What is Neuromarketing and How Does Psychology Increase Conversions?
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For the past decade, global brands and eCommerce websites have invested heavily in nudge marketing and neuromarketing expertise. This new approach to online sales has shaped the headlines, landing pages and even buttons used by our favourite websites: but what is neuromarketing, and how does it work?
What is Neuromarketing and How Does Psychology Increase Conversions?
Your website loads in under 2 seconds, your CPC campaigns on Facebook and Google are targeted perfectly – even your landing pages are a masterpiece… so why aren’t they buying?
According to Econsultancy, only 22% of e-commerce businesses are satisfied with their conversion rate. That’s partly because sites with a high eCommerce conversion rate quickly monopolise online sales. It’s also due to the fact that the leading platforms have invested in two strategies that give them an unfair advantage: the first is A/B testing and the second is neuromarketing. But, whilst A/B testing software is available to anyone, neuromarketing can require specialist skills.
Neuromarketing is the formal study of the brain’s responses to advertising and branding, and the adjustment of those messages based on feedback to elicit even better responses.
There are dozens of other definitions of neuromarketing. They all come down to the following: it is a type of technology that is used to measure and study brain activity to see a subject’s response to a stimulus.
The concept is still in the process of development, but it pretty much comes down to studying non-conscious processing of information in consumers’ brains.
You cannot deny that looking at certain brain patterns would be more useful than traditional surveys, for instance. People do not always realise what they do and don’t like. Moreover, they are not always going to tell you the truth about their preferences.
Skeptics claim that the direct connection between brain-pattern responses and purchasing behaviour is yet to be proven.
Removing the inevitable subjective bias that exists in traditional surveys helps to see the true picture and enables you to build a strategy according to the results.
Speaking of biases, we are not at all rational. Neuromarketing helps e-commerce businesses to find the flaws in rational thinking that customers won’t ever stop making because they are human. Whilst the location of stores (offline to online) and the platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento…) might change in the next few years, cognitive biases are hard-wired into your customers. It pays to understand these now, as they will help to inform your decisions for years to come!
Neuromarketing allows us to make lots of conclusions about people’s behaviour. We cannot set aside people’s weaknesses in thinking when we speak of trying to convince them to make a purchase. So let’s dive deeper into the concept of cognitive biases.
A cognitive bias is a limitation in objective thinking that is caused by the tendency of the human brain to perceive information through a filter of personal experience and preferences. The distortion tends to take place as our brain is unable to process information with unlimited speed.
In other words, it is when we aren’t thinking in the most rational manner and we literally cannot help it. We all suffer from it, and it is extremely important to be aware of those biases if you are going to delve into the minds of your visitors.
Here are just a few examples of the cognitive biases that could allow you to convert visitors of your website:
Anchoring effect
To put it simply the anchoring effect is the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions.
This is perhaps the most commonly used effect in e-commerce, yet many don’t know why they list the initial price before putting in the current discounted one. The thing is that people are impressed (both consciously and subconsciously) when the price is “decreased” as they mostly only pay attention to the initial figures.
Source: amazon.co.uk
Practical use: When discounting an item, always display the original price alongside but clearly crossed out. On a practical level, potential customers have to see the higher price in order to understand how valuable your deal is. But more subtly than this, the higher price will serve as a reference point for all other prices the customer sees. This will have the effect of making all lower-priced items seem better value for money.
Framing Effect
The framing effect involves drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.
You can either say “8 out of 10 people on the bus survived the crash” or “2 out of 10 people died”. See the difference?
When applying this to e-commerce, you could present negative reviews in a way that makes them useful to the customer without completely obscuring them. Negative reviews (provided they aren’t the majority – if so you have bigger problems than your conversion rate) lend credibility to the reviewing feature, but can be placed less prominently than positive reviews.
Perhaps the most brilliant way of presenting negative reviews was invented by the masterminds who made the poster seen below.
Pay attention. How many stars did “The Guardian” give the movie “Legend?” Even the critic who wrote the reviews applauded the guts of the movie’s marketers.
Screenshot: twitter.com
Practical use: Make the positive reviews of the goods you sell more viewable than the negative ones. Highlight the advantages of the products you sell and don’t “over-emphasise” their disadvantages.
Halo effect
When we talk about the “halo effect”, we refer to cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about his or her character.
Let’s take a look at Brad Pitt. He is a handsome man, a good actor and has tons of charisma. He’s just has to be perfect in relationships, right? Well, we should ask Jennifer Aniston, whom he dumped a while ago, or Angelina Jolie who has recently divorced him.
One great quality does not mean that the man is great overall. This idea is also applied to e-commerce websites. Well-designed e-shops may make money selling overpriced goods with terrible shipping fees while you’re still left with empty pockets.
If your website has a design that looks like the one that was deliberately made by Angelfire to highlight all the mistakes web designers are capable of, it will not be a credible site, people just won’t buy. They will close the tab and never come back.
Practical use: Make your e-commerce business website sharp and up-to-date to gain more credibility and make people stay. Potential visitors may very well convert into buyers and contribute to your revenue.
These are just several examples of psychological biases that are implied in e-commerce. Progressively more biases are being discovered with the development of brain study technologies.
We at Convertize have helped e-commerce businesses improve their conversion rate for almost a decade now. We implement all kinds of persuasion tactics and neuromarketing principles, including consumers’ cognitive biases, to improve out clients’ conversion rates. Furthermore, customers using our AB testing and Persuasive Notifications platform have access to a library of 250 tactics: these are practical, actionable tips based on our neuromarketing expertise.
Conclusion
Application of basic and advanced psychological principles has become a must for e-commerce websites unless they want to drown in the massive waves of other new pre-existing online shops.
Neuromarketing studies how the human mind works and the results of these studies help to persuade people. Please keep in mind, that respectable businesses should never blatantly manipulate potential customers and website visitors. However, reasonable use of cognitive biases can improve conversion rates, make businesses grow and increase revenue.
by Benjamin Ligier
Benjamin is a CRO Expert at Convertize. He is passionate about design, web marketing and consumer psychology.
