Optimise Conversion Rates Using Buyer Psychology

well hello good evening and welcome to the live recording of the ecommerce podcast my name is
matt edmondson and if you are watching the live stream just to let you know uh what is about to happen and what's
going on just so you're aware of uh everything that is transpiring right now um
we are gonna record we're gonna do the recording in one take the e-commerce podcast and tonight we
are gonna learn all about time buyer conversion i'm super excited about this one let me tell you it's
going to be great great stuff to get into first time buy a conversion with uh yeah anyway we'll get into all of it
you definitely want to stay and watch it and hang around till the end because it's going to be great now because this is the podcast live recording um
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welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online [Music]
well hello and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson
this is a show all about how to grow your online business yes it is top tips
on how to do digital business how to do e-commerce i love the show i love the fact that every week i get to talk to amazing
people from the world of ecommerce and i get to sit down with them for a good chunk of time and ask them
all kinds of questions about what they know and how it's going to help us develop our own online businesses
and today is no exception we are going to learn what it takes to
convert our first time visitors what is that gonna look like and how can
buyer psychology help us crack this puzzle and we're gonna do all of
this uh with rishi rawat an expert in the field of biopsychology
copywriting wow i mean that's that's quite an impressive resume isn't it
i met rishi a few months ago and became instantly intrigued by his ideas and his thoughts and this
whole idea of this whole area of buyer conversion he's actually approached this in a way
that i have never really seen before and so i'm super excited
to be talking to rishi on this week's podcast we are going to deep dive into it so make sure you stick
around to the end as we are going to look at this whole thing of buyer conversion
now let me give you a quick introduction to rishi then i'll bring him on the show and we are going to get straight into it and now for the last
years rishi has been probing and experimenting to better understand
how shoppers choose in a world filled with more choices than ever rishi
is the ceo of frictionless commerce which uses copywriting to optimize
conversion rates and he is here with us like i said to share some great value some real high impact
lessons on buyer conversions so grab your notebooks of course if it is safe to do so you are going to want
to take notes but if you're in the car driving or for whatever reason you can't take notes you'll be pleased to know that all of
the notes from today's show will be available as a free download on
our website so just head on over to ecommercepodcast.net forward slash and you will be able to download them
because this is episode number so that's ecommercepodcast.net forward slash to download the show
notes so all of that said without any further ado let's get
straight into it shall we let's bring on today's guest and welcome rishi to the show i'm just going to push this button here and
Introduction
hopefully as if by magic here he is he appears on the screen rishi hey good evening good to see you
good to see you that was quite an intro i'm very excited good i'm pleased i'm pleased that you're
here and i'm i'm looking forward to this conversation i've been looking forward to this one for a few weeks rishi because um
because it was really intriguing when we uh for those who don't know when we do these podcasts we always have a
separate call we always just sort of have a catch up introduce ourselves and figure out what we're going to talk about and in our pre-call
you really jumped straight into this whole area of bioconversion and biopsychology and just absolutely
fascinated me so tell me a little bit how have you how have you got into this whole area of
biopsychology and conversion yeah so um it's it's
it's a really i was i was around years old and i was
i was walking into a retail store and i was at the entrance of the store
and i was at a in interesting vantage point where to my right hand side i could see that there was a customer
working on one of the aisles trying to decide if they wanted to buy something or not and on the extreme left
hand side invisible to the customer was the store owner who was sitting on the cash register and
i was i happened to pay attention to the customer and i noticed that they lifted the object they investigated
it they put it down they took a step a couple of steps away from it uh turned away and they turned away
turned again towards it walked up to it again again they investigated it and they put
it down and then they walked away and just left the store and they were having this moment of
struggle uh clearly they were interested in the said item and clearly they had some
questions in their mind that they were trying to work through themselves and they couldn't solve it and as i kind
of looked at the store owner i had this thought which was that at the end of the day the store owner is
going to tally up the cash and decide if it's been a good day or a bad day and completely oblivious to this moment
of struggle that happened that could have been a potential sale and this how many times has happened does this happen times a day
has this happened times the last five years and i thought to myself what a wasted metric to focus on the
cash register and all of this data is being lost and you know i i didn't know what to do with
this insight i just that's what that's the inside i had i had no idea any i didn't know anything about e-commerce i don't even think it was a
real thing back then um and so this kind of thought this idea virus was in my head i just
didn't know what to do with it and you know circumstances of life unfolded and i found myself
in this unique intersection between design and marketing and technology and
um i've been pursuing exploring that uh ever since wow wow that's a
fascinating story so this guy who was intrigued by something that didn't buy it in a store has sort of
kick-started your whole journey well and so here we are i mean that was when you were you said right
so that was it was more than two years ago let's just leave it that way uh but um and so you've been pursuing
biopsychology ever since uh and you've you've been getting this that so let's define
what you mean when you use the phrase biopsychology what is that
yeah i mean biopsychology is i would say a curio a scientific
curiosity into understanding how consumers make purchase decisions and it's that's
what i would leave it at it's just it's it's it's it's it's a it's an interest in unpacking the human brain i don't think
there's anyone who's ever been able to unpack it nor do i think we'll be able to
ever unpack it completely but there are certain fragments of decision signs when it comes to
consumer products that we do have a pretty good handle on um so i would just say buyer psychology
is from a marketing perspective is the quest to understand how decisions get made
okay so you use this phrase um decision signs uh which i think is quite
an interesting phrase so let's unpack that a little bit more what do you mean by that phrase
well to me and and i don't know what the classical definition is and i'm thinking about decision science from the
perspective of the science of making decisions which i think is a distinction from decision science
so i define science of making decisions as when a consumer is interacting with a
stimulus whether that stimulus is an ad in a newspaper or a tv commercial
or a physical product what what trick what what what
sequence of triggers are happening in their in their mind and i'm looking at it specifically from the perspective of them making a
purchase not opinions it's like you know what triggers are can we triangulate
around as marketers to say okay these sequence of events lead to a purchase so let's have our advertising do more of
that yeah okay so a sequence of events
i like i'm just writing notes here if people are looking at me on the video going why does he keep looking down genuinely i'm a
pen and paper still it's the way of the future and i'm writing notes down as we go along so um
Internal debate
it's one of the phrases you used right at the start about this chapter was picking up the the thing in the in the supermarket um
which i i've noted down here i really like this this sort of moment of struggle as was had the phrase that you use this sort of
internal debate do i buy this do i not buy it there's obviously a bunch of questions going through their head to
try and figure out yes or no that's the you know the binary decision that they're going to come to
and they're obviously having this internal break this this internal struggle are there some common things that people
struggle with that we as e-commerce store owners should think about and should be aware of yeah
The human brain
i mean this is the thing i've spent the last um i would say the last
years investigating and the last five years investigating through rigorous science
and what we've identified is and again i want to be very clear about this the human brain is more complicated in many ways than
the universe itself so i'm not going to pretend like i understand the inner workings of how the brain works we're talking about in
very specific circumstances we're talking about how decisions may get made around
consumer products how you know and and what are some of the variables involved i recognize that
there are probably a million variables and there is uh it's there is a situational variance
from consumer to consumers so i don't think we can generalize but what we can say is that this is the thing about marketing is that when you
think about marketing at scale you need to identify the common variables so we do understand there's
nuance here we understand there's variability here as well but we want to find some of those basic drivers and what we've identified
through rigorous testing is that there are nine principal drivers that
take the consumer from you know being interested in something so we're looking at post engagement uh to purchase and
there are nine specific variables that um come into play in various degrees and depending on what
the product is some variables may be uh dormant and other variables may be
you know may play a dominant role so those there are nine specific
variables okay and can you share what they are yeah i i absolutely can so
Too good to be true
the first the first variable is too good to be true and basically that is our defense
mechanism for essentially being swindled and we are
we are constantly we are constantly uh making sure that we don't get screwed
over and and let's also let's before we get into that even let's kind of step back and understand what the
let's understand what the broader context is here for why why these things even matter so every
this year your viewers would be very interested in knowing uh it's a it's a sad fact for an e-commerce business but it's reality
every year new consumer products are launched of which totally fail so
imagine we have new businesses every year thinking they have they've invented the best product in the world
taking all of their budget and spending on advertising imagine what the consumer is going
through i think i saw a study at some point um and it's hard to actually quantify scientifically how many ads people are
exposed to but there is there is a basic study that says around ads a day consumers are
exposed to wow so yeah so our brains simply have not evolved to process
information in that magnitude and so what happens is that there are these autumn these are
instinctive systems that kick in and the the the consumer you and i is
not even actively aware of it's not like the brain is saying yes no no no yes yes no yes i don't even hear that chatter there's
chatter going on but at a very subconscious level of the garbage that's coming my way
is being conveniently deleted by the brain and so there is this there is this um subconscious mechanism
that is happening all the time which we call the system one mode um and it is
basically helping us manage um navigate life you know if you're driving a car
and if you start taking in all the stimuli that are outside in the world you will have a crash in
the next four seconds so our brains have evolved to say hey i'm going to shut off all of this external stimuli
and so in that context we have those nine nine uh nine triggers and the first one
is too good to be true it's a defense mechanism all of these triggers are self-survival i mean ultimately it's
let's keep in let's keep in mind that it's not like modern marketers have have created this brain response we're
talking about something you know modern human beings uh emerged years ago in in sub-saharan africa
we've we've these mechanisms have been um being have been evolving since then so all of
this that i'm talking about it's too good to be true essentially the as far as the brain is concerned um is nothing to do with consumer
products it's it's you know when you're looking for water supply and you you know and you
sense that there's a there's a safe water supply and if you're wrong you're dead
and so you know it's important to be skeptical yeah yeah so the two good to be true is you know
our brains way of saying you know hey you've made bad choices before i don't want to die [Laughter]
which is uh is important when it comes to consumer products i feel especially some of them you can buy on the web
okay so the first one too good to be true this um this idea that the brain is
Natural skepticism of the brain
is is actually naturally skeptical about things
um and it it takes some convincing it takes you know some some help to to convince
them um and so you've said this is the first one is this the actual starting point
that we should think about as marketers we should actually start right here at this point point number one which says
okay people are going to be naturally skeptical their brains are going to automatically default to think there is
an element of too good to be true here we don't want to get screwed over we don't want to die from drinking the
wrong water choice here we've we've we need to examine this a little bit more and is that so that's the default sort
of starting position that people come into our website are in um
that's really good okay have i got that right so far you you do i mean you're just to give
some context and i don't want to overwhelm your audience with uh with with unnecessary detail i think
it's completely fine to start here uh but just keep in mind that the
the story does start a little it's almost like you know um it's almost like the old testament and
new testament in the bible analogy so there is more to the story um but i i feel again you know speaking of
cognitive load if i would like just talk about everything that we've figured out or we've explored in the last years it
would be very uninteresting i think it's okay for us to stick to the nine stick to the nine uh the nine uh criteria and then if
someone's really interested they can reach out to me and i can you know i can talk to them about the whole picture but sure uh this would be
a great place to start great okay so number one too good to be true uh the the sort of the natural state of
skepticism of the brain um so what's what what where do we go to from there
so so again i should just mention that these are not on a hierarchy of like do step one first step to first
i think it's all situational so if you are selling a product for example let's say you're a retailer and
you're deep discounting for you too good to be true for your consumers too good to be true would play
a pretty important role um if you are selling a premium product i you know maybe the efficacy
of the product is the too good to be true aspect but maybe you don't even have to maybe that your product isn't really
something that warrants a too good to be true response so i don't look at them as a hierarchy i
look at them situationally but it is one of the triggers that we need to as marketers be aware of
and write copy to combat yeah and i like what you said there it's not just about
your um like if you're deep discounting the too good to be true thing is going to be about the the value of your offer
you know off what's that all about right so and i'm i'm your worst skeptic as
soon as it's over like i'm like this is a con something's not right um
so i i get that and i like what you said about premium products which aren't just discounted but actually are they worth
it are they are they worth this this premium price the efficacy of it so um so actually what we've got to do if
i'm hearing you right here where she is as business owners we've got to sit back and look at
um our products and ask ourselves what about our offering whether it's you know
the price the offer whatever it is what if that is going to fall into this idea of being too good to be true
right that's exactly right that's exactly right and it's not even just the price it's even the way we are
telling our story um so what's happening is every word words get converted into information and
energy and the consumer is subconsciously translating that energy to mean is this
word trustworthy or not so even the language you use even the pace with which you are
writing your copy um the cadence of the copy all of these things uh can can kind of play a play a role um so so
yes okay okay i'm i'm with you so far but so what's the uh what's the what what's
number two i appreciate this is not a hierarchy but this is uh what's the second one
Find expertise
find expertise sexy find expertise sexy
we are drawn to experts you know um i the great the best example of this is when we go
to the doctor we completely submit to what the doctor is saying we don't have a you know we don't uh
have a dialogue with the doctor effectively if the doctor says that this is the the treatment that i've prescribed for
you of people will just get that treatment and that's what it is and so that is
also a mechanism through which the brain makes sense of the world what are the experts doing how how
how is the how are the smartest people in my herd dealing with this uncertainty and then
you kind of triangulate towards that and and probabilistically it's actually a very good strategy
and so from a marketing perspective what hap what i mean by this is that the
copywriter the marketer has to through words and through energy
has to communicate to the reader that i know you are dealing with anxiety
about this decision and i know that there is uncertainty in your mind about if this product will
work the way it that you that we're promising it will i want you not to look at me as a marketer but to
look at me as a trusted friend who is recommending this product to you because i truly believe based on your
use case the way you use products this is going to give you the outcome you're looking for
wow okay so how do we do that without sounding pretentious
do you mean like it's when you there's this fine line isn't there when you come across as an expert as being actually
someone like who is a trusted friend and then there's someone who goes you know i'm you know i'm the best thing since sliced
bread and i i can actually get turned off a little bit like that so how do we how do we manage that on our own
in our own sites that's a that's a really good point actually and so one that's one of the things that we
extract we do this process of interrogating our clients um which
are typically inventors and they've invented a consumer product and so
what we what the consumer is seeing is the finished product they're actually not seeing the struggle
and the expertise that went into crafting this product i'll give you a great example
one of my clients um sells a sheet of metal a steel that is used
to bake the most delicious pizza in the world and they are extremely successful and
they are you know this their success is a validation of the fact that what he's
invented is is is an is an incredibly effective
method to build a very unique kind of pizza where the outer crust is crunchy and the inner
crust inner part is soft and gooey song um but the thing is that that piece
of metal uh it's called baking steel is mm thick
and it was just a simple fact on the website and so i interrogated the client and i said why is it seven millimeters thick
he said well actually we tried six millimeters we tried eight millimeters we tried all of these different
combinations that we discovered through permutation combination and by actually baking pizza using those thickness
that seven millimeter was the producing the best outcome so i wrote copy around that on the
product page i'm positioning us as being an expert in knowing the right thickness to use for a
sheet of metal that's fascinating that's fine and i love that and it's it's a bit like
um so you what i guess if i'm just bringing it back here what we're doing here is showing expertise
without being pretentious and it's like oh no we tried this and we tried and this is kind of and we're telling the story of how we've ended it ended up
and it's like um one of the things i've seen work very well uh like you go onto a website and they
sell shoes leather shoes and what they do is they show you a video of how they hand craft these shoes right
not where the best shoemakers in the world this is just how we and you look at the the effort and you
kind of go okay well that's worth you know the extra money that you're going to be charging for on the site just with that
simple video that simple demonstration of expertise is that is that the cut have i got that right
that's the kind of thing you've nailed it you're my favorite student awesome
love that love that as long as i'm the favorite i'm the main one that's cool uh so that's the um find
expertise sexy i like that phrase uh rishi that's cool so num what's what's part three of this
the third the third one is root for people who overcome the odds or who beat the odds
okay we all love a hero story we all love david versus goliath we want to
spend our doll we we use our dollars to cast a vote for what we believe in
so when you are selling uh a bomb for uh a beard bomb the consumer who
also happens to have a beard is spending that hard earned dollars to say i support what you're doing i want more
people to appreciate the lifestyle of having a beer for example i'm making this up completely but
it's a vote a dollar is a vote or a pound is a vote and so we how do we how do consumers
decide who they're going to bet on so they want to bet on someone they want to bet on the winner but they
want to bet on a winner that has overcome the odds you know so we don't want to like just
bet on someone who you know hey i just struck lucky and i found the right product and just
give me all your money we want to we want to support the person who says i got the crap kicked out of me by through
life and i failed and i kept on iterating and then i one day the clouds parted and i figured out how
to do it and here's what i discovered we like those stories you know um and so and this is the reason why i
was saying that um not all of these nine triggers have to apply to every scenario like this is a
very specific story arc and it may not be consistent with your reality so you won't use it but it
is the story arc available it's almost like there's a slot available in the consumer's mind but it may not apply to your product
yeah now that's very very true now does this extend beyond i guess the
owner i'm just thinking here i wear on my wrist i can't remember the name of it there's a certain type of band
here that's and the and the the the the band is made by recycled
plastic and the metal clip on it um is made from and this is what fascinated me
this was made from seized guns that were melted down and repurposed so this this thing here
this metal clasp has a story which kind of makes me feel good you know it's a decommissioned weapon which is now off the street
Product story angles
is that is that a in my head i'm kind of thinking well is this a case of the product itself has
a sort of overcome the odds the product itself has gone from um you know being something awful and
has overcome these incredible odds and now is on you know as part of the the story as
well um that's a great that's a great really fascinating observation and i'm
i'm pretty sure so one of the things i should also mention is that these nine triggers think of them as first cousins
they kind of share a lot of dna so there's there's a there is commonality between them so it's
sometimes it's hard to actually categorize them uh perfectly um i'm trying to think i'm i'm gonna
draw a blank on this but i'm trying to think about what you're describing we would just describe what you've done as so we call these
product story angles so you've identified a version of the story and i think it's
such a beautiful story by the way and i hope that that's what you know i mean that's that's really really
fascinating yeah i i don't know how it would sometimes product story angles fit into a tactic but sometimes product story
angles encompass a whole bunch of tactics so this could be a clustering of maybe like two or three
different uh triggers as well okay okay i'm i'm rishi let me tell you
i'm loving this conversation so we've got too good to be true uh find er
ex find expertise that conrad mine writing find experts he's sexy and number three uh
the third uh trigger you talked about is root for people who overcome the odds we like the people
that sort of overcome insurmountable odds now listen if you're watching the live stream or if you're listening to the audio podcast don't go anywhere we are
just going to take a quick moment to thank this week's show sponsors and we are going to be back in the second part
for the other six triggers i can't wait don't go anywhere we'll be back very
very soon let me give a big shout out to one of our show sponsors curious digital you
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Surprising details
okay i am with rishi we are talking about nine triggers to do with biopsychology and
how to convert our first-time visitors now we have gone through the first three rishi what is
number four i'm i've got my note notebook ready i'm i'm taking notes brother so let's uh let's get into
number four uh the fourth one is uh fascinated by surprising details
okay and this one basically is that we are we are junkies for
new information we collect new information and so when you are selling your product if you
can if you can encapsulate in that selling process some surprising details for example if you
are selling um if you are selling uh a product that
uh blends uh smoothies for example if you can inject
in that storytelling some really interesting details about the benefits of a smoothie something
that people won't know um that what what surprising details do it's very it's actually very interesting
it's actually a indirect benefit what it does is it it acts as an energy boost um so
you know think about think about congress think think about conversations you have with people when people share interesting data
points like i'll share an interesting data point there was a study that was done of million e-commerce sessions
and they found that the average session duration for an e-commerce website is three minutes and
minutes and seconds it's really interesting curious detail and i can guarantee you that most people
listening to this will remember that because it's such a fascinating tidbit
and what it does is it actually adds a little bit of energy boost to the conversation so i
use interesting details especially when you're writing long form copy um i look at it as uh you know it's
it's taking energy away from the reader to some extent because they're you know people have low attention spans so when you inject in some interesting
details you're giving the reader a boost of energy and it's a branded boost of energy because you're giving an
interesting detail not about some random fact but a fact that relates to in some
way to what your product is doing so that is something we like to do a lot because it it my job as a
copywriter is to make sure that the consumer has read my entire sales page not just the start of it not just the middle of
it but the whole sales page so i need to use interesting details to keep them interested and you know the if they've
read the whole sales pitch there's a statistically high probability that they'll buy from me yeah okay so uh fascinated by
Visuals
surprise and details i was actually fascinated when you said that i mean it was kind of proof was in the pudding right
and if you like me listening to it you're surprised by you know fascinated by surprising details that's kind of like okay well
i'm actually fascinated by this surprising detail so that's that was great okay uh number
five um we are visual animals fifty percent of our brain
is devoted to uh processing info information visual information i was um
in us i was in a hotel a couple of years ago and you know how hotels are trying really
hard i know you're an eco-minded person so hotels trying really hard to have to not have guests just throw their
towels after the first use for laundry because that's very you know ecologically you know it's not
it's not a good outcome and so they had a little card that was in the in the in the restroom in the toilet in the
bathroom that said that um in the last year from the water that
we've saved by having guests not throw their towels in for a wash
you can fill olympic pools of water and the moment i read that i in my mind
i saw olympic pools now i have no idea how big olympic pool is but i'm imagining a crap ton of water um
and so you know it just it just instantly even though i wasn't intending for it to happen it just
turned into a visual and the visual stuck with me i'm telling that visual to you right now so you know visuals are super powerful
so how do we incorporate them into our storytelling and there are a
bunch of things here as well there are a couple of types of visuals there's the contrast visual so you can
use a visual to kind of contrast what you're saying against something else you can use a visual as an analogy
so sometimes like for example if we're trying to show some we're talking about a feature we can use a visual that shows maybe if we're
talking about balance this probiotic helps balance the good bacteria and the bad bacteria we can have a visual of a bird that's
walking on a on a on a on a ledge and the bird is kind of tipping over and you can have copy that says
you know it's like the bird is trying to balance and so you're using you're using an analogy to kind of reinforce that
same point and then of course visuals can also be used to visually communicate um
you know a feature that was not um you know that that was not mentioned
visually so visuals are very powerful and those are three ways in which you use it yeah okay that's really really good does
Contrast
the um i guess the thing that i'm thinking here the the you know you're talking about the olympic swimming pools the
immediate example that comes to my mind and i'm curious if this is the same sort of thing was when
the ipod first came out and steve jobs said it's songs in your pockets
rather than two gigs or whatever you know everyone else was saying um he took a he took a meaningless piece
of information and all of a sudden i can i can understand what ten thousand pockets in my yes it means i'm seeing what that what
that is is that right have i got that you nailed it he created a co and he used a contrast right so he said ten thousand
songs and he said pocket so we know how big a pocket is we know how much how much ten thousand is
and it creates this contrast yeah like how is that possible uh especially when i grew up with cassettes and cds and you know i had how
Competition
how does that work steve um so yeah it was it was it was one of those brilliant lines of
marketing wasn't it that you just kind of it is it is a classic and we actually use it and we we talk about it as well
yeah okay so trigger number six
uh people need motivation to break habit um okay one of the you know it this is one
of the biggest mistakes that marketers make is that when we are telling our story we are so
focused on how our product is better than the competition what we don't realize is that we're not actually
competing against the competition we are competing against non-consumption so in the case of the
the band that you're wearing in your hand uh they're not competing against other companies that also make bands
that are made of uh decommissioned guns they're competing against a consumer saying i think this is really interesting but i
don't really know if i need it that's really fascinating we're not com
our competition is is not what we think it we're actually competing against non-consumption non-consumption
i like that that's cool how does that work then um how does that work i get that that works
Nonconsumption
for a unique product like say this band um but let's say um i'm just looking around my desk here
so let's say i've i've got my lego indiana jones look it's he's kind of cool uh he's he sits on my
list but let's say i'm a website which sells this product and there's other websites which sell the same product
um they're still my competitors but am i still
i'm still competing uh with non-consumption is that right you are still you are
still competing against non-consumption i see the point you're trying to make here
um i'm i think marketers do a fairly good job of contrasting what they have against
other other um other websites yeah but they did then they leave this gaping
hole and part of what we're trying to do with these nine triggers is we're trying to highlight tactics
that are not being utilized we're not saying these are the only tactics we're saying that there are many tactics that marketers do a pretty good job with
so talking about what our product does in relation to the competition we actually do a fairly good job with it but we don't
actually talk about against non-consumption also we don't talk about it inter in in
in contrast to workarounds so imagine if you are i was on a bike website uh they sell these
regular cycles you know that you can buy and you can you can uh ride a cycle for for good health um
and they were talking about how their how their bike was incredible but they didn't really think
about first of all they didn't think about non-consumption but there's also this idea of workarounds
imagine if if i'm a consumer i'm buying a bike because i want to be
healthy so i can buy a bike and i can be healthy that way but i can also run on my treadmill
that is a workaround for buying a bike right so they could have written copy that says that if you are
you know the treadmills are awesome but scientists you know science has
proven that on a long-term basis they can add a lot of pressure to your knees which you don't have when you ride a
bike so you've actually already made the enemy and you've destroyed the enemy um and you and you
you know that's the workaround so we're competing against that workaround so okay okay now um
Personalisation
turning the page here number seven what's our seventh trigger um so number seven is we love
personalized experiences so when a consumer is buying something no matter what they're buying
they like to know that that experience that they're being sold to in a personalized
way um so you know the the great analogy of this is like when you go to a sales when you when you're on this on the on the
when you're buying a retail store the sales person is engaging you in a conversation and then he he reflects back to you a story that is
based on the data you just gave him you know or her right so it's a personalized experience and where we fall for it every time so
if you can personalize stuff um it just has this amazing of ability
uh to um you know to really connect with the and it works at a subconscious level so that's that's point number seven yeah
Apple example
and i've seen that work very and i'm i'm you know i'm not trying to be an apple fanboy here one of the example that sticks out in my head
was i remember um taking my team into the apple shop
because i wanted them to understand this point i'm like i want you to watch that guy over there right and what was going on was there
was a sales rep for apple and this this elderly gentleman came in
and just said to the guy i need to buy an ipad and so that guy says we need to go and talk to johnny over there go
stand there and i'll let johnny know and he'll come talk to you um he's our ipad expert and johnny comes
over doesn't talk about the ipad under any circumstances he just says
why did why do you want an ipad and um this elderly gentleman says and i we
stood there listening to him stood just ears dropping on the conversation he said because i want to be able to do
that thing you know whatever they call it where i can call my grandchildren and see them
in other words he wanted to be able to facetime his grandkids right and he he just wanted to be able to do
that so this guy the sales guy then says let me show you how easy it is
to do that right and he goes and stands on one side of the side of the store with an ipad and he says when it rings just press
that button there and he calls the guy and they have this video conversation across the store it takes like seconds
and then the oh he says now you try and he gets the elderly guy to to call him right he was literally there
for four minutes and bought this ipad this guy didn't talk once about how to do email he didn't talk once about
processor speeds or any of that sort of stuff he just laser focused in on this personalized experience
and it was honestly it was magical to see and that guy is um has that's that's a
wonderful story that's that's exactly right that's exactly what we want to do one of the things you know
this is some of the questions that someone's going to have as they're listening to this is they'll say well i can understand how a human
being in a human to human circumstance can personalize a story how do i do it
on my product page i mean how do i how do i personalize story based on who the visitor is and actually you can
absolutely do it and we have tons of evidence uh lots of test evidence around it i'll give you guys one example
um so we were working for a client that sells a room air purifier for nine hundred dollars
pretty expensive item it's a high consideration item so people don't just randomly buy an air purifier
um and the buying cycle is relatively long and one of the things that we discovered
in our in our research was that hey look
this is a pretty technical product and there's so many technical details that we need to talk about in fact the product page already was
talking about a lot of technical details but we realized that not just like that
older gentleman the apple store they the consumer actually that a certain buyer
may actually not need that much detail they may just want a quick summary and now the question was how do we what
should the product page be for should it be for the majority or should it be for the the group that
spends the most and so we did we did a test and in our test there's a when you get to the product
page there's an opening intro for what the product does so at least everyone is oriented about what the product does and
then right below that it asks the simple question how much time do you have today and there were two buttons i have two
minutes and i have time and the way we designed it was that if someone is a methodical shopper and they want to
consume all the details they're going to click on i have time and if someone basically doesn't want all those details they're going to click
on i want to i have two minutes and when you click on i have two minutes we showed you the elevator pitch of our
sales page and when you clicked on i have time we showed you everything we threw everything at the
wall and we noticed overall there was a improvement in purchase rates for their already
best-selling air purifier by simply giving consumers these two choices wow a increase in conversion
The eighth trigger
that's ridiculous that's incredible that's incredible um okay so let's let's talk about the
eighth trigger uh they like knowing they've stumbled on something rare
nobody likes to buy it nobody okay i mean they've stumbled on something right yep
so no no nobody wants to buy a commodity even though you are buying a commodity you don't want to feel like you're buying a commodity so
we want to buy something that is that not everyone has access to it's like an exclusive club you know
part of the reason why certain restaurants so popular is because it's hard to get into them um and so how do we convey that again
this is something that doesn't apply to every single brand it is something that marketers do not such a good job with
okay that that that's really interesting so how would you how would you do that
on an e-commerce website for your product how would you convey that that kind of exclusivity that
rarity so it's a it's uh so i'll give you a great example um
so imagine if you are selling organic premium dog food the if i was working for a client that
was selling organic premium dog food i would write copy that says one percent of dog owners
give their dogs premium dog food or organic premium dog food so you're basically conveying that this
is exclusive it's essentially where we're exploiting exclusivity so the the reader feels that i found something
that not everyone has access to um and then it just it just draws them in so it's it's it's
it's it's a trigger i won't say it's none of none of these tactics by themselves are gonna take the consumer
from i'm interested i'm gonna buy but as a as a whole set as an orchestra they can they can
they can do wonders that's fantastic i like that so we like knowing we stumbled on something rare
so what's the final trigger rishi must overcome their negative thoughts
okay that's kind of self-explanatory yeah but
is this different from the first one which is which talks about their skepticism is how do these two differ they're actually
diametrically opposite so too good to be true is too positive and must overcome negative thoughts is
negative so if for example you sell a product and your shipping is
that instantly creates a negative thought in my mind because it's like i don't want to be spending for shipping so now you have to
build a story around it and explain why that is you know is the is is worth it so it's a negative thought it's not too
good to be true it's a negative thought okay and i like how you've sort of bookended
Recap
your nine with these two diametrically opposed sort of things that's brilliant
so we've gotta i'm just going to recap here okay so we've got our nine elements too good to be true
uh number two find uh expertise sexy number three
uh we we like people who have overcome the odds number four we're fascinated by
surprising details number five we are visual animals number six um
people need motivation to break their current habits number seven we love a personal
experience number eight we like knowing that we've stumbled on something rare
and number nine uh we've got to overcome the negative thoughts in the person's mind and so
those are nine sort of triggers nine sort of tactics that we can use in our copy how let's bring all this
back together and thank you for sharing that by the way that was that was just pure gold um what is what has this got to do these
sort of nine areas i'm sort of listening to thinking this is all great and at the start of the show we talked
about um how we're going to convert our first time buyer and i remember when
we talked in our pre-call about you have this this sort of um
this drive to focus on the first time buyer it's like you know you talked about the importance of uh focusing on the first time by
so can you bring these nine elements together for us
in context of a first-time buyer maybe a few examples a few stories
absolutely so there's uh let me start off with some interesting data for your for your viewers
there was a survey done by data box and they found that of all visitors
on an e-commerce website are brand new so it's very likely that all of your listeners
have an overwhelming number of people that have visited their website for the very first time and
statistically speaking will never come back and so this is the biggest group
of people that are on our website and one of the challenges with marketing is there are there are four principal areas of
marketing there is um converting first-time buyers there is up increasing average order value
reactivations which is converting someone who is nev who bought from us two years ago but hasn't bought
since there is um you know subscription selling so you know getting people on a
subscription plan and there is word of mouth marketing so these are like five principal areas of marketing and
typically what teams do is they divide their attention across these five silos and my recommendation is
considering the fact that of people are completely new to our website and
we'll never come back again majority of which will never come back again why focus on these other things why not
laser focus on converting first-time buyers typically for websites their first time buyer rate
is conversion rate is no more than four percent so we have an atrociously low conversion
rate so it just makes sense to focus on converting more first-time buyers and and this is something that is really
interesting is that if you can improve your conversion rate for first-time buyers you're actually improving
all of the other metrics as well because they're all related so if you can improve someone if you can get someone to buy for the first time they are way more likely to
do word-of-mouth marketing for you they are way more likely to be a subscript you know so that's the reason why i focus in on
first-time buyers okay well that makes a lot of sense so
Where do we start
that's a big portion of the whole thing so um so how can we where do we start i
suppose with these nine elements that you've talked about and how we engage um first-time buyers if i'm sat
there looking at my website um i like what you said rishi but
help me distill it down where do i start jill i mean i'm looking at the website i've got pages on it where do i
start what do i do okay so um
first of all i mean obviously this depends on how broad your and the depth of your product
line and depends on a whole bunch of things but i would say that if i'm working for a client where they have um different products and there is
one product i would focus on the best seller first of all so that's that's the center of gravity for me so i would look at two specific
metrics i would look at what is the revenue that the best seller is driving because
if we we're looking to improve numbers by so we want to we want to focus our
energy where we get the highest bang for our buck um so the best seller is a place to
start because that's where you're selling the most of but then i would also look at what is the visibility of my best seller you
know this is a very starting going back to point number five surprising details i'll share with your readers something viewers something really interesting
which is that and i've seen this times to know that this is a statistical certainty
is that what we find is that we look at the revenue contribution of a best seller on e-commerce website
which of course all your all your listeners probably do as well then we also look at the visibility of
that best seller so we look at the discovery rate for that bestseller page so let's say the best seller is driving
of overall sales you would expect you would want
of site visitors to have discovered this best seller because it would you want it to be synchronized with the
visit number and the revenue number what we will find is that the discovery rate for that best seller
in nine times out of ten is so you have this huge delta
between discovery and purchase so the first thing i would do is i would create parity and make sure that more people discover
my best seller so simple things like that and so you know that would help a first-time buyer
anyway because most first-time buyers would probably want to buy the most popular item and but if they don't if they don't even
discover it that's a point of friction right there so that's something that they can do you know as a starting point
they can say okay what's our best seller how many people are discovering it let's create a mechanism to get more
people to discover our best seller that's absolutely gold advice right there so how would you
Create a mechanism to get more people to discover
what are some of the ways that maybe i could do that um simple ways that i could help help make
the product more discoverable so that's a that's we have a very specific formula for this so what we do
is we set a cookie and when a user comes to the website and they've seen three pages so we
trigger the cookie we trigger the the the element on page three and when they
go to page three and we exclude the best seller page from this so if they've gone to the bestseller page in the first
three pages then they're excluded from the experiment but if they haven't we then show them a floating tab that
is a nudge that simply says have you seen we have a lot of products but have you seen our best seller or some some
variation of that copy and invariably people will click on it and they will discover your best seller
and that that directly um improves revenue of best sellers wow and i'm i'm intrigued uh i'm i i
Why wait until the third page before you show that tab
i feel like you've opened a door here and i'm gonna walk straight through it why wait until the third page before you
show that tab um just i i don't think that i don't think we've tested different variations
of this um we just we just thought logically that you know hey listen let let me okay so so one of the things that we
were thinking about was we want the user to start getting engaged with the website the thing is if you
discuss if you take the if you take them to the best seller too soon so like if they just land on the website you're like okay cm cmi best
selling product they haven't even properly oriented themselves yet and and and people feel like you're being
heavy-handed right so we want to be subtle about it and then show them a little nudge once they're
once they've signaled to us that they're engaged with what we're seeing okay okay so this is something that um
Making the product page more discoverable
actually i'm curious i'm curious to see what the results are when you test that cookie on various different uh view
links um so okay so we're we're helping to be more discoverable and then you said
you said you're going to focus in on the product page so we're going to make the product page more discoverable what's something that we could do maybe with
the product page so so and again i i just really i really
hope that viewers aren't like having their eyes glaze over at this point saying okay this is the start of interesting and now there's
so much minutiae and i promise them it's not it's not really that complicated i want to kind
of keep it i want to keep things really really simple but essentially on the product page your product description
to me is where the magic happens so i want to draw as much attention to the product
description and then once i have drawn their attention in the description i want to tell them a story
that is so compelling that i look at it as almost like a court case where i am
a lawyer that is representing my client the buyer is the ultimate judge and so i
need to bring forth an argument for the judge and so that's what the product description does
it's essentially making that argument and we are framing that argument around
those nine dimensions that we just we just discussed earlier um that's what that's how i would focus on converting
the first time buyer okay have you got um and this is just a question that's come
to my mind really i have you got an example of a website that's doing this well that maybe people could go and have a
look at uh i mean i get the only examples i
you know i mean i would i mean i don't the answer is i i you know this is a question that has
come up a couple of times i actually don't spend enough time studying what other
marketers are doing with their pages i don't think there's a perfect example of a product page except for the pages that we've worked
on where we do apply all nine tactics um so i can certainly link to i
mentioned baking steel earlier on the call their product page perfectly encapsulates this process and
we've tested it so this is you know this is something we've a b tested on their website uh but i don't
have another example of you know um i don't have an example to share right now but if i think of something
yeah yeah but so i'm gonna if i google baking steel i'm curious to see their their page come up and have a look at it
so that's great rishi listen i feel like i could go on i've got thousands of questions um but
i'm i'm aware that at some point we have to end the podcast it's been an absolute treat to to talk to you about
all of this and i'm sure that there are people like me listening going goodness me i would love to connect with you more around
this topic so how do people connect with you how do people reach you
i'm pretty active more so than i should be than that's healthy on linkedin so if any of your listeners
are on linkedin and they search for my name rishi r-i-s-h-i last name r-a-w-a-t you will
find me um i also have a newsletter where here's here's my sales pitch for the
newsletter i study ecommerce websites every two weeks and it's just part of my
job i need to look at i need to look at what other marketers are doing and what happens is in that process i
discovered these little nuggets of insight these really clever little things that some marketers
somewhere has done for a small little website in some corner of the world and i look at it and
i say this is pure genius and i take a screenshot of it and what i do is then
once a week every monday morning i share some of those insights based on
biopsychology with my subscribers and i send a screenshot with quick notes and essentially it's a swipe file
and you can just take that id and apply to your website um so if you're interested in those kind of ideas i would say
head over to my website which is frictionless one word dash commerce dot com
forward slash join um and then you will find my newsletter sign up link page and you
can sign up and then every monday you also will be waking up to a little bit of wisdom
that's that i'm signing up right now uh frictionless hyphen commerce dot com forward slash join to get that
um and of course we will link to all of these things which rishi has talked about in the show notes as well so if you uh
if you can't remember any of these links just head on over to the show notes and we'll send those out to you um you can get all of that there no
problem rishi listen it has been an absolute joy it has been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you thank you so much
for joining us uh in this episode of the ecommerce podcast uh it's been brilliant i really really appreciate your time
it was great being here thanks matt no problem thanks rishi well let me just uh
click here wasn't that fantastic now i just i don't
like if you're like me you will have taken copious amounts of notes and your brain is kind of going at a million miles an hour ago
i've got so many ideas of how i can implement this but like rishi said start with those two things start with your product page and start with the
discoverability of your key products and just see where it leads you to
and of course you can always reach out to rishi you can always connect with him i'm sure he would be more than delighted
to reach out and have a conversation with you he's such a cool guy super generous with his time and wasn't
he super super valuable didn't he offer some super super value
with the content he was giving i mean wow so a big thanks to my very special guest tonight rishi loved
it loved it loved it you know what i always say this uh my aim uh whenever i speak to a guest is to always find some real practical nuggets
that i can use on my own e-commerce websites and my own e-commerce businesses and i got a whole bunch out i really
enjoyed those nine triggers and trying to understand how that's going to work and so
i am definitely going to be checking the discoverability rate that he talked about on my
best-selling products that's what we're going to be doing tomorrow so uh what about you let us know what you're going to be doing and i hope you
got some great stuff out of this too and if you did then i would appreciate it obviously if you could rate the show on
itunes or even share it out so that we can connect with more folks around the world as i said a few
seconds ago and at the start of the show all of the notes the links and even a transcript to tonight's show will be
available for free and you can get them uh at ecommercepodcast.net
forward slash no email address required you can just go and you can just look at those and just re the
transcripts are awesome because you you can just read through uh and just sort of remind yourself of all the great
things that came out of the show so all that's left for me to say is thanks for listening make sure you come back whoops smack my
computer make sure you come back next week as i'm going to carry on interviewing some more fab guests just
like rishi on how and we can learn how we can grow and develop our own ecommerce business gets lots of
great tips out of it so do come and join us make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast from
and of course if you are on facebook or youtube do connect with us on those channels as
well because we do live stream out the recording of the podcast it goes out live and you can
come and watch you can ask your questions you can join in the conversation to your
heart's content so do check us out on those channels as well uh i think that's
everything from me uh my name is matt evanson thanks for watching uh thanks for listening to the ecommerce podcast and we'll be back again
next week where i'll see you then
you've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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