you're wondering does that or would that help my SEO? I can't tell you how many folks, surprisingly even folks who are very savvy, who have done lots of other stuff in the technical and web development worlds, are thinking about this from a SEO perspective.
I can understand where it comes from. Basically, you have this understanding that more links is a good thing and that more link diversity is a good thing. So you think to yourself, "Hey, maybe I can capture more links and more link diversity by having more slightly different websites. I want to keep my main site all about one particular topic or one particular niche of that topic, and I want to have these other niche sites that maybe I have some great domain names in my portfolio or some really brandable ones. Maybe I've picked up some old domain names that I've bought, or I've bought entire properties outright. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to add a site-wide link or many links from these pages all back over to my main site."
What you're hoping is that this will amplify your ranking signals and amplify your opportunity. The opposite is true. In fact, what's happening is you're creating a barrier for the full link equity for brand, user and usage data signals, and any potential social signals. You're creating a barrier that's stopping some of those things from passing fully here.
Let's just imagine that you've got four links over here, and they are all pointing to mysubsite1.com, which you're then thinking, "That's great. That's exactly what I wanted to have happen, and now mysubsite1 is pointing to my main site." You're actually losing most of the link equity, the value, the ranking power that would be passed if only two or three of these links had linked directly over to your main site.
As we talked about with the subdomain/subfolder issue, by collecting all of the ranking signals on one sub and root domain, you create the best possible benefit. This concept of domain authority -- I don't necessarily mean the number in Moz's Mozscape Index -- the concept of domain authority is that basically as a domain becomes more popular, as it inherits all of these ranking signals, could come from links, from visibility, from branding, user and usage data, all the kinds of signals that a domain inherits, it passes those on to all of its different pages. But it doesn't pass them on to other sites.
That's true for each of these as well. They're inheriting signals that they're not fully passing on here. I'd recommend that you 301 redirect all of these and have one main site. It simplifies a bunch of your work and streamlines it. It lets you focus on building this one brand. Branding is so powerful today and online visibility as a whole, not to mention SEO, that this is really a best practice.
I would get rid of those subsites as best you can. There are still reasons sometimes to have a microsite or a different website for branding purposes, or if you're going to sell that site separately, or if it's a completely different team working on it. But from an SEO perspective, everything on one sub and root is really ideal.
All right everyone, look forward to the comments, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Souces : http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday