Psychology is at the root of every effective marketing strategy. Understanding your consumers’ thought processes is a surefire way to grab their attention and convince them to convert into a loyal customer.
Being able to successfully grasp the tendencies, habits, and preferences of your audience can be incredibly beneficial. To help you get started, here are five of the most effective psychological principles that will boost your homepage conversion rate:
Cognitive Fluency
Many people find Apple’s homepage aesthetically pleasing, but have you ever wondered why this is?
Cognitive fluency, also known as cognitive ease, is defined as “the ease in which our brain processes information; this level of each impacts how positively [or negatively] we feel about something.” To put this into practice, this means Apple refrains from bombarding users’ brains with useless and excessive information. Instead, they employ a simplistic, modern style that people innately enjoy.
So, what can you take from this? Avoid overloading your website with vivid and excessive animations. Instead, use plenty of whitespace on your homepage and landing pages. Keeping your pages sparse will keep your visitors at ease and your CTA clear.
Visual Salience
Visual salience is a simple concept: Make the most important elements on your homepage (i.e., your CTA) stand out from everything else. Try boosting your conversions by experimenting with different formatting options and colors via A/B testing. Whichever method is receiving the highest conversion or engagement rates, employ for the future.
Principle of Reciprocity
There is an old experiment in which customers at a restaurant were given after-dinner mints along with their checks without an explanation. In this scenario, waiters’ tips increased by three percent. Then, other customers were given mints and told that the mints were for those individuals specifically. In this scenario, tips increased 20 percent.
What’s to learn here? Offer your customers something of value for free on your homepage. This could be a PDF, eBook, or discount code, but just ensure you include a brief message letting the know how they’re special.
Scarcity
Using scarcity is a widespread marketing strategy because it gets results. For example, if a customer is shopping for shoes and sees that there are only two left in stock, they will most likely make an immediate purchase to ensure that they get that pair.
The Psychology of Color
Colors have an effect on our emotions, so understanding what types of emotions your audience will feel while scrolling through your page is important. NBC, Google, Ebay, and Windows incorporate blue, yellow, red, and green into their company logos. This is because blue gives users a feeling of trust, yellow conveys optimism, red gives visitors a feeling of excitement, while green exudes a feeling of peace. Use a color emotion guide to create the color scheme for your website.
