CRO News Roundup: Maximise Sales With Cognitive Biases

Richard Chapman rounds up the latest in CRO advice, including how to sell more with cognitive biases, direct response strategies that increase engagement, and how to turn psychology into sales.

Maximise Sales With Cognitive Biases

Think you’re a rational individual who makes rational decisions? Think again.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll realise there are numerous decoys and signposts that affect our decision-making processes. Writer Shanelle Mullin calls these “cognitive biases”.

Although these may not get us thinking or deciding with the best logic, cognitive biases are a proven way to influence user behaviour and in turn, supercharge sales.

From “Availability Heuristic”, “Hyperbolic Discounting” and “Ingroup Bias” to the “Decoy Effect”, Mullin outlines thirteen cognitive biases, how they work and how to align them successfully to e-commerce marketing.

How Direct Response Marketing Increases Engagement

When it comes to increasing engagement, the aim is to follow-up after initial interactions and seize every opportunity to build on and maintain relationships with your customers.

A time-tested and proven way to go about increasing engagement is to simply ask for it.

By applying a direct response dynamic to your strategy, you’ll find ways to ask your prospects and customers to take action at every turn:

• Include offers in email P.S’
• Sidebars and breaks in blog posts
• Add a URL and offer to business cards

Don’t forget to mix up your response mechanisms! Copywriter and consultant Julie Boswell writes:

This is a strategy we use in direct response marketing all the time – multiple response mechanisms. We don’t just provide a phone number to call; we provide…

• An email address
• A physical address
• A URL
• A fax number

Don’t confuse this with giving multiple CTAs. There is ONE CTA: Get in touch with me. You’re just giving them multiple ways to do that.

Hotjar’s Instant Visual Feedback

Ever wondered exactly what your customers think about your website or app?

Now, thanks to Hotjar’s latest tool release ‘Incoming Feedback’, people can provide you with their detailed feedback regarding your site or app.

Nick Heim writes:

We wanted to build a tool your visitors could use to share something the moment they need to—while also supplying the context you need to understand their feedback. This was the reason for Incoming Feedback: a tool that lets visitors instantly show and tell you about their experience with your website or app.

This tool is simple, speedy and completely customisable – widgets can be set up in minutes and tailored to match your branding.

Make More Sales With Behavioural Science

Conversion Sciences’ author Brian Massey (and his lab coat – the famous Enclothed Cognition prop) believes people can gain unfair advantages based on behavioural science.

Can we gain this unfair advantage throughout the digital marketing universe?

Massey discusses numerous methods for applying behavioural science to your marketing efforts, including “The Two Brains That Drive Behaviour”, “Research vs. Intuition”, “Image and Headline Selection”, and “Studying Page Layout”.

Concluding that the real money is in the data, Massey’s article gives us a crash-course in Conversion Rate Optimisation.

Thinking about how you can turn more of your website’s visitors into paying customers? Contact our conversion optimisation experts for more advice on converting traffic into sales.