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We’ve all wished we could have better influence in our marketing at one point or another. But getting people who visit your site or your store to actually buy from you is really tough. Most of the advice out there you could quite easily call “stylistic.” It’s rarely about psychological triggers of influence.It’s psychological in the sense that it accepts that enticing people to buy your product is important. But it’s naive in its approach. It doesn’t seek to exploit the psychological triggers of influence.Let me discuss various psychological hacks that trigger the buying decision. How you can influence them?SatisfactionHuman beings might have very different personalities, but they’re all wired on a basic level in a very similar way. This is particularly the case when it comes to pleasure and pain. People like pleasure and they avoid pain.This basic fact is important for companies. Companies that provide their customers with pleasure are in a better position to do business than those that don’t. Why? Because companies that provide pleasure will become associated with pleasure in the consumer’s mind.The theory seems straightforward, but how to make it actionable? Today, many of the world’s top companies are using the A to Z process. The idea here is to take customers from their first interaction – point A – and get them as close to point Z as possible, before asking for money.You see this sort of thing all the time from businesses. They won’t charge for their products upfront. Instead, they’ll offer customers a free trial that lasts perhaps a couple of weeks. And they rarely ask for credit cards either.In that time, customers will use the product and learn all the many ways that it can help them. And, ultimately, they’ll begin to associate pleasure with that product. When that happens, businesses will look to close the sale. It’s an effective strategy and one that exploits a key human drive.More to learn: Psychological Theories ... Employing Influence and PersuasionUse asymmetry to draw attentionMost people don’t like disorder. So, you perceive all objects with a symmetry around their center.So, how you can you leverage this trigger principle?Your audience will quickly comprehend information, when you convey it in a symmetrical and orderly manner. On the other hand, when your composition provides a sense of imbalance, then the user might find it difficult to concentrate.But, you can leverage asymmetry to draw attention towards important elements on your website – like the call to action buttons.NoveltyThe media has known for a while that people strongly respond to both precedence and novelty. In the consumer world, the same is true. Take novelty, for instance. Neuroscience has shown that our brains react to novelty in a very interesting way.When we see something new, our brains immediately release dopamine, making us feel good. We then start to associate new stuff with feeling good and become, in a sense, hooked.Take the iPhone, for instance. Everybody knows that the difference between the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 6 is small. And yet people were quite happy to throw away their iPhone 5 and blow money on the new version, just because it was new.So what can marketers do with this information? The key here is to continuously tweak your product. Add a couple of new features, change the styling, or even do a simple rebrand. These can all be effective in driving new sales and giving customers what they want.Customers will call your bluff if you don’t add meaningful new features or change your business model.SimplicityThe famous psychologist Daniel Kahneman said that the law of least effort applies to cognitive as well as physical effort. His theory says that if people have a number of options to achieve the same goal, they will choose the easiest.His argument, therefore, is that people like stuff that is easy and dislike stuff that is hard. We are basically lazy. It was a survival benefit for us to expend as little energy as possible because we never quite knew when our next meal would arrive.Because laziness is so deeply built into our psychology, it’s something that is paramount for businesses. Firms need to make the customer experiences as painless and as easy as they possibly can.Take making payments, for instance. Customers want to be able to make payments as quickly and as easily as possible. But often businesses don’t offer solutions that cater to their needs. Nobody wants to spend ages filling out a direct debit order form every time they make a big purchase.Recently, however, we’ve seen the rise of consumer financing companies. These companies make it easier for businesses to offer customers financing options. Crucially, they’re quicker and smarter than the finance options of the past. And many of them can be handled by a single POS terminal.Apply Hick’s LawPsychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman conducted choice reaction experiments to assess cognitive information capacity. They found that increasing the number of choices increased the time that it took to make a decision exponentially.A common application of this law is the jam study that you might have read. When the number of choices at a grocery store was decreased by 18, the sales shot up from 3% to 30%.So, how does this law apply to your website design?Instead of providing 10 choices to your visitors and overwhelming them….You need to cut down the options that you provide to the absolute, bare minimum.A consumer is bombarded with a lot of information, every day. So, when they visit your website, value their time and present them with your most compelling offer.StorytellingA classic and powerful technique to make an emotional connection with people is by telling stories. Your design tells a story, but is it a compelling and memorable one?I would recommend starting with my article on brand storytelling, to assess your visual story.Don’t underestimate the power of storytelling. Check out the result of Ecommerce brand Raven + Lily. They were able to ramp up their sales by 150%, by incorporating product storytelling and doing a site redesign.Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Lets examine the various psychological forces that trigger the buying decision. How can you better influence and convert potential buyers. Let’s take a look.PleasureHuman beings might have very different personalities, but they’re all wired on a basic level in a very similar way. This is particularly the case when it comes to pleasure and pain. People like pleasure and they avoid pain.This basic fact is important for companies. Companies that provide their customers with pleasure are in a better position to do business than those that don’t. Why? Because companies that provide pleasure will become associated with pleasure in the consumer’s mind.The theory seems straightforward, but how to make it actionable? Today, many of the world’s top companies are using the A to Z process. The idea here is to take customers from their first interaction – point A – and get them as close to point Z as possible, before asking for money.You see this sort of thing all the time from top tech startups. Almost all tech startups won’t charge for their software upfront. Instead, they’ll offer customers a free trial that lasts perhaps a couple of weeks.In that time, customers will use the product and learn all the many ways that it can help them. And, ultimately, they’ll begin to associate pleasure with that product. When that happens, tech companies will look to close the sale. It’s an effective strategy and one that exploits a key human drive.Hick’s LawPsychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman conducted choice reaction experiments to assess cognitive information capacity. They found that increasing the number of choices increased the time that it took to make a decision logarithmically.A common application of this law is the jam study that you might have read. When the number of choices at a grocery store was decreased by 18, the sales shot up from 3% to 30%.So, how does this law apply to your website design?Instead of providing ten choices to your visitors and overwhelming them...You need to cut down the options that you provide to the absolute, bare minimum.A consumer is bombarded with a lot of information, every day. So, when they visit your website, value their time and present your most compelling and relevant offer to them.Here are the specific design elements that you need to consider:Keep the number of form fields to a minimum. Here’s an estimate of the conversions that you might lose, upon increasing the number of form fields.Every additional social media share button on your website contributes to increasing the loading time. So, find the social platforms where your audience hangs out. Only show those sharing buttons on your blog, not ten other options.Whirlpool increased the CTR in their email campaign by 42%, after they eliminated 3 secondary CTA buttons and resorted to a single, focused CTA.Related post: Customer Influence and Trust ... Key Enablers to ConsiderNoveltyWe have known for a while that people strongly respond to both precedence and novelty. In the consumer world, the same is true. Take novelty, for instance. Neuroscience has shown that our brains react to novelty in a very interesting way.When we see something new, our brains immediately release dopamine, making us feel good. We then start to associate new stuff with feeling good and become, in a sense, hooked.Take the iPhone, for instance. Everybody knows that the difference between the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 6 is small. And yet people were quite happy to throw away their iPhone 5 and blow money on the new version, just because it was new.So what can marketers do with this information? The key here is to tweak your product continuously. Add a couple of new features, change the styling, or even do a simple rebrand. These can all be effective in driving new sales and giving customers what they want.If you do go down the novelty route, however, you’ve got to be careful. Customers will call your bluff if you don’t add meaningful new features or change your business model.Visceral reactionI didn’t share complete information when I said that beautiful websites don’t get good conversions.Occasionally, you can win over people and get them to love you by directly triggering their central nervous systems. People just feel that your website is great and can’t get enough of it.What am I talking about?Visceral reaction.We all react, subconsciously, to certain things.How we are subconsciously affected is relatively consistent, across genders and demographics, because these reactions are rooted in our old brain.So, how can you evoke a visceral reaction on your website and make people want to experience it again?One simple way is by leveraging colorful pictures. Airbnb uses beautiful images to please its visitors and make a great first impression.The UX Magazine shares a few more ways to design for the gut, in this article.Ease of useThe famous psychologist Daniel Kahneman said that the law of least effort applies to cognitive as well as physical effort. He says that if people have some options to achieve the same goal, they will choose the easiest.His argument, therefore, is that people like stuff that is easy and dislike stuff that is hard. Evolution, he says, has made us lazy. It was a survival benefit for us to expend as little energy as possible because we never quite knew when our next meal would arrive.Because laziness is so deeply built into our psychology, it’s something that is paramount for businesses. Firms need to make the customer experiences as painless and as easy as they possibly can.Take making payments, for instance. Customers want to be able to make payments as quickly and as easily as possible. But often businesses don’t offer solutions that cater to their needs. Nobody wants to spend ages filling out a direct debit order form every time they make a big purchase.What’s the key message to convey to your customers? It’s that your business is the easiest and simplest way for your clients to get hold of the service that they want.Personal connectionsUltimately, it’s all about connecting with your audience emotionally. If you can’t communicate a relevant offer for the user at the moment when he visits your website….then you’ve failed.Here are a couple of ways to ensure that you take care of your prospects.Conduct user experience tests While data about your users from analytics is a good way to make decisions, it isn’t the best. Because it doesn’t tell you ‘the why.’Yelp leveraged a series of five tests, to analyze user behavior and derived valuable insights on the specific elements of their website.For example, the search bar was one of their major features, and it was easy to use. They also found some elements, like the ‘Events’ tab, which weren’t particularly noticeable.StorytellingA classic and powerful technique to make an emotional connection with people is by telling stories. Your design tells a story, but is it a compelling and memorable one?I would recommend starting with my article on brand storytelling,to assess your visual story.Don’t underestimate the power of storytelling. Ecommerce brand Raven + Lily was able to ramp up their sales by 150%, by incorporating product storytelling and doing a site redesign.Share a common enemySteve Jobs wasn’t the best manager or the best engineer. But what he could do better than anybody else in the world was sell. He understood that they way to sell to people was to create an alliance with them to solve a problem.Creating a common enemy helps to unite businesses and consumers in a fundamental way. It makes it seem as if they are on the same team and have to work together to face down a common foe.In the 1980s, Apple saw that Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were running away with the desktop market. Jobs immediately saw an opportunity to cast Apple and its consumers as the underdog, and the PC firms as the corporate giants.It didn’t matter that Apple itself was a big company. All that mattered was that Apple was uniting its customers under one banner against the PC.The advice for small businesses is to find a common enemy. Remember, you don’t have to unite with people against a particular company. Having “colds and flu” as an enemy or “boring education” can be just as effective.Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Since I do travel a lot. I have a bunch to travel hacks in my notes compiled that I keep in mind and read before heading to a new destination.Here are they.Travel Hacks Before You Leave1. Instead of a hotel, look into reserving a home if traveling with a family, or a single room if alone. Websites like AirBnB can provide homes and private rooms from home owners who are renting them out, usually offering better accommodations than hotels.2. Roll your clothes when packing. Instead of creating a folded pile in your suitcase, rolling allows you to fit more things in. Plus, you can even roll underwear and socks within your clothes for optimal space-saving.3. Scan your passport, identification card, and itinerary and email them to yourself. This provides an extra copy of each in the event of loss or theft. As an iPhone user, once I email the documents to myself, I usually open the email on my iPhone and save them onto iBooks. This provides me with an offline record.4. It’s important to remember to call your credit or debit card company before you leave to ensure that you have your card authorized for your foreign destination. This prevents them from suspecting suspicious activity.5. Mark your baggage as fragile. This is a tip I learned a while ago from a friend who found it to be a great way to ensure that your baggage is handled correctly. Your luggage is kept at the top because of this, which will make it one of the first bags to be released.Travel Hacks For the Departure6. Bring your own water bottle. Depending on the airline’s own policies regarding drink costs, the amount of times water is offered may not be to your liking. Having your own water bottle ensures that you have water when you want it. When they do come around, top off your bottle with what they give you.7. Never underestimate the value of a fanny pack. Yes, they can be embarrassing and seemingly out of the mid-to-late 1980s, but trust me—every time I travel, even domestically, it has ensured that my valuables are safe, and it expedites security checks.8. Splurge on Internet service if your flight is more than six-and-a-half hours long. You’ll thank me when you find that sparking conversation with your seat partner is harder than pulling teeth. Plus, you can complete work for the last time before you hit your destination.9. Ensure that you have a pen before leaving home so you can complete customs forms. Fill the forms out when you get them, and ensure that your family members have theirs filled as well. People will clamour for your pen; flight attendants rarely have them.10. 20 minutes before you land, sprint for the bathroom. Usually when the seatbelt light comes on, I’ve found that you still have 15 minutes of leeway until you truly have to be seated. Use this opportunity to relieve yourself to prevent fighting for restrooms when you land.Travel Hacks When You Arrive11. Dart directly for baggage claim. It is amazing how many people seem to lollygag after landing. Save that for someplace else to save yourself time and to prevent any arguments with fellow travelers.12. Use ATMs to get local currency. Using money converters in the airport usually come with their own fees and the exchange rates are a rip-off. ATMs always dispense local currency, of course, so use your debit or credit card and get your money there.13. Ensure that you have Yelp downloaded for domestic travel in the US. This is a great city guide for both travelers and locals alike, and is best way to find the most amazing places to eat and sightsee.14. Shop for groceries when you arrive. You don’t have to shop for a feast, but getting basics like water and a few snacks in local stores instead of at the hotel can save you a ton.15. When in your room, remove only the necessities from your luggage. Trying to make yourself at home by taking out every pair of shoes and all of your toiletries will only make repacking a living hell, and it increases your chances of forgetting something when it’s time to go home.Exploring Your New Location16. Use guidebooks sparingly. I recommended Yelp because it allows you to discover a few places off the beaten path. Guidebooks only presents you with tourist spots; even those that advertised themselves as being off the beaten path.17. Use the local language as much as possible. It reflects well not only on you, but also on Americans/your nationality in general. It shows you are willing to make the effort, which can work in your favor in some situations.18. Have a souvenir list prepared, and stick to it. This will save you money and prevent you from purchasing something that “you’ll find someone to give to another time”.19. Eat locally only. Save McDonalds, if you have to eat it in any location, for when you’re home. Trying the local cuisine will save you more money and allow you to experience new and flavorful meals.20. “When in Rome, do as the Romans” is a general saying that I like to translate it as, “don’t be a stubborn traveler, and get out of your comfort zone”. If a country advises modest dress, for example, follow through. It can even ensure your safety as a foreigner.Travel Hacks for Returning Home21. If you are a frequent traveler, live out of your toiletry bag and keep it packed. This will allow the packing process to be a bit easier and will prevent you from having to make expensive toiletry purchases if you forget something.22. Use IFTTT when sharing traveling photos to make it seamless and easy. “Recipes” like sharing automatically to Dropbox or Evernote will allow you automatically to have a copy of your precious photos.23. Unpack immediately when you enter the door. You may be tired out of your mind, but you’ll be glad you did it in the morning. Plus, it saves your luggage from smelling like soiled laundry.