Psychological Triggers Marketing: 10 Triggers Increase Your Sales

In this article, I will give you a secret edge over your competitors —proven psychological triggers that get customers to convert at higher rates and spend more money. Knowing about sale psychology is like having a secret weapon, and I have found that most online sellers neglect this entirely. I see a lot of them like to focus on numbers and special things like the best Facebook ad bidding strategies while completely ignoring why people choose to click on ads in the first place.

Here are 10 psychological triggers that you can use to increase your sales. I’m also going to be giving you actionable strategies as to how you can implement these in your online store.

1. Incite Customers to Buy by Giving Them Something for Free
2. Create Envy with Customer Reviews
3. Use Curiosity to Drive Traffic and Engagement
4. Use Photos to Help Customers Visualize
5. Use Photos to Create Emotions in Customer
6. Use Price Anchoring to Push Prices Higher
7. Include Product Pictures with Human Faces
8. Pain is More Motivating than Pleasure
9. Create a Common Enemy
10. Phrase Your Items as Low

1. Incite Customers to Buy by Giving Them Something for Free

So obviously, giving a customer a 20% discount coupon encourages them to buy more from you because they’re now getting items at a discounted price. But that’s not the only reason why. When we give a customer a freebie like a coupon, especially if they weren’t expecting it, and it felt like a personal gift, we trigger the social norm of reciprocity.

The norm of reciprocity is simple. When someone does something beautiful for us, we are obligated to return the favor. If you move to a new house and a neighbor comes over to bring you cookies as a welcome gift, you would feel obligated to return something. This sense of obligation is very powerful.

In 1976, sociologist Philip Kunz experimented; he mailed handwritten Christmas cards. They contained a photo of him and his family to 600 random strangers. Despite not knowing him, almost 200 strangers sent him a card back.

The norm of reciprocity is one of the critical tenants of marketing in advertising. Think about a mattress seller who lets you try their mattresses for free at home. The customer feels indecent to the company for making them have the mattress. They don’t want to inconvenience the company, so many people who don’t want to keep the mattress will keep it anyway.

So how can you implement this psychological trigger?

Well, if you’re running your own dropshipping store, a really great way to do it is to add personalized coupons to your store.

For example, the spin2win coupon pop-up boxes you may have seen that gives you a random discount are a great example of this.

Not only do they feel more personal since the customer gets your own exclusive discount, but because they are engaged with your site and had a fun experience. They now feel indecent to you. And if you’re selling on Amazon, customers rarely expect to receive anything with their order, so the really great idea is to include a note and a discount coupon inside the product packaging.

2. Create Envy with Customer Reviews

So let me ask you: “Why do you think it’s a good idea to encourage customers to leave reviews for their purchased items?”

The obvious answer is that it provides social proof for potential customers. They see that other customers have liked it, so they trust you more.

However, that’s the obvious answer. The other side to customer reviews is that they create envy in prospective customers.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Keeping up with the Joneses?” It refers to the idea that if our neighbors (i.e., the Jones family) buy a car bigger than ours, it makes us feel jealous and envious and makes us want to buy a car to match.

So that’s what positive product reviews do. We see that other people benefit and enjoy this product, and we want that same benefit in our lives.

So if you’ve got a Shopify store, a great way to do this is to add an app to your store like Stamped.io that automatically sends the customer an email asking them to leave a review.

If your store is on Amazon, it’s also crucial that you try to get as many customer reviews as possible. So you also want to be using an app like Jumpsend, which will automatically email the customer after the sale, asking them to leave a review.

3. Use Curiosity to Drive Traffic and Engagement

Curiosity can be used to drive direct sales, but more often than not, it’s used by marketers and advertisers to drive clicks to websites and products or to increase engagement.

How can you create curiosity?

In 2009, Colin Camerer experimented; He took 19 undergrad students and hooked them up to a brain scanner, and then asked them 40 trivia questions. They ranged from super easy.

Questions are like, “What galaxy is Earth a part of?” The answer, of course, is the Milky Way. To more obscure, “What instrument was invented to sound like a human singing?” The answer is the violin.

The students were asked to do three things;

1. Think silently about what they thought the answer to the question was.
2. Write down how confident they were in the answer.
3. Mark on a scale of how curious they were to know the answer.

Ultimately the study found that curiosity is like a U-shaped curve.

• When we know nothing about something, we are not very curious.
• When we know a little bit about something, we become very curious.
• The more we know beyond that, the list curious we become.

So how can you implement these psychological triggers to increase sales online?

The spin-to-win discount coupon pop-up boxes are another great example of this. The customer knows a little bit that they can win a discount if they play the game. But they don’t know what they will win. This curiosity drives them to act and sign up to find the answer.

And curiosity has been used by many drop shippers to sell this avocado slicer. Check out this video ad.

It creates curiosity by showing us the strange-looking tool of the start and telling us that it will help us slice avocados better. But not showing us how. It makes us want to see it in action because it looks odd. It’s hard to figure out how it works just by looking at it.

If you’re something on Amazon, then a great way to add curiosity into your strategy is to be creative with the email titles you use for the emails you seemed out, asking customers to leave a review of these email titles that will pique curiosity.

So normally, people will send that email titles like “How are you enjoying your avocados slicer,” instead try to email titles like “I have a favor that I would like to ask you” Titles like that piqued curiosity, the customer thinks, oh what favor do they want from me. And so it drives them to open the email to find the answer to that question. For more e-mail marketing strategies, you can see the article.

4. Use Photos to Help Customers Visualize

Photos are the most important part of your product listing when you’re selling items online with your dropshipping store. Yes, Amazon has tested this, and photos are the number one conversion factor regarding whether a customer buys a product.

Therefore, one of the most powerful things you can do is include a photo in your product listing that shows the products being used in a real-life context. Because this helps the customer visualize themselves actually using it, customers can imagine themselves using a product; then, they are far more likely to buy it.

If you’re dropshipping from Aliexpress, don’t just include the basic photos of a product against a white backdrop; instead, look for photos the supplier has provided showing it in a real-life context. If the supplier doesn’t have these, consider buying a test product and taking your own photos.

5. Use Photos to Create Emotions in Customer

Honest truth, when most people try to sell things online, they take a very dry approach to marketing. They say, “Hey, I have this avocado slicer; it’s made from food-safe plastic. It cuts avocados and looks like it takes out the avocado pit. It creates every cube. Buy my avocado slicer!” —No.

You know what works so much better, approaching it from this angle, “Hey do you love avocados but you find cubing them messy and annoying? Well, guess what this toe fixes the problem.” Now, this is so much more effective for multiple reasons. One of the reasons is that it triggers emotions in the customer.

Emotions are integral to decision-making. Professor Antonio Damasio conducted a study. He took a group of people who were mentally impaired at feeling and experiencing emotions and who could still access the rational, logical parts of their brains. He discovered they struggled to make simple decisions like what to eat for dinner because they lacked any sense of how they felt about the different options. In other words, a lack of emotion leads to indifference and a lack of motivation.

So yes, words can create emotions, but photos are some of the most effective ways.
Before it became massively saturated, many people had success dropshipping this ring because of this photo the AliExpress supplier provided.

They slept this photo on relevant Instagram influencer pages, and it sold like crazy, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. When you look at this photo, it really feels like you’re there at the ocean at sunset.

6. Use Price Anchoring to Push Prices Higher

We’re presented with the products we would like, but we have no idea what the value is, and it’s not your fault. It’s called price anchoring.

In phase one of the study, customers had two choices. A standard beer for $1.80 and a premium beer for $2.50. Around 80% of people chose the more expensive beer. In phase two of the study, customers were given a third choice. A cheap beer for $1.60. Nobody bought the cheap beer, but now 80% of people chose the $1.80 standard beer instead. In phase three of the study, the cheap beer was removed and replaced with an expensive $3.40 beer. The result was that people returned to buying the premium $2.50 beer. A small number would buy the $1.80 beer, and 10% opted for the expensive $3.40 beer. They made more money overall.

Price anchoring is when you place multiple products side by side, and it’s usually most effective if you’ve got at least three pricing tiers. Most people will choose the middle option. It looks cheap compared to the expensive option, but they assume that it’s higher quality than the cheaper option. Of course, the study also shows us that some people will always choose the premium product.

So how can you action this psychological trigger to increase sales?

Well, if you’re running your own dropshipping store, then make sure you don’t have all your prices seat to be the same. Don’t have every item in your store be $9.95. If you’re selling on Amazon, often the safest pricing strategy is to price your items somewhere in the middle of your competitors. Don’t be the cheapest option but don’t be the most expensive.

7. Include Product Pictures with Human Faces

It probably doesn’t surprise you, but humans are drawn to other humans’ faces and in particular, drawn to eyes.

A study was conducted with photos of faces placed on e-commerce stores to see if they would increase or decrease trust. It was found that if the potential customer did not trust the store showing photos of faces helped to build trust. However, if the customer already had trust built in the store, photos of faces did not improve this.

Building trust with potential customers is one of the challenges that new sellers and stores face. So you should take advantage of this hack to create free, easy trust. So if you are dropshipping from Aliexpress and your supplier doesn’t have photos like this, just make sure they take at least one photo containing a human face.

8. Pain is More Motivating than Pleasure

Of course, when most people try to sell a product online, they simply list its features, which is a huge mistake. You should explain how this product benefits and improves someone’s life.

Which is better; focusing on how a product adds some pleasure into someone’s life or how a product solves a problem?

It has been studied and found that usually, people are more motivated by avoiding short-term pain at the expense of both short-term and long-term pleasure. That’s why everyone procrastinates so much.

So how can you implement this psychological trigger to boost your sales?

Take this little tool here this little inconspicuous little tool sounds crazy because it solves a problem then a lot of people have, which is slicing vegetables like onions and having it fall apart within your fingers. So if I were selling this in my product description, I would emphasize how frustrating and slow it can be to chop onions and how much this little thing solves the problem.

Of course, the honest reality is that some products don’t solve problems. But they do more fun. For products like this, don’t try to enforce a problem.

9. Create a Common Enemy

Here is a quick tip: If you’re struggling to create an interesting product ad or an interesting product description, an easy way to make it more interesting is to create a common enemy.

This is a pretty common and effective marketing tactic probably the most famous example is Apple, which ran an advertising campaign that drew a sharp distinction between Mac and PC users for years — essentially creating an us-versus-them attitude amongst its users. Apple no longer uses this marketing tactic, but it was extremely effective.

I remember some friends sitting in a history class at school when they were learning about the different world wars, and a teacher asked them, “What would you do to unite the whole world together and stop everyone from fighting amongst themselves?” My friends said an alien invasion. The teacher was not impressed with this answer, but I thought it said it was genius because it’s the exact idea despite all of our enormous differences. If aliens were to invade, we would all suddenly have a much worse common enemy, which could, in theory, unite us all together under one common goal defeat them. Whether or not you think that would work, common enemies work in marketing.

So how can you implement this psychological trigger to make more sales?

Let’s say you were selling dog treats made from all-natural ingredients. So guess what your common enemy would be? — processed dog treats.

Or maybe you are dropshipping reusable funny shopping bags; guess what your common enemy would be? —plastic shopping bags.

10. Phrase Your Items as Low

I have another question: “Why do you think that free just pay shipping promotions work so well?”

There are many reasons, and one of them is that you can take advantage of possibly the most powerful word in marketing: “Free.” But there is another word in there that you may not have considered: “Just.” The item is free; just pay $9.99 for shipping.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers did a study. They took a free overnight DVD trial with a $5 shipping charge. They changed the way it was phrased from “a $5 fee” to say instead “a small $5 fee”. Guess what? Conversions increased by 20%

So yes, if you were phrasing your offer as “This item is free. Shipping is $9.99,” that would be far less effective than saying, “This item is free to you; just pay $9.99 for shipping”. So when you’re phrasing your pricing and marketing materials, don’t be afraid to minimize the price verbally.