Use Psychology 101 to Increase Sales Online

Increase sales online, psychologically: Consumer Behavior is referred to as the actions and decisions that individuals make as they are purchasing services or products.

Everything regarding a product or service is linked to the initial standpoint; afterwards, you look at how the product or service is used and why they should continue to purchase what you have to offer.

Our value proposition lies in the service we offer. What helps increase sales online is the mix of benefits and skills that we promise to offer you.

Sounds simple, right? Here’s our guide to how to increase online sales quickly, Psychologically.

Marketing Psychology 

Marketing Psychology is the understanding and prediction of what individuals think and how they approach a product or service offered by your business.

In order to know how to increase online sales, you need to understand what drives your customers to spend.

Consumer Psychology 

A field that falls below Marketing is Consumer Psychology. This field, in particular, studies and helps businesses understand the decisions they make.

There are multiple factors that clearly influence why consumers follow through with buying a product or a service, and they are:

• Personal: The Personal factor involves age, gender, and income 
• Social: The Social factor involves family and friends 
• Culture: The Cultural factor involves religion as well as traditions 
• Psychological: The Psychological factor involves motivation, perception, and learning. 

By creating effective marketing and advertising campaigns, you will have the opportunity to reach your target audience and customers, thereby increasing sales.

Application of Marketing Psychology in Ecommerce

The buying process or journey often consists of multiple steps:

• Attention Phase
• Interest Phase
• Consideration Phase
• Decision Phase
• Action Phase

Increase Sales Online – Attention Phase 

Aspect	Description
Increase Sales Online – Attention Phase	Social Proof: People tend to follow the behavior of others. Positive reviews on your product pages can influence more purchases.
Attention Phase & Device Translation	Device Translation: Ensure your website is accessible on mobile devices and tablets for user-friendly navigation and broader audience reach.
Attention Phase & Speed	Speed: Fast-loading sites create a professional impression. Slow sites can lead to customer abandonment. High-speed access improves customer engagement.

Increase Sales Online: Interest Phase 

When customers find that you are able to offer them a clear, straight-to-the-point site that has a user-friendly experience, they’ll begin browsing your page to see what else your site offers.

Aspect	Description
Increase Sales Online: Interest Phase	User-Friendly Design: A website with clear hierarchy and easy navigation guides customers effectively through your offerings.
Interest Phase & Uptime	Uptime Importance: As website traffic and sales increase, uptime becomes critical. Hosting with 99.9% uptime is essential to prevent crashes and maintain customer engagement.

Increase Online Sales: Consideration Phase 

Aspect	Description
Purchase Decision Phase	Behavioral Influence: Purchase decisions are often triggered by products or services that stand out and capture attention.
Behavioral Principles	The Framing Effect: People decide based on positive or negative associations. Choose appealing words for categories and options to boost sales.
	Center-Stage Effect: Empower customers by presenting products/services for decision-making. Utilize anchoring for effective comparison placement.

Increase Online Sales: Decision Phase

Aspect	Description
Online Shopping and Ecommerce	Online shopping is the new normal, and ecommerce sites are expanding year-round, becoming the go-to place for people’s needs via mobile phones.
Importance of Choice Architecture	Choice Architecture: Refers to how choices are presented, influencing decision-making. Small factors can shape opinions and create strong preferences.
Nudge Theory	Nudge Theory: Nudges guide customers toward specific choices, leveraging triggers for desired behaviors. Suggestions are presented gently, not mandatorily.
Doubt Avoidance	Doubt Avoidance: Displaying icons with percentages or benefits on products/services builds trust and positive associations. Empowers confident decision-making.
Decision Phase & Security	Security in Decision Phase: As customers provide confidential information during checkout, ensuring security is crucial to maintain trust and customer satisfaction.

It is vital that the hosting provider offers SSL Certificates that offer security without risk of breaches and threats. This will allow grant customer trust, as well as offer an added bonus of positive customer feedback.

Ecommerce Sales and Psychology 

Choose a hosting provider to begin the process of initiating your business online, it is best to prepare yourself for when you have a registered domain, email address and a hosting plan of what your site will come to be. 

We are well aware of the popular ecommerce sites that are coming out and the importance of understanding which ecom site has the best suited factors.

The smallest of details include your story and why your business came to be. People want to be motivated and feel connected to the product or service that you are providing.

Website Design 

The businesses’ primary design decides the fate of your business – from color scheme to visuals to loading speed, it all matters. 

The Psychology of Design 

Showcasing your brand identity through the use of design and psychology play out into generating a larger audience. The brand identity included places certain association between color, typography, website design trends and more, which therefore leads to brand awareness.

Content Management Systems such as WordPress offer a variety of themes used to better ease the process of building a website, which are easily customizable in order to best fit your brand identity.

Visuals

Humans are visual creatures. Appealing to the senses is the best way to initiate contact with your consumers and doing that can be through the use of the following:

People & Images

The majority of purchasing decisions done on ecommerce sites are impacted by visuals. Ecommerce takes place online, through the use of mobile devices, tablets and laptops.

Making use of your website basks in the idea of using the spaces and texts, but most importantly using well-lit images and videos that offer a feel to the product or service your business offers.

Think of including images and videos with faces. People’s attention is more likely to shift and respond to faces. Statistics show that 50% of online shoppers depend on images to decide their purchases. 

Color Scheme 

The Psychology of Color plays a vital role in web design, by creating a strong brand, boosting sales and leading visitors to specific pages or actions. Color, a universal content, helps communicate directly with the subconscious minds of customers.

Color is known to have an impact on emotions and decisions. As evoking emotions and decisions as colors are, the subtext behind them may differ from one culture to another.

Every color contains certain characteristics and through the use of color psychology one would be able to create the best result for their ecommerce store.

Here’s an example: famous apps and sites such as Twitter and Facebook use the color blue. Blue is considered to be the popular choice and favorite color since it is associated with peace and security. 

How to Use Color Psychology for Your Ecommerce site

Aspect	Description
Demographics	Importance of Demographics: Understand age and gender groups visiting your site. Cater products/services accordingly. Color choices should resonate with demographics to boost online sales.
Shades and Hues	Integrating Shades and Hues: Use shades, tints, and hues to enhance engagement, impressions, and conversions. Bright colors appeal more to men, while women prefer softer tones.
Trigger the Emotion	Triggering Emotions: Colors evoke specific emotions. Tailor colors based on gender and demographic preferences to create desired emotional responses. Connecting with customers through a soothing color scheme can establish a sense of comfort and connection.
Incorporating Brand Colors	Consistent Brand Colors: Maintain consistent brand colors across social media platforms and your ecommerce site. This builds a steady and positive first impression. Incorporating brand colors in various elements enhances attention to detail and fosters trust.
	Enhancing Brand Recognition: Consistently using brand colors improves brand recognition by up to 80%, leading customers to identify and connect with your brand. Steady brand colors contribute to enhanced brand awareness and customer familiarity.

Principles of Persuasion 

Now that we understand the importance of Psychology and Design, we need to understand the principles that push your customers to follow through on their purchasing.

There are seven principles of persuasion: 

1. Reciprocity 

Reciprocity which is instilling a sense of indebted gratitude in your customers. Offering a service or product to potential customers encourages them to consider ways in which they can balance out what they’ve received.

Think of this as offering them 15% off their first purchase once they sign up on your ecommerce website. With signing up, 15% off their first purchase, they’re more encouraged to purchase, therefore, possibly receiving more percentage off their next purchase, or a free service or product, overall.

2. Scarcity 

It is no surprise that customers, or individuals are after something that makes them feel unique. Scarcity is making customers aware of how they might miss out.

Think of this as flash sales that last up to 24 hours, or discounts arranged for a time. Knowing that they might miss on a service or product because it will no longer be available will nudge them to follow through with their purchase.

More often than not, through the use of scarcity, businesses are able to increase online sales and have potential customers spend and become your trusted loyal new customers.

3. Authority 

Using influencers to sell has always been a standing point. Think of Wix when they advertised their services by hosting Heidi Klum, Gal Gadot, Karlie Kloss and more. People of influence encourage customers since they are through trusted voices.

People of authority can range from social media influencers to celebrities, however, if we’re delving into it a little deeper, 62% of people trust social media influencers over celebrities.

This is because customers trust and value social media influencers more than television, paid social media ads, or paid endorsements. 

4. Commitment and Consistency

By making smaller commitments, one will feel safer to make bigger commitments. You can picture this like having a new partner. Rushing into things will give you cold feet, however, by getting to know each other through dates (small commitments), the next big step would be moving in together, and maybe bigger would be getting married.

Smaller commitments lead customers to big purchases. This will allow for an overall positive customer experience.

5. Liking 

When a customer buys from you, the next step would be to make them feel good about buying from you.

Brand loyalty stems from a deep psychological instinct to stick to what one knows and likes, therefore, there should always be an intrinsic need to focus on what new customers are looking for and what they’ll like about your brand, or business. 

6. Social Proof 

Customers decision making is mostly generated and led through what the majority has to say. ‘There’s safety in numbers’ as they say. Social Proof offers potential customers the experience of existing customers, and this may take form on your ecommerce website as a video, comment or even reviews.

Around 88% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations. To narrow it even more, 70% of consumers will trust a review left by someone they don’t know and 92% of consumers trust a recommendation offered by a peer. 

7. Unity 

Help your customers build a sense of belonging to your ecommerce site – this may take the form of forming a loyalty group in which deals are sent on a weekly basis or a loyalty points card that allows your customer to make use of your products and services to receive an offering after reaching a certain limit.

 

Customer Service

Offering 24/7 customer support is highly required when hoping to grow your business. Customers or users will feel the need to reach out to an expert for any possible query, doubt, or concern in order for the matter to be resolved efficiently.

Around 31.2% of customers expect a response within an hour or else. However, the ideal time is a response in under 10 minutes.

Great customer service allows for added bonus of customer trust, as well as an increase of positive customer conversations that may be through word of mouth, or comments and reviews left on your page.

Increase Online Sales, Psychologically 

Increasing sales does not simply stop at the psychological aspect, however, it also plays into who you choose as a hosting provider. At GuruDesk, we place grave importance on our users, as well as their customers.

Offering users a well made website by applying the necessary web design features, ensuring that it is accessible and user-friendly will not only promote the idea of a well-executed online business, but will place the importance on the journey customer goes through.

Our Guru Developers focus on page load time, performance, scalability, security, and uptime (which is 99.9% guaranteed) to ensure that customers are satisfied, as well as maintaining private data shared to offer a safe and trusted environment.