More Ways to Generate More Sales With Pricing and Persuasive Writing
The design has a big impact on your ability to sell then but this is actually only one of the tricks you have up your sleeve. Also valuable is your ability to alter the pricing and to add smart descriptions to your store. This can not only make your items more affordable (and therefore increase the number of people who can and will spring the cash for them) but it can actually have a range of subtle psychological effects as well…
Pricing Strategies
Special Offers and Deals – Scarcity
A special offer is a great way to encourage more people to buy your products and if you price this offer correctly then the increase in turnover should help to increase your profits ultimately. In other words, you might lose out on each individual item but by selling more items you can still increase overall earnings.
But special offers and deals also have another effect – they introduce time pressure. People know that offers last only for a finite amount of time and thus, by introducing special offers and deals, you will automatically make people want to buy more quickly instead of going away to ‘think about it’.
This in turn is very valuable for you. Why? Because people are most likely to buy things when they act impulsively. People buy most of the time based on emotion – not reason. So if you can get them to act quickly, they’ll be much more likely to spend the cash than if you give them time to go away and mull it over. By using an incentive to act faster, you thereby make them more likely to act impulsively. And as such, they become more likely to buy from you.
Another way to make your audience act quicker is to make the products limited in stock. This creates ‘scarcity’ and doing that in turn also makes your items more valuable and thus desirable. People want things that no one else can have!
Contrast
We talked about color contrast earlier and making your products physically stand out on your digital shelf. But there’s another type of contrast to consider too – and that’s the contrast between your price points.
Whether we like it or not, our brains tend to automatically judge the value of something by comparing and contrasting it with other things. Something expensive only seems expensive (often) insofar as it is expensive compared to other things.
What this means is that you can easily make something look a lot more affordable by putting it next to something very expensive. And at the same time, doing this can also help make the expensive item seem more ‘premium’ and thereby luxury and desirable.
And furthermore, this means that you’ll have more luck selling ‘point of sale’ options and upselling when the customer is already spending more. When someone is spending $500 on your website, they won’t think much about adding $10 extra for a discounted product. But if they’re only spending $5, then they’ll be unlikely to want to add another $10 to the order. Think about this when choosing what to upsell and how to utilize POS.
Bundling
Another option is to let your customers create their own ‘bundles’. Bundling essentially means that your customers can choose precisely which items they want and which ones they don’t need and thereby save money by buying in bulk but not end up with items they don’t want.
Bundling is very effective because it ensures you have at least one option for every type of buyer. At the same time, it makes people feel as though they’re getting a better deal while actually encouraging them to spend more in your store. It’s a genuine win-win scenario.
High Ticket Items
When pricing your products, you might decide to include a ‘high ticket’ item that will land you a large amount of profit per sale. The aim is that just a couple of sales of this item will be enough to keep you in profit and in this regard, you might actually use your other products in order to encourage sales of those high ticket items.
For example, if you sell a lot of expensive products, consider adding something cheap so your customers can get used to shopping with you in a low-risk manner. This way you can overcome the barrier to sale, so that all you have left to do is encourage your visitors to spend the money on that product.
Persuasive Writing
Another thing that can make a big difference is the way you write the descriptions for your products. Here, your objective is to make sure that people act on impulse and are moved to spend the money right there and then rather than going away to think about it.
To that end, good persuasive writing for sales will need to focus on the emotional aspect of the product. And this means that you’re going to emphasize the ‘value proposition’.
A value proposition basically describes how a product will improve someone’s life. In other words, don’t just look at the sum of the parts but what people actually want to gain from spending the money. For example, people don’t buy dumbbells because they need something heavy. People by dumbbells because they want to be strong, toned, healthy, attractive and confident. This is what you need to emphasize in your pitch because it will ensure that your prospective customers start imagining what life could be like after they purchase your item.
Meanwhile, try to get people to imagine what your product will be like to own (companies like Apple always use words like ‘feel’ and ‘touch’ a lot) and emphasize how quickly they can get their hands on it.
Split Testing
We’ve seen how color, layout and even wording can improve the effectiveness of your store and help you get more sales. If you get all this right, then you’ll be improving your ‘optimization’ to increase ‘conversions’.
But the question is how you know if everything you’re doing is working. And to answer that question, you can use something called ‘split testing’. This basically means creating two different listings for the same product, one using a red font (for example) and one using a blue font. You then observe how each listing performs over time and ultimately compare the results to see which design got the most sales. Once you have your answer, you adopt the winning change and this way you can evolve your site over time until it’s perfectly optimized to convert the highest percentage of visitors possible into paying customers.