With so many campaigns targeting every conceivable consumer demographic, it’s become more difficult for businesses and marketers to ensure their message is accepted.
This is the best reason why it’s important to give your initiatives more substance and tap into consumer’s psychology. Fortunately, there are many factors that influence the buying decision process. There are many points at which you can secure a conversion.
Here is a number of approaches marketers and business owners can leverage to influence buyer’s behavior:
1. Knowing What Makes Your Consumers Happy
There are a whole host of contributing factors and strategies that can affect consumers’ buying habits, and when psychological triggers are well-placed within marketing initiatives, businesses are able to reap the rewards. Such strategies can be broadly categorized into either:
- Rational marketing: This method promotes the product’s overall quality and usefulness by emphasizing its benefits as opposed to its features. In this way, the advertisement appeals to the rational or logical consumer.
- Emotional marketing: Alternatively, this approach explores those elements that appeal to consumers on a personal level, and as a result, tend to focus heavily on tone, color, lighting, and mood to increase conversion rates and promote brand loyalty.
2. Principles That Guide Consumer Behavior
It’s a common knowledge among savvy business owners, consumers typically base their purchase decisions around emotions (feelings and experiences) rather than the information (brand attributes, facts, and features) presented in marketing materials. So, how can marketers and business owners use this knowledge to their advantage in a competitive market? The answer lies in the way they cater their customer’s past experiences.
3. Factors Affecting Checkout Abandonment and Conversion
Consumers are exposed to countless ads in every conceivable format on a daily basis. That’s why it’s important for businesses to factor both rational and emotional marketing into their marketing campaigns.
Consumers are likely to behave when faced with critical tipping points in the buying decision process. Thinking about marketing and consumer psychology in these terms may help you to more accurately predict the following:
- When consumers will abandon the checkout process or navigate away from a website
- When the best times to advertise across your chosen promotional channels are
- How your customers will respond to significant changes in price
In the end, these factors affect how far through the buying decision process a potential customer will make it before deciding whether or not they will convert.
4. The Role of Price Points in Affecting Buying Behavior
In terms of more rational marketing, nothing is more effective at convincing or dissuading a consumer than price. In an age of global competition, customers are given all the tools necessary to compare items and carry out research. This means marketers must be adaptive to quick changes that often happen in the market.
There are some ways businesses can implement psychological pricing, a tactic that can guide customers in a specific direction. Some common marketing tactics include:
- Flash sales: This appeals to the”impulse buyer” and relies on eliminating lengthy thought processes by introducing time as a critical factor. As such, a lower set price will often result in higher conversion rates.
- Bulk bundling: A favorite approach for businesses offering a range of products that can be packaged and sold in various iterations to create an even wider selection.
- “Sweet Spot” pricing: A business can increase the sales of one product over another simply by ensuring the price point ends with a zero, five, or nine. To potential customers, $99 looks cheaper than $100, despite the mere dollar difference.
While there are many other conventional pricing techniques, some are proven to work better than others. It depends on your need. Choose the one that suits you.
5. Creating a Constructive and Fun Purchase Environment
Marketers have determined that online businesses only have five seconds to grab a visitor’s attention. Within that time, a potential consumer can form lasting opinions about your business. Creating a positive purchase environment has little to do with what products or services your business is offering. It’s something businesses operating within markets of any size will be able to take advantage of.
One final aspect to consider is the way in which content is phrased across your online media spaces and marketing initiatives. If you continually promote positive brand perceptions, consumers will believe they’re making the right buying decision.