Guest Post: Top psych tips to sell more online

By Nathalie Nahai, web psychologist and author of “Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion”.

By Nathalie Nahai, web psychologist and author of “Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion”

Have you psychologically optimised your website to maximise your sales?

If like me you rely on the web to reach out to prospective customers, there are several psychological techniques you need to know to get ahead of the competition.

I’ll be discussing ways that psychology can be applied to ecommerce at the Chinwag Psych Conference on 15th May, but in the meantime, here are five top tips to help lift your conversions and make your website work for you.

1. Make it easy

Let’s start at the beginning. Have you checked your analytics lately to see which page(s) your customers are landing on the most often when they arrive at your site?

We tend to assume that the homepage is the main point of entry (and therefore the most important), but if you don’t actually know where people are entering, it’s going to be nigh on impossible to optimise their experience and boost your conversion rate.

So, first thing’s first – check your analytics account to see which are the main points of entry, and then make sure that on each of these pages you make the following three elements really clear:

1. Your logo – this should be bold and will usually sit in the top left hand corner;


2. Your offer – this should articulate how your service or product benefits your customer, you need to make this concrete;


3. The call-to-action – make it obvious what you want your customer to do next.

A great example of a website that does all three of these things really well, is Eyequant.com – they’ve made their homepage easy for you to understand who they are, how they can help you, and what action you should take next.

2. Give a choice of three

We like to think that if we’re given a wide range of choices, we’ll make better decisions. However research has found time and again that if we’re offered too many choices, what we actually end up with is a state of ‘choice paralysis’ – an inability to choose. So it is online.

Have you ever wondered why so many SaaS websites offer a choice of three price plans, and highlight the one in the middle? LinkedIn and Hootsuite are great examples of this principle in action, and they work because they rely on this heuristic: when faced with several options, you’ll tend to go for the one in the middle. Why? Because we seem to be hard-wired to avoid extremes.

Research from the field of behavioural economics has found that we dislike losses more than we enjoy similar gains (a principle known as loss aversion), so in order to lower our risk of loss, we hedge our bets and instead opt for the middle ground.

That’s why, if you’re selling a range of products or services to your customers, it may serve you best to select your top three items, and place in the middle the one you’d most like to sell.

3. Use ticks

Now this one is super simple. Some friends of mine over at Online Dialogue in the Netherlands recently conducted an experiment to see if they could increase conversions by changing the way in which they displayed a product’s USPs.

They tried three different conditions: listing the top rated benefits, the lowest rated benefits, and then a mix of both. But contrary to what you might expect, when they only showed users the top rated list, it didn’t have much of an impact on conversions – so they decided to change tack.

Instead of using straightforward, simple bullet points to list their benefits, they decided to try green ticks instead. The results were phenomenal. By changing this one small, seemingly insignificant visualcue, they were able to dramatically increase conversions where they had failed before.

These results confirm what we’re finding in wider research – that the decisions we make are far from rational, and that by applying and testing these (often subconscious) psychological design elements, we can make a huge impact on our bottom line.

4. Leverage scarcity

Now, if you’ve read around the subject, you’ll have no doubt heard of the principle of scarcity: that which is rare, is also perceived as valuable. The same applies online.

If you want to boost your sales by inducing a sense of urgency in your customers (remember, you should only try this if it fits with the tone of your brand), you can invoke this principle by running limited time sales (“24 hour flash sale!”) and highlighting when an item is in low stock (“hurry, only a few rooms left!”).

5. The peak end rule

Last but not least, there’s the peak end rule. Originally coined by Kahneman and his colleagues in an experiment exploring pain, this term describes how we hedonically evaluate our past experiences.

In a nutshell, we tend to judge an experience by its most intense point and its end, as opposed to the average of the whole experience. Online, this means that if your users are going through your website’s sales process and they encounter a moment of intense frustration (which often ironically happens at checkout), you may be losing customers unnecessarily.

In my experience, the biggest, most common mistake that businesses make here is to create ‘required’ or ‘mandatory’ form fields that are asterisked with aggressive red marks, and that pop up red, unhelpful messages when completed incorrectly.

Instead of punishing your customers for trying to give you their money, try this instead: for every field they complete correctly,give them a green tick. I know it sounds simple, but by offering this culturally relevant, positive mark of affirmation, you’re essentially rewarding them for taking the positive action you want them to take.

So, now that you know these principles, it’s up to you to go and apply them. Experiment with them – you may just be surprised at how a few small changes can make a huge impact on yoursales.