How to Use Persuasion Techniques to Drive Store Conversions

Introduction

Kausambi: Let's dive into today's topic. It's a very interesting angle for me on how to leverage the subtle art of persuasion to actually drive tangible conversion in your online store.

And I'm very happy to grab this opportunity to speak to Marty. Marty is a seasoned expert and precedent at site tuners. He and his team have actually helped many, many businesses from e-commerce to subscription, um, uh, to actually increase their conversion rates by at least 25% in under six months and that's, that's a crazy timeline.

So, so a very warm welcome Marty. And, uh, we'll get started with a quick introduction if we can share about what you do and why is it important for e-commerce.

Marty: Okay, fair enough. So, my team and I, we actually describe ourselves as 'the online persuasion people', because it's all about getting people to feel comfortable and take action on a website and for e-commerce when somebody lands on a website, Um, they ask themselves three questions:

• Am I in the right place?
• How do I feel about this? And that's important that how do I feel about this and,
• What am I supposed to do here? And those last two questions are really formed the basis of all. All right. And so we've been doing this since 2002. I think the last time we checked, we increased the revenue across all of our clients by an additional, like $1.5 billion, you know, in aggregate across all of them.

Yeah.. Now we fare into, some of them are really large. So, you know, you do 25%. It's always doing large sums of money. That really adds up quickly. Right. So anyway, no, but that's a crazy number.

Kausambi: That's a crazy number to grapple your head around.

Marty: Yeah. So thank you for having me today. When you and I first spoke, I immediately wanted to be associated with you and your team.

I was so impressed! And so I thank you for having me today.

Understanding Your Customers is Crucial

Kausambi: And so the pleasure is all ours and we are super excited to be associated with you have money up now there's the art of persuasion. Right. And how do you really bring it into like a very scientific, almost like the experimentation, uh, you know, site design, product design, like how do you really make these tools?

Marty: Okay. Okay. So the, uh, I'm going to share, um, one principle. All right. That I think really explains everything. So I'm going to put you on the spot. I didn't know you. I know you weren't expecting a test today. All right. But I know. All right. So, so do me a favor and describe my hand. Okay. Okay. Um, it's uh, anything like I can just say, okay.

Kausambi: Okay. It's a little red. It's like got five fingers. It's it's very close to the, uh, you know, camera right now. I can, I see very clean lines. Um, and, uh, feels like a good warm hand and a strong hand to grab and get a handshake in. Perfect. So what's interesting.

Marty: If I were going to describe my hand, what I would have said was fingernails knuckles hair.

Which one of us was right.

Kausambi: That's a good question. Yeah.

Marty: So here's the trick to, uh, to, to truly becoming a better marketer, uh, for your e-commerce store, actually, what I'm going to talk about right now, cause I I've talked about this. This will actually make you a better employee. It will make you a better boss, it'll make you a better spouse, parent friend, all of that! Right. And so the key to all of this is understanding. That true communication means, understanding that whoever you're talking to this is what they're seeing. All right. You're seeing this. You first have to understand what they see before you can explain what you see.

You have to acknowledge that their point of view is valid.

Okay. And so with that in mind, think about shopping. All right. When we go into a big department, And you'll see signs everywhere, electronics this way, and maybe, you know, baby clothes that way or whatever it is. Okay. In the store, you feel like you're in control.

You feel like, oh, I'm here for this. I'm solving my problem. I had to buy new clothes for my baby, or I needed to buy a new outfit for me, or I need to buy a present for my wife or whatever it is you're in control. You see the signs you go to there and you don't feel. Like, like it's dangerous or unsafe.

Marty: Compare that to cause a lot of us have done this. You go to buy a car and when you go to buy a car and whether it's a new car or used car, they don't listen to you. A lot of these people, they're just going to sell you whatever they're going to sell you. And they don't, you don't feel like you're in control.

You don't feel safe. And this is why people hate car shopping. Okay. Unless they like playing the game, that's all another story. And I'm not a psychiatrist. So we can't discuss that. Being in control, making someone feel like they're in control will absolutely make a difference on, on how they perceive the site.

All right. So what does that mean on a site? When someone comes to the site, you have to make it really clear that they feel comfortable about what they're looking at and they feel like they're in control. So is it okay if I show you an example of what I'm talking about?

The Key to Persuasion

Kausambi: You brought a very good point across, right? Like when we call and we are speaking to a car, car sales men, versus when we are, you know, in a department store, does it have something to do around when someone's like, kind of pushing you and it's in your face versus when you have an opportunity to make a decision. Does that make a difference?

Marty: Oh yeah, that's exactly right. And then that is the key to persuasion. It's all about the visitor. Okay. And making them feel comfortable, you know, a lot, most websites.

Uh, including e-commerce sites are very self-centered right. And they, they use what we call the opera school of marketing. It's like me, me, me, me. It's all about me. I don't care about you, but that's not the way to do it.

You have to make the visitor feel safe and comfortable, so you need to make it feel all about them. - Marty

Case Studies

So, so which is a perfect lead on to a screen I'd like to share with you. All right. If I may. So whenever we let me click here. And let me know if you see a blue bungalow. Okay. So Blue Bungalow is, uh, someone that we helped. Uh, they are a nine figure a year business. Uh, we even have a case study about them, uh, up on our website and I want to share with you, um, the most selfish page on any website, which is the about us page. Okay. Now we took a month and we built this About Us page here. All right. And now imagine you're a woman in Australia and if you read the words -  The words are all about them, but if you look at how we organize this flattering, safe place, your friend in fashion...

How do you feel? Imagine you're a woman in Australia. All right. And you come here. Are you going to feel safe and comfortable potentially? You know, buying from these people, right? We've made this all about the visitor. And again, if you look at where we started, blue bungalow was founded with the vision of bringing Queensland vibrant beach style to the restaurants here.

This is all about them, but it's founded in 2012. So, you know, they've been around women all over the world, 3000 styles, 150 brands by doing. This actually increased their signups that are Facebook group and their email list and generated seven figures overall in incremental revenue.

It's all about the visitor. - Marty

This is what I'm talking about. This is how you, you, you understand what they see, right? And you want to say, we want to say, this is exactly what we're talking about, making it about the visitor and not about. You know, whatever it is you want to say to people. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah, it totally, totally does.

And I've never seen an about, about us page like this before. It's always like, this is what, who I am. This is what we do, but it's hardly about, about you. It's always about, yeah, that's right. You know, and because most people, they do their about us page. Like you should feel honored to talk to me. Right. But now.

Now we should be honored that these people took the time to learn about us, right? And that's the difference. It's a different mindset. And when you apply those principles, not just on the about us page, but on every single page and you make them feel comfortable and safe and know that they can trust you.

And you're not two people hiding in a cave trying to steal their credit card information and you show them that you're a real company on your e-commerce. With real personality. That's what makes a difference. People want to buy people don't want to be sold, which goes back to the car dealership.

Right? I don't want someone to sell me a car. I want to pick my car. I want to buy a car. No one wants to be sold. And it's the same thing on the websites. Make it all about the visitor. What do they need to feel comfortable? Yeah. Having said that there's things that you can do to add a little extra persuasion.

You can add scarcity where you see only three left in stock. Well, that's scarcity. That is a persuasion principle to get people take actions. But here's the thing - If you only, if you only use the persuasion principles without making the person feel comfortable, they're not going to buy.

Yeah. You'll increase your conversion rate on. You have to combine really caring about your visitor with these techniques. So trust symbols are important, and I'll tell you for every person who is watching this, the biggest trust symbol on the face of the planet, which we have tested on. I can't tell you how many hundreds and hundreds of sites is a phone number, a phone number in the top right hand corner on a desk.

The biggest trust symbol (on an ecommerce website) is a phone number. Or the Click to Call icon on a mobile phone header.

Okay. Or the click to call icon on a mobile phone in the header, right? We'll increase your conversion rate by an order of magnitude. All right. And yes, it does increase phone calls, but if you cannot, you know, answer the phone, make sure that it goes to a voicemail system where you provide lots of love.

Okay. You, so Emma, who's the director of marketing at blue bungalow actually makes an internal joke. She actually tells people, are you giving Marty love on this page? If you're not giving Marty love, then you have to redo it. Right? And so it's all about Marty love, right? And so, which is not my nickname but it's all about, you know, providing that feeling on each and every page. And so if you put a phone number up and they're calling, you want to make sure that they feel love on that call versus the answer and, and just like, what do you want? We don't do that. Yeah. So I got carried about I'm sorry.

Kausambi: No, I love it. I love it. And that's, that's actually pretty hard because a lot of times, uh, you know, when we it's this only brick and mortar at that point in time, you knew you had people around and you knew that you could either coach them to show the love or, you know, it was about. People great salespeople who knew how to show the love.

Right. But, but online, it, it ends up becoming just a Craigslist sort of a site and not really that same store experience. So I think like what, what could people do just today? They have to get started. Like, I don't have a store. I literally have a Craigslist and I need to do like three things or five things to add Marty love to my, to my store.

So how do I go about doing.

Understand Your Customers Thoroughly

Marty: The first thing, if you want to understand who's coming to your, to your site. All right. So for example, it's all about the demographics. So if your clientele comes to the site and they are, you know, 18 to 25, you're going to speak to them differently than you would somebody who is in their sixties plus, right.

And so you need to understand who's coming cause you write differently for people. All right. You also, and this is even a Google app. If your audience is, is skewed, female or male. All right. You got to ask yourself if you know, based on who's coming, is it written for women or is it written for men?

Because we do think differently and I'm not being sexist. All right. Well, we are different. Okay. And different doesn't mean worse or better or anything. It's just different. So, so you want to appeal to that person who's coming to your site. You want to write for your visitor. Okay. And so you use different words.

You also use different colors. All right. I, I make a joke - We, we once did a site for, um, for, uh, industrial generators where you could buy industrial generators. These are basically these generators would go into warehouses. Our audience was basically fat old men who sat in an office smoking a cigar. Okay.

We, I mean, I'm not exactly. So, so did we create a beautiful site for them now when you read something that appealed to fat old men sitting in a, in a garage, right? Yeah. Pretty much. Right. So you really want to make the site the words and the aesthetic. Appeal to the audience that you're going after. Right.

Understanding your audience is key. So is understanding what problem they're trying to solve. - Marty

And so, um, so really understanding your audience is key understanding what problem they're trying to solve. Okay. Because if you're selling a widget, you can say here, buy my widget. Or if you know the problem you're trying to solve, you could say this widget solves this, you know, are you, are you struggling with.

Smoking too many cigars. Right? I don't know what it is. Are you struggling with smoking with too many cigars? You know, is your breath bad because of it? I'm making this up, right? Whatever it is, I have a word here's magic, cigar breath, mint, or whatever it is. Right. And because you're addressing the exact problem, it's not about buy my stuff.

It's about what problem does your product or service solve for that visitor and who is that visitor and how do I write for them? Right. Fair enough.

Kausambi: Fair enough. And by the way, that applies to everybody. I think these are like moats that me and Riya should take that for us too. It's always about the person on the other side, and making sure we are on the same page.

In interest of time, we already have a few questions. Also, whoever is on the call, uh, you know, if you want, uh, to, uh, put in your questions on the chat box, please do that. I'm going to quickly jump on to a couple of questions that are, some of our audience have already shared with us, Marty.

So I'm going to go one by one.

Recommended Books on Persuasion

Question: What are, what are some of your favorite books to learn about persuasion? Actually, that's a good one. I want to know that too.

Marty: Well, I, I, you know, I, I'm not, I can't help myself, but so I just wrote this book. Okay. You know, I mean, in fairness, right? True Connections: Relationship Marketing in the Digital World (by Marty Greif).

Um, and it's up on Amazon and so on, and this is really how we think about it. All right. And it talks about the three questions. But I will tell you the two books that I've read that aren't my book. Okay. That I, I think are incredibly valuable and this is going to be really bizarre. Okay. Let's start there.

The first book is an oldie, but goodie. It's How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. And I read that just like that book really changed a lot of how I approach people and, and you really are supposed to read that. Over and over again every year, because we are basically, and this is gonna sound terrible people, but we're basically animals.

50,000 years ago, we were, our ancestors were in a cave eating our hunk of meat. Everything was about survival, right? And so we're selfish. We are just literally selfish. We can't help it. And so we treat each other from this perspective of what we need and what we want. And that book really makes you look at the other person and what they need and what they want. And I apply a lot of those principles on the websites that we work with. So Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of my favorites.

Then the book that absolutely changed my life okay. Was, uh, by a woman, uh, Beverly DeAngelis.

She is, uh, got her PhD and, uh, her book is titled. It is what I believe. It's What Women Want Men to Know. All right. Yeah. So it's, it's kinda like the, uh, men are from Mars. Women are from Venus, but it's so much better. And, and I will tell you when I read this book and it's about 20 years ago, when I read this, I got through the first few pages, the first 70 pages, and I was VP of marketing for another company.

And I read through this and I'm like, oh my God, Women can't possibly be this dysfunctional. And I said, that's really weird. So I asked the women I work with, do you do this? And they're like, yeah, we did you do this. Yeah. And then I read further and I went, oh my God, men can't possibly be this dysfunctional.

And we are okay. Oh my God. Men and women are equally dysfunctional, but in different ways. Okay. And that book, once you understand how men and women actually think, and it's not black and white, there's a spectrum of people. All right. There are men who are more feminine, women who are more masculine at people in between.

There's all sorts of things, but, but understanding the basic premises. And once you identify how a person is treating a person with respect and, and talking to them, Based on their personality and who they are is it's, life-changing unlike, performing for people. And so what I took away from that book was, was, was truly an understanding of how different we all are and, and you can apply those principles again to what you do on your website. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true.

Kausambi: Yeah. And of course, I'll circle back the first book again. It's Relationship Marketing. So Marty, so make sure you get that.

Persuasion Online vs Offline

Question: The second question is, is online persuasion different and then how do you do it in the offline world?

Marty: I'm going to assume what they mean is they're on my website versus maybe email marketing versus something where they're not quite.

Because the other offline might be in person. Right. And so I'm not really sure which one they're asking for. So, so online it's because they don't know anything about you, you, when you structure a page, the structure. What it is at a high level. Okay. Followed by a call to action and near every call to action.

This trust and the trust could be, you know, uh, anything from serving clients worldwide over a million clients worldwide, you know, you know, money back guarantees, testimonials, whatever the trust is. And so the structure of a page when you're doing this should be the correct structure for a page is

What it is - Call to action - Call to action is always followed by trust. Or you can have the trust followed by the. Then you go deeper, more detail on whatever the thing is followed by trust. But again, it's now it's a different trust. If you use symbols like guaranteed free shipping, whatever it is, the next trust might be, um, might be tested.

Followed by a call to action. And then if you have to go deeper because some people need more and you just keep repeating that sequence of three things, which is what it is at either high, medium, or lower levels, followed by trust or call the accident. They can be swapped. And as long as you have different trusts, so you're not repeating the same trust over and over and over again.

Um, that really makes it, uh, a high conversion, um, page or a funnel. All right. So that works. In a semi offline, which is like your email marketing or, you know, um, something where they're not on your website. Um, again, it's the same principles. It's essentially an email. It's all about them.

We've all seen where we've written emails to each other and you get so angry that somebody wrote to that email, but they didn't mean what, what, how you read it. Okay. So it's really hard. So again, it's the same principle. It's about that. It's it's, it's gotta be clear what you want them to do. All right.

And it's got to have trust and then obviously offline. All right. If it's truly in person, I will tell you. Um, and this is maybe my quirk, but I love people. I find people fascinating. I talked to everybody. I can't, I can't even get in a taxi without talking to the taxi driver, finding out their life story.

Now I love people. So, so if you, if you, and if you, if you believe that everybody has value, okay. And that you. You, you can help everybody. And, and, and you have that connection. It works. I mean, I'll go a step further. I'm on the board of directors for, um, uh, for an organization that works with, with, with people who are mentally challenged and we provide services.

I do that free because I care about everybody. And so find your passion and find your passion and all people. And good things happen. That's all right. Sorry. I got carried away again.

Personalization in eCommerce

Kausambi: No, but that's, that's what makes you! But I think that's so true. Like I find it very interesting how you are seeing that layer, your trust, your and your persuasion matches across and don't think about it almost like.

I did it once and I'm done, but it's actually, as you're reading, you got to continue to kind of like reinforce it, read it. I think that that's the takeaway for me. I hope that answer helps.

Uh, the third question is interesting. I think it's more about like targeting it for different visitors. So cold leads, hot leads, new versus returning customers, et cetera.

Of course, I assume the persuasion type and how you convinced him or high continued attendance to pass to change. So I think the question is like, how do you do that?

Marty: Okay, so I'm going to start with crawl, walk, run. All right. So most people are not at the stage where they can do the personalization. Now we do do that for folks.

All right. And personalization absolutely makes a difference. Um, but starting with let's assume there's none of that. Let's at least try to appeal to the, the, the group, the masses of everybody. Then you might have some paths that people could follow and the past might be, you know, let's say you are, you are, um, I don't, I'll make up.

It's for e-commerce let's say we're selling, you know, um, a Walker for someone who is aged. Right. And so, uh, so you might have, "are you looking for a Walker for your parents. Right. Or, an elderly friend or relative versus are you looking for a Walker for yourself? So now what we're doing is we're giving a path for the person who's buying it for themselves, versus somebody who's buying it for, you know, somebody they care about or there could be a third, are you buying it for your, for your facility?

Right. So, so one way of doing it, if you can't identify. Um, there's ways to do that too. But if you can't identify the targets is to create paths for people so that you can answer the questions that they would care about, which is a little different, you know, it may be similar, but it's not quite the same that the same, the person who's going to use, it might have slightly different questions than the person who's buying it for their parent.

That's one way to do it. The next level of doing is - if you can, you should always treat new versus returning visitors differently. If you can, with the understanding that you don't always know that your visitors are new, all right. They may be returning people who have cleared their cookies or, or, you know, they're coming from, you know, an iPhone or there's something going on where you don't really know who they are.

So you have to give them the option potentially of, you know, uh, been here before, you know, or whatever, or give them option to log in. Right. So that's the next level, the further level to go down. And there's plenty of tools that do this and depending upon what you're selling. You can actually lean a lot of information from people, um, not just from cookies, but from IP addresses.

All right. So if you use some type of IP address, level of software, uh, and there's all sorts of, of services out there you'll know that they're coming from this company versus at home now. Just cause I come from home, it might be, I still work for Ford motor company or IBM, but I happened to be working from home.

Right. And so, you know, my IP address is going to show my home. So again, you can assume, and that's why it's always nice to have those paths that you can follow for the different kinds of visitors. But you can preempt some of that. If you do know the returning, if you do, you know what their IP address is and you're using that, but I'm going to go back to crawl, walk, run.

Most people are at the crawl stage. Okay. Then we say very few people are doing that level of personalization. So, so know who they're coming, create paths. That's the simplest thing you can.

Kausambi: Yeah. And, and what I like about what you're saying, Marty, is that it actually is the same thing that you were talking about at the beginning of our conversation is you're giving the person the ability to make a choice.

And it's, again, not like forced, the personalization is not necessarily forced on them. So even, even if you are, I guess you are there on stage having some sort of pats and nudges that helps them redefine where they feel they are. It might also be an interesting kind of like, an ability for people to feel more in control.

Marty: Absolutely. And it goes back to the three questions. Am I in the right place? How do I feel about this? What am I supposed to do here? Am I in the right place? If I see something where they're talking to me, it's like, oh my God, they're talking to me. I'm in the right place. How do I feel about this? Well, I feel pretty good right now.

What am I supposed to do? Oh, go down this path. It answers all three questions.

Kausambi: So true. There's the final one. And then, guys, if you have any more questions, audience, please share it. We can't keep Marty forever. I know you guys have a lot of questions, but at some point we'll have let him get along with the rest of his day.

But this question. Like my personal favorite, uh, because I always find like visual cues, very exciting. I don't like, not necessarily like reading a lot of different things all the time, specifically, not when I'm shopping. So the question is;

Visual Cues for Persuasion

Question: How effective are visual cues versus like a lot of different text or paragraphs that you can use when you are trying to persuade, uh, you know, your, uh, shoppers across the.

Marty: Okay. So interestingly enough, that varies by country, right? Um, and so we've tested this too. Uh, so, uh, visual clues are always important and always worthwhile. And so some of the things that you want to do is you want to make sure that your call to action color, you know, whether it's a button or whatever you do.

Is only used for that. It might be an accent color that using just a little bit, but don't overuse that color. It needs to pop, you know, and you have, you want to use colors very specifically.

You want to be very careful on using animation because animation and movement actually can lower conversion.

We've tested that over and over and over again. Right. But back to the text. And I'll use three countries as an example, I'll use the United States, England and Australia, because they all speak English kind of. Right. So we can argue about that. Yeah. Somewhere. Uh, so, so here's the thing, American. I don't read anywhere near as much as people in UK do.

So if you take an American site, cause we're the land of instant gratification, right. We know literally we are, um, you know, our site will convert well for us, but I won't convert well in the UK. Because they want more information versus an a UK site. If you take a UK site where it's heavy in text, then you bring it to the United States.

Those people are going to be bored out of their bird and not convert and believe it or not, Australia is in the middle between the two and we've tested. This is kind of like personalization, but it's really understanding your target audience. And so the question of how much. Really has to go back to your website and your visitor and the culture that you're selling to.

Now having said that, as I say, We're a spectrum. People are not, you know, I'm this or I'm that it's not black and whites. There is a spectrum of people. So even in the United States, when we structure a website, we structure it with high level stuff, and then there's a path for those of us who want to learn more.

They can go down and learn more. But for those who are instant gratification, they can do that. And so you can have paths where they can learn more and more and more. So those people who are no fun at a party.. no, I'm just joking. All right. But if you, but if you, if there are those people need absolutely every detail and you have to provide it, but you cannot provide every detail for those people who just want, just want to buy it.

Right. So you have to structure it with layers. Hopefully that I think hopefully that was not too long.

Kausambi: I think that totally makes sense! Honestly it's  such a wealth of information. This was incredible! Thank you so, so much for being here.

I'm sure we have one final question.

Predictive Audiences in GA4

Question: What do you think about predictive audiences in GA4?

Marty: So the whole GA four thing is, is, uh, if, let me start with, if you haven't already started moving to GA four, please don't wait until, uh, you know, to Google analytics go away.

So predictive audiences will be really good GA for in general is about, um, engagement as opposed to Google analytics is about events. So. So if you think of GA for as being, um, uh, you know, an engagement level analytics to know that people are engaging, which is what Google has been talking about for quite a while being to predict how people might be able to engage.

Well, what's going to attract people is absolutely, you know, the direction we're going. There's a really good conference.

Actually. Let me back up. In, in Vegas, in June, there's two conferences that are back to back at the same time. One is our conferences. It's a conversion conference. Okay. And the other one is Marketing Analytics Summit. At marketing analytics summit, which is not our conference, but they have a whole workshop on GA 4.

And if you're serious about GA4, and if you can go to Vegas in June, I would strongly recommend going to that workshop. I'm even sending one of my people to it. All right. So it looks that good, right? Um, and if you want to learn more about conversion, you can obviously go to the, to our conversion conference.

I'll put the plug in why not? And this June. All right. But having said that, um, predictives are, are off the charts important or will become even more off the charts important because again, Google is going to be rewarding or giving Google love to sites that engage the visitor more. Right. And so. So the more you can engage with their, where they stay on your site, they engage with it.

They click from page to page. They take action. You will wind up with more SEO love as well as higher conversions. So I'm sorry. I was kind of a long answer, short shorts. I cannot answer anything with a short answer.

Kausambi: But that's Marty love! So we love it! Thank you so much. Incredibly insightful. And I think every little nugget that we spoke about literally could be like 20 different blog posts, but we got at least one.

We, we will be sharing the recording and Marty's actually gonna put together a blog guest blog. With all the details. So don't worry. We got you!

And thank you so much. And this was, this was incredible and hope to bring you back again. So that's it for Day 3. I hope you guys have learned a ton.

I definitely did. All right. Thank you!

Marty: Thank you.