Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Regentsâ Professor of Psychology Robert B, Cialdini, Ph.D. describes in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion the principal of human automatic action demonstrated in an experiment by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer.

Hereâs a passage from the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B, Cialdini, Ph.D.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine; Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because Iâm in a rush? The Effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: 94% of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60% of those asked complied.

This example works well in the real world where we can interact with someone directly but can this translate to the online equivalent human automatic action?

On a website the need for reassurance is even higher because of the lack of direct human interaction. The nature of the web puts the user in control and when that control is challenged users tend to bail out since thereâs no guilt holding them back. They are not walking away from an actual person after all.

The cutting in line experiment is the online equivalent of when a company form page or registration page asks for information that may be beyond what the user is comfortable with providing or information that has nothing to do with the expectations of the task. For example why ask for your mailing address if youâre just signing up for a free online membership? The user has no expectation to receive anything in the mail and therefore assumes they just want to send him or her junk mail or worse yet sell his address to several other people who want to ensure the mailman has plenty to stuff in his box.

The lessons learned on persuasion in the experiment can be easily adapted to this online situation and as a result improve the conversion rate of all online forms. If in the real world conversion went up 34% we can at least expect an equivalent online.

Below is an example of how the lesson of human automatic action can be leveraged by adding a simple reason why to a contact page.

In the example rather than simply asking for information a bit of verbal persuasion is used to reassure and explain why the user should be filling in his valuable information.

This simple act of explaining, âEntering a URL allows us to review your site so that we can begin thinking about improving it before we speak to you.â Not only provides a human level of comfort but also directly relates how entering this information will be beneficial to the user filling out the form. ââso that we can begin thinking about improving it before we speak to you.â

Whatâs the most important page on any website?

Most people think the home page of their site is the most important, and therefore it has to be the most persuasive to pull visitors in towards conversion, but most people would be wrong. Although the home page is where most internal stakeholders attention is and where most of the time will be spent on any average web design project, it is actually not the most important page of your site. Unfortunately more hours and debate, not to mention opinions will be wasted around this one single page since everyone from each department wants a piece of it. If only the internal stakeholders knew all their concerns were surrounding a page that doesnât even rank in the top five of importance. The reason for this has to do with how sales works.

Does your website have a sales formula?

Any good sales person knows the âAIDAâ formula, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. First get your prospects attention, peak their interest for your product, create a desire around their needs and finally get them to take action. The online equivalent of the AIDA formula puts the home page at the interest stage. Attention would be your promotions vehicle used to generate awareness and bring visitors to your site. At the interest stage of the sales funnel your prospect has more than likely arrived at your home page and are scanning the page to see if there is anything relevant to them. Once they find that nugget of relevance they click and poof theyâre gone from the home page. Generally the home page has the least amount of time spent on the page and is the least engaging. Think of it like this, a website home page is the front door to your business itâs only purpose is to get prospects to enter to engage with the real content on the inside. It is no more than a hotel lobby, it sets the tone provides an impression and the helpful clerk behind the counter tells you how to get to your suite upstairs. Once upstairs you kick off your shoes fix a drink from the in room bar and relax in chair on the balcony before you unpack. This is where you want to be not the home page.

But what about persuasion?

Continuing the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action formula you can easily see how the interior pages of your site, like your product detail pages are where you create desire in your prospect, these pages are more important than your home page but still are not the most important or most persuasive pages on your site. It is in the desire stage where your prospects are thinking about buying.

On the web your prospects need to explore, the job of your site is to provide them with the tools they need to do this with the least amount to resistance possible. Resistance in this case would be anything that gets in their way from completing their task. This can come in the form of poor usability practices, weak navigation, and pages that have not been designed around your specific prospect. Aligning your prospects needs with the needs of your business is what persuasive design is all about.

The further your prospect gets in the sales funnel the more valuable they become because they are closer to converting into a customer. Therefore the more important pages on your website are the pages that are further into your site, where the customer has chosen to be. These interior pages are where persuasive design can be fully leveraged in order to get the most bang for your buck.

The most important page on your website

The most valuable page on any website is the thank you page, the page that your customer see after completing a transaction. A transaction can include anything from completing a contact form, a registration page or an online purchase. The thank you page is also the most persuasive but often overlooked. At this point your customer is at the furthest point into the sales funnel, they have raised their hand and taken action. All to often this page says nothing more to the customer other than Thank you. A this point your website has the best opportunity to be persuasive.

Design has a tremendous impact on marketing results, it can make the difference between achieving your business goals and often surpassing them or driving your customers as far away from your objective as possible. Design is far more than simply look and feel and certainly more than an add-on service at the midpoint or end of the development phase. Design is as much scientific as it is instinctual and should never be done without a specific reason. Fundamentally design communicates in a visual way and taps into a subconscious decision making process which words alone cannot achieve.

A simple design element like the position and color of a call to action button or the amount of white space on a web page, if used as part of the design strategy, can enhance or reduce the power of your marketing.

It is no secret that perception is dependent on presentation, which contributes to the response to your marketing message or lack there of. On the web the effect of design is amplified because all any prospective consumer has to go on, is your web presence. The visual look, usability and design of your site is your company or product. Your web site is the interface with your potential customer at the time of purchase, when they are considering starting or continuing a relationship with you.

Design has too much of an impact on performance to be reduced to a subjective opinion of whether someone or some committee likes it or dislikes it. Because of this impact on communication it is important to measure and test design just like any other part of your marketing mix. It is also important to note that design testing is not the same as usability testing, which is also vitally important and should not be ignored.

Design testing measures your customersâ behavior in relationship to your brand and can combined with good design can improve your siteâs conversion rates. Under the lens of a properly conducted design test there will be no question that design B increases some business metric by x% vs. design C which decreases the same metric.

Measuring design and other web analytics are ultimately good for the business intention. However, there is some backlash within the industry that believes it creates too much of a focus on the short-term. The Creative Thirst solution is to combine design testing with usability testing, along with qualitative data and observation of visitor behavior over time. This combination is the key to developing deeper insights into your customers and is the basis of the continual improvement process that will ensure greater gains to your bottom line through the design in situations where you cannot afford to guess.

Do all customers have the same value? Sure everyoneâs money may be good inside of an ecommerce shopping cart but are some customers more equal than others?
It would certainly seem every customer is equal on the web right? After all weâre all hiding behind a few mouse clicks. Just imagine what it would be like if marketers knew that some customers were more valuable than others. Now of course we all know that it takes less marketing dollars and less effort to increase sales for existing customers than it does to get new customers but what if the value of each customer was dynamic and it changed all the time.

Well actually it does if you think of it in terms of a buying funnel.
1. Need - the process by which a need is determined and identified.
2. Awareness - determining what solution will satisfy the need.
3. Research / Consideration - gathering of information to proceed with a purchase. Determining which solution will best meet the requirements and satisfy the need.
4. Decision - finalizing the details, including pricing and solution support.
5. Rationalization - qualifying the purchase after the fact. Was the correct choice made in the selection process?

The further a customer goes down the funnel the more valuable they become because they are getting closer and closer to a purchase. The size of a market segment further down the funnel is much smaller however but the value is much greater. Media buyers have always based campaigns on the size of the segment, how many eyeballs see an ad, and online media has been guilty of this as well. There is been a marketing allure to 435,000 views but what does that really mean to marketers? If only 100 people walked through your door and all them bought, signed up, converted, etc. isnât that better than 1000 people showing up and 999 of those people leaving after hearing your offer? If this is the case itâs just a matter of finding the right people or attracting them.

Before a potential customer enters the funnel they are not interested or they donât even know they need for your product. Marketing has handled this in a traditional approaching through mass media. At this stage the value of the customer to the retailer is at itâs weakest yet this is where most of the marketing effort is, i.e the 30 second spot, etc.

An interested buyer at the research / consideration level, obviously has a greater value than someone at the top of the funnel. Just ask any car salesman who pounces on some poor schlep that just finished a test drive.

Online it is possible to orchestrate a users pathway and optimize it for persuasion. Think of your website as the buying funnel. The further a user gets into the site the more valuable they become which means you have an opportunity to market to them differently the further along they are.

A website provides the potential to focus on different messages to different segments of your market in many different ways, for example.

• Customer database email lists â different messages to different groups, one to one marketing approach.
• Product selector tools â lead a visitor down paths based on what is important to that individual visitor with a unique message at the end and along the way of that path which speaks directly to that segment. (being able to talk differently to people who are at different stages of the buying process.
• Customer segmentation based on type of customer.

Persuasive design combines with performance metrics tracked across different customer segments allow for rapid adjustments and continuous improvements which maximize the value of each individual group, by increasing the value across each segment more value is brought to the consumer and also the business profit and brand, the costs of efficiently targeting each segment online are minimal at best after all there are no print costs, or distribution costs associated with a web page. Therefore the size of the customer segment is of less importance producing a long tail effect for the marketer.

Let me begin my making a clear distinction, design is not art.

Simply stated art is created for the artist and the artist alone. The artist paints a picture solely for the purpose of self-expression of how he or she sees the world. Anyone can look a piece of art and like it or dislike it. Art is subjective, either you like Van Goghâs sunflowers or you donât.

Design on the other hand is not created for self-expression but for a client with a particular goal in mind. If a design accomplishes the desired goal, for example to increase the response rate of a particular message by 63%, then it has satisfied itâs objective and purpose for being created. If subjectivity is added to the process of design approval the purpose of design has been completely removed and has become subjective.

So someoneâs opinion may be that they donât like a particular color or that the empty white space can be filled with something, but that is not design, that is an opinion.

Design is the accumulation of principals and elements that perform on many levels with several different parts all contributing to a desired influence. Every element in design has been placed or chosen for a reason and to change something that may seem trivial like color or white space just because of an opinion could result in a negative desired outcome.

Truth be told, no designer or copywriter or art director or even you can know beyond any doubt what the best design will be, until itâs test. Design is a process that must constantly evolve and grow.

A conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors who complete a desired action upon visiting your website. Mathematically conversion rate is expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the total number of visitors that completed your goal by the total number of people that started your goal and multiplying by 100.

The desired action for reaching your goal is always dependant on your business goals, it could include buying something, subscribing you your site to become a member, submitting a sales lead, downloading a free article, white paper, viewing a key page on your website, or some other measurable activity.

The key factor to remember is to start small, measure and continue to optimize and improve your returns. During these difficult economic times optimizing your website for greater returns should be on the top of everyoneâs priority list.

There is a lot going on in your prospects mind when he or she is surfing your site. A lot of what goes on in their head keeps you from getting a sale and most of it is the fault of your website.

Often times a website is designed with too narrow of a view of what design is. There are several people to blame for this, web designers, programmers, copywriters, marketers; the list can go on and on. Each making changes and decisions based on color or something personal. Everyone is usually focusing on a subjective aspect of the look of a site or page. The subjective look and feel is what most people call design, but very rarely is anyone thinking from the perspective of your potential customer.

Web sites need to be designed around the thought process of your prospect, not just around your brands color and logo. This is why using personas to design is so important. Design needs to start in the mind of your prospect and be built around their goals, fears and desires if you want your website to do the hard work of closing a sale.

Lets take a simple example of an e-commerce siteâs shopping cart page. Your prospect has added an item or two to the cart, notice the visitor is still a prospect not a customer yet since they havenât entered their credit card info, shipping address, etc and clicked the complete purchase button yet. Donât make the mistake of thinking that design has stopped at this point, this is when design needs to do some serious work. If you donât believe me just ask a few million abandoned shopping carts scattered around the web. - Forrester Research reports shopping cart abandonment rates at 25 percent. eMarketerâs research shows the abandonment rate at 32 percent. NetEffect and Greenfeld Online report shopping cart abandonment as high as 67 percent. Shop.org research goes as high as 75 percent.

There is a lot going on in the mind of your prospects at this point and the design of the process on your site is directly weighing on their mind even though they donât fully realize it. Donât worry your web designer and marketing team didnât realize it either. Yet your web page has to carry the weight of this success or failure to your companyâs revenue.

External factors and internal factors, both of which are the responsibility of your web design to correct, are at the forefront of your prospect mind adding anxiety to their purchase decision and keeping you from a sale. Your prospect is wondering about quality, reliability, price, and security.

One way to reduce the anxiety your prospect faces at this moment is to use trustmarks to reduce some anxiety in the mind of your prospect and support their decision to buy from you. Trustmarks can include credit card security seals (Is this  a safe place to give my credit card information?) Credibility images like a better business bearer seal, Trust-e, Hackersafe, (Is this a legitimate website? Will there be a problem before I even get my product or after?) testimonials, guarantees, etc. These types of trustmarks all help to lower the anxiety level of your prospect but itâs not enough to just have them on your web page. They need to be designed into the thought process that is going on in the mind of your prospect at the right time, when they are concerned about it and in the right place. It doesnât help to have them stuffed in the footer of your site on every page or in an area where your prospect needs to scroll to see them at the exact point in their buying process when they need them. These trustmarks need to be in close proximity to the area in which the anxiety rises. They need to be designed not just into the site but into the buying process. A single trustmark image at the right time and place can dramatically increase your sales and decrease your shopping card abandonment rates along with other cognitive psychological factors that should be at the core of all design.

Web copy is mistakenly treated as an after thought and really needs to be though of as part of the design and incorporated into a web page as a part of the whole. Treating web copy as part of your verbal design strategy will maximize your conversion rates. Assuming that is if your copywriter is writing for the web, which is vastly different than writing for any other medium. But lets be honest, most in-house marketing departments or ad agencies take the easy way out and reuse existing copy to save time and effort. Sure this will save you time but this form of laziness will get you no where when it comes to converting your visitors into revenue.

The main reason why web copy needs to be thought of in a different way than any other copy is partly due to the motivation of web visitors and partly due to how people read a web page. People read online very differently than they would a book or a brochure or magazine ad.

To start with, people scan copy on the web, which is why web copy should use headlines, sub headlines and bulleted copy, which you normally donât find in print writing. In addition to writing in an inverse pyramid format, putting the most important information up front in the first paragraph.

Generally, visitors wonât read your entire web page, in fact they may not even get as far as they would in a magazine article, with the exception is perhaps a blog, that type of reading on the web is rare and will happen in some cases depending on the psychological personality type of the visitor and what stage they are in of their buying cycle.  

Moreover, reading print is linear vs the webs nonlinear format. The chief contributor to the non-linear type of reading is encouraged through hyper links. Imagine this scenario. A visitor lands on your web page in search of solving a problem. Heâs interested in the page because your headline and sub headline support the problem heâs looking to solve because you chose the right words to use and designed them in the right place. Youâve effectively grabbed the reader, congratulations. He continues to proceed across and down the page, skimming through the copy your writer painstakingly wrote. He runs across a linked word that also cleverly supports the problem heâs looking to solve. He stops reading doesnât make it any further down the page and clicks on the link, remember heâs on a mission, he wants to buy he just needs help converting. He needs to be sure your product or service will really solve his problem.

Your visitor follows this pattern over and over on multiple sites skimming and clicking, skimming and clicking. Your web copy has to support this and be designed in such a way to not only allow this to happen but to strategically allow this to happen, so that your visitor can go down his own conversion path and when he is ready, he will buy. Do you see how a nonlinear writing format is something so different than any copy you may already have someplace else in your marketing arsenal?

But thatâs only the beginning when it comes to the verbal design of your site to increase conversions. According to most eye tracking studies on the web, visitors consistently read web pages in an F pattern.  (Eye tracking studies are done with âheat mapsâ which is a graphical representation of visitorâs eye movements. Red areas represent the hottest areas, which is where visitors spent most of their time looking.) Visitors first read horizontally across the top or active window of a web page, this is the top of the letter F. Next visitors move down and then across forming the second horizontal bar of the letter F. Finally, visitors scan down the left side forming the bottom of the F shape.

The F shape-reading pattern has many implications when it comes to page layout and conversion.  For example most e-commerce shopping cart checkout pages donât take advantage of this for cross-selling and up-selling offers. Cross-selling opportunities are usually placed in areas outside the F pattern; so most visitors are not even looking at them much less buying. Imagine how much this would increase the total order per customer if this one element of design were used more effectively.

Thereâs a lot that goes into designing a site for maximum conversion and we didnât even get into half of it, perhaps in a future post.

The problem with choking budgets is that as a marketer, youâre still expected to produce results or even exceed expectations for the year. Virtually do more with less resources.

In these shaky economic times itâs not just your budget thatâs on the line, itâs your job as well. The fight between CFO vs. CMO is a constant one in any economy, but particularly in todayâs times itâs vitally important to your job and your companies lively hood to maximize every dollar left in your budget.

The best use of any online marketing budget is to optimize your conversion rate so each and every dollar works twice as hard. Incremental continuous improvement in your online conversion funnel is key to getting the most out of every dollar left. Marketers today cannot afford to chase dollars, they need to convert more clicks into customers to get more results with smaller budgets that show real return. A website conversion optimization strategy will outlive your marketing campaigns by converting traffic at a higher rate, month after month regardless of your budget.

Improving the effectiveness of your website through scientific testing will make your dwindling budget workable again. Whether your company intends to decrease spending or not, small improvements in your online sales funnel add up to large gains that will keep you in business.

Putting the buyer at the center sounds easy but in actuality not all buyers are at the same point in the buying cycle and not all personality types buy in the same way. This is a complex system and thatâs why a human sales person is better at selling than a website. But donât worry most websites donât make it easy to buy and this is where you can leave your competition in the dust.

Itâs not simple enough to have a product detail page and a buy button with a good shopping cart. Thatâs just the minimum to get into the game. If you want to double your online sales and blow the doors off of your competitors your web design needs to go beyond the surface and dive deep into the psychology of your buyer and the buying cycle.

At any one point in time your website has four different types of buyers, browsers, evaluators, purchasers, and customers. Each type has a combination of different personality types in their subconscious that drives their decisions partly based on where they are in their buying cycle, not your selling cycle. This is why it is so important for the two cycles to match and support each other.
Or in other words, help people buy.

Different buyer types have different needs

• Browsers need help finding what they need.
• Evaluators know enough to be dangerous and need more detailed information to help them decide if your product or service is right for their needs.
• Purchasers have made the decision to buy but still need to feel safe while going through your buying process.
• Customers have already completed the purchase but you need to make them feel satisfied so they will purchase again.

The different buying types closely mirrors the steps of the buying decision process.

• Identify the problem
• Search for a solution
• Evaluate alterative solutions
• Decide to purchase
• Purchase
• Reevaluate the purchase

Reprinted from a recent MarketingSherpa post:
Less than 4 out of 10 (38%) B2B marketers say they tailor their content to specific stages of the buying cycle, according to MarketingSherpaâs 2008-2009 Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide.

That means that you can gain a big advantage over 62% of your competitors when you create high-value content that addresses the different needs and questions the buying committee asks at different stages of the buying cycle.

In summary, your site needs to design paths and provide supportive copy, images and taxonomy for each buyer type and each step of the buying process. Design is so much more than simply look and feel when you put your buyer in the center of the design process, after all shouldnât a website be more about them than about you if itâs going to accomplish your business goals?