7 Psychological Facts That Help Understand Customers Better | Innovation Management
Psychology is not only about human emotions. Understanding their behavior, nature, and finding out the behavioral patterns is the ultimate goal of psychological studies. And the best practices of psychology can drive sales for business too.
Shocked? But it is true. Many of today’s successful companies have been pushing their tremendous sales results using the concepts of psychology.
They are putting the psychological concepts to use in one way or another, sometimes even unknowingly. But if you get to know what are the best practices and uses of it, you can effortlessly drive your business sales and achieve business growth also.
Psychology of Consumer Mind: It’s Not that Easy
The word psychology is formed of a combination of two words—psychē and -logia. It stands for the study of the mind and behavior of humans. Including the concepts of feelings and thoughts, psychology focuses upon understanding how a particular human will react under given circumstances. And it provides the advantage of finding out what a person wants and their hidden desires.
To increase business sales, this can help a lot. But understanding your customers is not that easy. Not only experience in this field but also strong support from fundamentals of psychological facts are required to keep your train on the right track.
7 Psychological Facts Powering Up Business Sales
If you are looking for making the best use of your sales expertise, refer to Cialdini’s 6 rules of persuasion that helps you understand how your sales should proceed to drive tremendous business growth.
The Power of Words
Effective copywriting is a great skill to possess. But does giving a small twist to words make any difference? Yes, it does, and the results are unbelievable. And this fact applies to your sales as well as your employee management statistics. We all crave for a word of appreciation, don’t we?
But if we talk about customers, the use of the right words at the right time is all that is needed. The content marketing institute suggests that content marketing scores three times more leads than paid advertising. Exciting! Therefore, bring out your best game of words and promote your business operations.
Bonus: As Gallup suggests, a motivated team of employees showcases 21% greater profitability, it is essential to keep your employees motivated and engaged in producing the best results. And words pave the best way to reach the hearts of your employees, as a few kind words will help make an enormous difference.
Showing Who You Are
Being a business in the market, you have to face cutthroat competition and save yourself from getting knocked out. And a business that makes a mistake doesn’t stand a chance if their customers find it extremely inappropriate in any sense. But how does admitting your mistakes can help your sales? Because it helps highlight what your business is good at.
As psychologist Fiona Lee’s study suggests, customers tend to put their trust in the companies that admit strategic failings. You can also easily understand these results. It is wise to acknowledge that you can do better than rigidly sticking to it wasn’t your fault. To make your customers feel better, you can make small changes in your existing services that can increase customer satisfaction to a great extent.
The oldest and still-working trick to increase your sales is creating an urgency of your products or services in the market. But it doesn’t require you to stick to making circumstances favor your product selling. A smart yet simple move can create a big difference in the market.
It is also important to note that creating hype for your services or products is not enough. You have to explain why your services or products are the only chance they have got. The sense of urgency surely works, but if you are not putting up your best attempts at it, you may never reach your sales goals this way.
You can certainly use the sense of “missing out on a great opportunity” among your customers as it motivates them to reach you as soon as possible. This concept works excellently if you own an experienced sales team who very well understand the steps required to be taken to do the same.
Offering Rewards
The best part of using psychological concepts to drive your sales is that they certainly help make a great sense and drive your campaigns on the right path. Rewards are your best bet when it comes to grabbing user attention right away. Discounts work their best, but the rewards are on another level when it comes to driving sales.
As one of Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, reciprocity states that people are inspired to give back in return when they are given something of interest. And this gives a motive for providing rewards to customers when they complete specific goals. By motivating them to promote your products and services, you can undoubtedly score a large customer base.
Because displaying earned reviews from customers can drive conversion rates by 270%. If your customers are saying the truth out loud, it will make a significant impact on your sales and help you expand your reach. For example, businesses that like Uber tend to provide referral codes that app users can share with others and earn discounts on services provided. This is an effective strategy to promote app use and score an ideal customer base.
Promoting a Motive
Do good, be good, and get everything good. Your business should promote a motive that can encourage good in your customers and support their desires to help society in any way possible. A brand representing the good of its customers, and the good in them gets to drive more profits as they become a recognized entity in the competitive market.
Customers of today are highly technology adaptable, and they know how to find information relating to anything easily. Therefore, customer loyalty is vanishing as customers can find various options and better alternatives over the internet. And as Gartner says, customers of today are not loyal to brands, but they are loyal to the motives of these brands.
This requires a business to attach an excellent motive to their name that intends to do good for society. For example, TOMS has taken over the entire social media with their charitable campaigns that are powered by the item sales and the profits they make. They spread out the word as a single item purchased from them by customers adds up to their charity funds that further actually helps the poor.
Knowing the Types of Buyers
Neuroscientists define the buying patterns of humans as an experience of “pain”, i.e., “spending till it starts hurting”. To drive your sales growth, it is crucial to understand the types of buyers and get your sales strategy designed accordingly. There are three types of buyers—unconflicted, spendthrifts, and tightwads. Unconflicted buyers tend to buy their required products without giving a second guess to changing their brand—they are confident of what they buy.
Spendthrifts are the ones that will spend more before they reach their “buying pain”. But the tightwads are different from these two. They try their best to spend a minimum before they hit their “buying pain” point. And there are 24% of customers out there that are tightwads. They are the most difficult ones to perceive, but with the right strategies playing at their best, it becomes easy to convert them.
You can use various tricks to relieve them of the pain—by offering discounts, monthly subscriptions, packages, and more. Your business requires support from an expert sales individual that can help you shape your conversion rates easily.
Invoking the Halo Effect
Do you want to build brand loyalty in your customers? Are you eager to see a “cult” of customers actively reaching out for your products or services? The halo effect can help you achieve that. This effect is all about making a good impression on your customers.
As we all know, the first impression can make all the difference. Therefore, creating a positive brand image among your customers is crucial to establish brand loyalty and widen your customer base. Halo effect states that if person A creates a good first impression—he/she will be considered as a good person all the time. And similar follows for a bad one. This applies to your customers also.
If a brand succeeds at creating an excellent user experience from the first time onwards, customers are likely to become loyal to their brand as they will always strive to do the same for them again. This leads to a strong bond with your customers and creating your loyal customer base in the market. But the scope for making any errors is narrowed as it can oppose what your customers believe about you.
Still, Human Are Complex
If you think following these facts and figures is enough to bring your sales up, you are wrong. The human brain is a complex paradigm that can shift its route at any time and for any reason. Therefore, it is wise to say that humans are unpredictable. But with these states and facts by your side, you can certainly develop a basic plan to execute your sales campaigns and later upgrade it as situations demand.
Obtaining the trust of your customers and following the right approaches, you can easily understand what your customers want and serve them accordingly to drive sales growth.
About the author
Deep Moteria is an aspiring entrepreneur and blogger having led 75+ startups on the right path with their information-admiring content. He crafts content on topics including on-demand services like uber clone, finances, technology trends and many more.