Digital Psychology and Persuation.

What does?Digital Psychology and Persuasion?mean? This is a comprehensive study that gives the theoretical knowledge and empirical know-how to optimize the website and marketing strategy for persuasiveness and appeal. It is also important to keep in mind is that while the internet and technology have changed at a rapid pace, the human brain has been pretty much the same for millions of years. And probably will continue to be.

This is what digital psychology?and persuasion is all about Human nature. The human brain is the most important source of a business to decide whether it will rise or fall.

Persuasion is the tip of the pyramid — we’ll have to make sure everything else, the fundamentals, has been taken care of before we move on to applying persuasion techniques.

That doesn’t mean that we should hold back from using them. Some of the principles — like social proof and urgency — can be very effective. Some principles should also inform our design and copywriting.

By building and delivering highly tailored, individualized messaging aligned to your customers’ needs, you’ll be able to optimize your organization’s growth rapidly through a multitude of channels, especially the ones that matter most to your customers. It goes without saying, that growth starts with the product. If you don’t have a validated product or business model yet, stop here. Do not pass go, until this is complete.

You can’t growth hack your way into problem-solution fit or product-market fit, so really focus on that first. Make sure you have a good understanding of your value proposition, cost structure, revenue streams, customer segments, etc. before continuing.

This is where psychological persuasion plays an important role.

Cialdini’s principals of persuasion-

Human beings are wired to basically want to return favours and pay back our debts. In short… to treat others as they’ve treated us. People by nature feel obliged to provide either discounts or concessions to others if they’ve received favours from those others. Psychology explains this by stressing that we humans simply hate to feel indebted to other people!

E.g. Subscribe to our fitness channel and we’ll give you a free diet plan too!

The principle of commitment (and consistency, too) declares that we human beings have a deep need to be seen as consistent. As such, once we have publicly committed to something or someone, then we are so much more likely to go through and deliver on that commitment…hence consistency. This can be explained, from a psychological perspective, by the fact that people have established that commitment as being in line with their self-image.

E.g. Find your perfect partner by filling up this simple form.

The field of social psychology is rife with experiments that beautifully illustrate this unavoidable, human phenomenon. The vast majority of people prefer to simply belong to a group rather than think independently.

E.g. If a new rider looks at people taking u-turns even though there is a route ahead, he’ll also follow the same direction instead of going somewhere else.

Social proof is most powerful not when it comes from a random mass of people, but from people who are familiar, respected, and liked — your friends for instance.

Using social media widgets to show off the number of followers you have on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is a great idea. But it can be the opposite too — showing a very low number of likes and followers (worse yet — 0) is negative social proof (meaning nobody likes this stuff, and you shouldn’t be the only idiot either). I’m sure you’ve seen when an ecommerce site has “Like” buttons on its product pages and literally has no likes. Conversion killer.

If you don’t have impressive numbers to show off, don’t show them at all. If you don’t have lots of customers, try to find social proof in other ways. A few quality testimonials, or the number of countries your customers come from. Be creative.

Ever wonder why people in general have a tendency to obey figures of authority, even if those figures of authority have questionable character and/or ask others to commit questionable acts? It’s simply the essential nature of the human animal.

What is it to like someone? According to Cialdini, “liking” someone increases the chances of being influenced by that individual. Liking is based on sharing something similar with people you like (you like dogs? I like dogs!), and it’s also based on something as superficial as how attractive a person’s looks are! It’s a known fact that beautiful people sell more.

A well-executed “About Us” page can go a long way.

Scarcity?is defined as the perception of products seeming to become more attractive when their perceived availability is rather limited.

In my personal experience, this can be *very* effective when the scarcity is authentic (e.g., last 30 days to buy a product, and then it will be taken off the market for good).

There are two elements of scarcity that you can use:

1. Quantity (only 2 items left!)

2. Time (last 5 days to join!)

What do you have in common with your customer? The Unity Principle is the shared identity that the influencer shares with the influencee.

The Unity Principle is all about appealing to a “We” — a cohesive identity that is shared by a group. You can do this in many ways — family, location, religion (or CrossFit), or co-creation. Of course, as is true with most social psychology, results may vary. Appealing to these ties will generally put your probability of persuading (converting) your audience a bit higher, but your site also has to be usable, functional, intuitive, etc. That is to say, that using the Unity Principle is no silver bullet. But if you use it judiciously and authentically, and especially in conjunction with other methods of persuasion, it can be very powerful.