Chapter 19: An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence and Persuasion
Editor's Note: Ironically enough, the book that inspired Rand to create this visual reference in 2010, Influence: Science & Practice, was made into a graphic novel last year.
Conversion rate optimization, the practice of improving the number of visitors who take a desired action on your site, has been a hot topic the last couple of years. There's both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers, and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans, and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without reading Robert Cialdini's seminal work Influence: Science & Practice (Pearson, 2008), now available in its fifth edition. I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment of Guy Kawasaki, currently founder and Managing Director at Garage Technologies Ventures and formerly Apple's Chief Evangelist.
“This book is the de facto standard to learn the psychology of persuasion. If you don't read it, I hope you enjoy pounding your head against the wall and throwing away marketing dollars.”—Guy Kawasaki (www.amazon.com/Influence-Practice-Robert-B-Cialdini/dp/0205609996)
The problem is, not every marketer will read the book, and that leaves a lot of head-shaped holes in a lot of walls. Thus, this chapter is here to help do the next best thing: explain the broad concepts of persuasion in a condensed, illustrated format.
The book covers six major “weapons of influence.” I'm going to provide you with an illustration of each concept, followed by some tips and examples of how each can be used to increase online marketing conversions.
#1 Reciprocation
Hold open a door, and you receive a “thank you” and a smile. Send a birthday present to a friend, and you're almost certain to get one in return. Pay for a co-worker's coffee, and she'll pick up the next one. As Cialdini painstakingly details in the book, there is no culture on Earth that does not have this unspoken, yet powerful rule of reciprocation.
The power of reciprocation relies on several conventions. The request must be “in-kind,” which is to say, commensurate with the initial offering. The power is increased if the give-and-take happens in a short time frame. Reciprocity's influence increases with closer relationships, too. It's much harder to resist returning a favor to a friend than it is to refuse reciprocating one from an anonymous website.
How You Can Leverage Reciprocity
• Ask for permission to add the recipient to your email marketing lists in exchange for providing him free data and analysis tools.
• Tweet or blog about a prominent person or business in a positive fashion, and then email them to ask if they'll help spread the message.
• Email a site owner about a problem on her site and offer a solution/fix; she'll often follow up by asking how she can return the favor.
• Provide exemplary answers to questions posted in online forums. Leave a final note asking anyone who finds your answer valuable to consider visiting your site and sharing it with friends.
• Share great information on your blog, and ask your readers to subscribe to your feed.
#2 Commitment and Consistency
As humans, we have an insatiable desire for consistency in behavior. It's why we abhor hypocrisy, and embrace leaders who “stick to their guns,” sometimes to the point of foolishness. Our need for consistency can be observed through the effectiveness of political tactics like push polling, wherein a paid “surveyor” will call numbers and ask voters whether they'd cast a ballot for “a man who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance,” for instance. The purpose is to get a verbal commitment that will transfer into a vote come election day after the follow-on ad campaign alludes to precisely that inaction from the opposition candidate.
A case study from Cialdini's book illustrates this principle quite elegantly. Researchers on a New York City beach staged thefts to see if onlookers would risk personal harm to stop the “criminal.” A research accomplice would listen to music on a blanket near their “test subjects” for several minutes, then stand up and stroll away, leaving behind a nice personal radio. A “thief” would then approach the scene, grab the radio, and attempt to hurry away with it. On average, only 4 in 20 bystanders intervened.
However, when the experiment was changed slightly, the results altered dramatically. In this second scenario, the research accomplice would ask the test subject to “watch my things” before strolling away. Now under the influence of consistency and commitment, 19 of 20 subjects became “virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away.”
Commitment and consistency can't happen without that initial action of a response or promise. Cialdini notes that this power increases tremendously if the agreement is written, rather than merely verbal. (Last week, you told us you wanted XYZ ... Guess what? Here it is!)
How You Can Leverage Commitment and Consistency
• Ask users to answer online questions about their habits and preferences, and then market to them based on their answers.
• Have website visitors sign an online pledge to take a certain action, and then email them at the specified time they have committed to act. The “Quit Facebook Day” movement used this technique. As a result, a number of “Internet famous” Facebook users deleted their personal accounts (see http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/31/quit-facebook-day-flops-as-only-1-in-15000-pledge-to-quit).
• Ask your users/members/fans to commit to doing something if a certain event occurs. For example, let's say that your startup is up for an award. You could ask your fans to offer support by emailing a friend about your service if you win the award. If/when you do win, email your fans an announcement, and request that they share it with their friends.
• Use a landing page plus a funnel process that defines users in a set number of ways based on their answers to multiple-choice questions. Then speak to how your product or service is the right choice for people like them.
#3 Social Proof
If you're walking along a street and see a crowd gathered, it's nearly impossible to resist the urge to go over and investigate for yourself what they are so interested in. If you're at a party and everyone else is drinking, the pressure for you to have a drink rises dramatically. We all hate the horrifyingly over-the-top laugh tracks on TV sitcoms, but TV producers keep using them because they know that the social signal of laughter makes us laugh along, too.
This same phenomenon applies when we judge exceptionally important life decisions like who we should date or marry, where we should go to school, and where we should work. The powerful influence of our peers can't be overlooked in the sphere of marketing.
Social proof becomes more powerful when the numbers increase and (especially) when the action-takers become more like the targeted buyer. In other words, if you're selling games to rebellious teenagers, don't show testimonials from middle-aged parents. Show testimonials from rebellious teenagers.
How You Can Leverage Social Proof
• Let Facebook users see when their friends have engaged with your site using badges, like buttons, etc. (even more relevant social proof).
• Place testimonials on landing pages and in sales copy from customers that your readers will be able to relate to. Those that feature photos of the customers and their full names work best.
• Utilize the fast-growing and far-reaching online networks Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
#4 Liking
We've heard the phrase a thousand times: “People do business with people they know, like, and trust.” It turns out, there's quite a bit of science to support this. Research confirms that factors like physical attractiveness (we like good-looking people), familiarity (we trust people we know), similarity (we like people like us), and compliments (we like people who say nice things about us) all factor into to the principle of “liking.”
It's hard to argue with the power “liking” has on us as consumers. When Will Critchlow (whom I like a lot, despite constantly losing presentation-off battles to him) recommends that I read a book or try a service, it's practically a guarantee I'll do it. (Note to Will: Please don't abuse this power.) Similarly, movie executives realize that asking Tom Hanks to go on the late-night circuit is a great way to drive viewership of a film, while sending Tom Cruise on a similar mission may have the opposite result.
How You Can Leverage “Liking”
• Start a blog, Twitter account, or email list. Share your personal thoughts with your audience in a personable, friendly way.
• Employ the power of celebrity in microcosms. If Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com) wrote a blog post saying that Moz was a valuable resource, then that would likely drive many people who like Seth to take commensurate actions.
• Join in conversations on the web (on forums, in blog comments, on Twitter, via other social services) in ways that engender you positively to those community members. Follow up personally with community leaders and organizers to help spread the liking effect in a more scalable way.
#5 Authority
A story from Cialdini's book illustrates this principle so well that I couldn't resist sharing it here:
Professors of pharmacy Michael Cohen and Neil Davis attribute much of the problem to the mindless deference given to the “boss” of a patient's case: the attending physician. According to Cohen, “in case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription.” Take, for example, the strange case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location “Right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear.” Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient's anus.
Obviously, rectal treatment of an earache made no sense, but neither the patient nor the nurse questioned it. The important lesson of this story is that in many situations in which a legitimate authority has spoken, what would otherwise make sense is irrelevant. In these instances, we don't consider the situation as a whole but attend and respond to only one aspect of it.
The power of authority can come from a variety of sources. Here are a few examples:
• Clothes—Think of the movie Catch Me if You Can, in which Leonardo DiCaprio “becomes” a doctor or pilot simply by changing his attire.
• Titles and prefix/suffixes—Dr., Senator, President, C-level executive all carry weight.
• Context—The famous Milgram study (see http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm) in which ordinary people commit horrifying acts simply because they are told to do so by an authority figure.
Photo of Anthony Bourdain courtesy of Corbis Entertainment
An authority is only influential when the target believes in the power and authenticity of that authority. The stronger the association the target has with the authority, the more powerful the impact. The reverse is also true. Not all authorities influence all people.
How You Can Leverage Authority
• Has a well-respected individual or organization endorsed your product/company? Make that a prominent feature when you request an action from your visitors.
• In some cases, the product itself can positively influence sales conversions by demonstrating its value in a concrete way. Software tools, for example, can provide a limited amount of free data to users. This develops trust and confidence in the product, ultimately converting into sales revenue from product/subscription upgrades that give users access to more of the data and features they become reliant on.
• Experts in your field can provide you with great testimonials and endorsements. They need not be recognizable, or even speak to social proof elements if they carry the credentials and weight that will your target audience will respond to.
#6 Scarcity
Ever notice that some shops seem to be perpetually running “going out of business” sales? It's no mistake. The power of potential loss is a remarkable influencer. The Rolling Stones' “last ever” tour, the final can of Crystal Pepsi, the limited edition collectors' keepsake (only 70 ever released!). All are examples of the scarcity principle at work.
As Cialdini notes:
The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerful motivating properties. The ardor of an indifferent lover surges with the appearance of a rival. It is often for reasons of strategy, therefore, that romantic partners reveal (or invent) the attentions of a new admirer. Salespeople are taught to play the same game with indecisive customers. For example, a realtor who is trying to sell a house to a “fencesitting” prospect sometimes will call the prospect with news of another potential buyer who has seen the house, liked it, and is scheduled to return the following day to talk about terms. When wholly fabricated, the new bidder is commonly described as an outsider with plenty of money: “an out-of-state investor buying for tax purposes” and “a physician and his wife moving into town” are favorites. The tactic, called in some circles “goosing ‘em off the fence,” can work devastatingly well. The thought of losing out to a rival frequently turns a buyer from hesitant to zealous.
Scarcity becomes more powerful when it's clear that the resource is finite (houses are great for this reason), and when immediacy is added to the scarcity (as in the case of another buyer on the horizon). Auction sites like eBay combine the power of these persuasion tactics with remarkable results.
How You Can Leverage Scarcity
• Offer a special version of your product for a limited time, in limited quantities.
• Feature messages like Expedia's “only two tickets left at this price” or Zappos' “only three pairs in this size in stock” next to search results and product pages to encourage timely sales conversions.
• Create an incentive for the first x number of visitors to take an action.
• Show the number of people viewing an item right on the product page (for example, “Six others currently on this page”) to help create excitement and a feeling of immediacy. This works particularly well for one-of-a-kind or limited quantity products.
Individually, these principles are powerful instruments of persuasion. Together, they're a marketing force to be reckoned with. Let's try an experiment and see if I can effectively employ the six principles in relation to Moz. (Please note, I'm not normally this self-promotional, and this exercise is meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek.)
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The next time you make a landing page or try to drive actions on the web, think about how you might leverage these principles of influence to improve your conversion rates.