Have you ever visited a casino that actually had a clock hanging on the wall? Probably not. Have you ever wondered why the essential food in the supermarket is located in the very back, forcing you to walk all the way through the store? These are just two elementary offline tricks used to boost sales. The first one is so you will keep gambling without noticing what time it is, and the second one is meant to have you walk around the supermarket, in the hopes you will fill up your cart along the way, with items not on your shopping list. There are many more tricks that shops and stores use to make you buy more. Many of these tricks are also used in the online world, so it is important to learn about and understand them along with the logic behind them.

 

Wait! Do I really need that?

A well known trick shops and stores use is to use their bestsellers as an up sell to sell other products. The reason why this method is usually so successful is that it takes advantage of the fact that purchasing one item significantly increases the chance of purchasing another item. Offline stores might try to convince you to buy a beautiful case if you are already buying flowers. Your local car washer will offer to wax your car in addition to the regular wash. The brilliant way Amazon does this, is by using phrases such as” recommended accessories”, and “frequently bought together”, as well as “customers who bought this item also bought”.

Control your impulse!

A similar upsell trick supermarkets use is to place impulse products in the checkout area. These are usually chocolate bars and sweets, and they can be very tempting, especially when there is a long line at the checkout. Ecommerce sites do this by offering you products when you are already on the checkout page. They use phrases such as, “You may also like…”, or, “Suggested Products”. In the following example from IKEA, I am already at the checkout, in the process of buying a bed, when I am offered to buy bed slats.

Are we mice in a maze?

It has been shown in previous research, that when people walk into the mall, they will usually enter from the right side. Therefore, the most successful stores at the mall will often be on the right side of the main entrance. Similarly, stores will place their best looking and best smelling products on the right shelves. Supermarkets will place fruits and vegetables on the right, because they are colorful and fresh. Also, toiletry stores will place their best perfumes on the right. Off-line marketers know where people go, so they build their storage structure and selling tactics around this. In websites, there is no “right” to turn to, so you have the power to direct your users to the “right” place. Presenting your users with big bright call-to-action buttons helps direct them where you want them to go. Drawing attention to the buttons with arrows or other pointing visuals, will serve you even more, because the more attention you draw to your call-to-action, the more people will follow them. For example, this is a landing page we created, with all the visuals in the page pointing at the button.

Okay, but that’s my final offer!

If you start to walk away during a negotiation, the salesman you’re negotiating with, might be convinced he is about to lose you as a client. This may result in him pulling out an improved offer in order to close the sale. (Note – I’m not recommending that you walk away to get great offers, because it doesn’t always work.)

The same happens online, with the wonderful solution of exit intent pop-ups. These are offers you present to users who are about to leave your website. These offers may vary, depending on what you want to offer. E-commerce sites can offer discounts, while b2b can offer more information in the form of downloading data sheets. And bloggers can offer for visitors to sign up for a newsletter. The logic is to understand that you user is about to leave, and then to decide what the best offer is in order to keep him.

The following example is from Kissmetrics.

Mmm..shiny!

There are tons of other tricks you can take from the offline world and use them online. For example, wrapped items tend to look more prestige. So, in the online world, if you want to make your product look more prestige, you can place a virtual ribbon around it. You will see the use of words like pro, platinum or premium in the following example from Godaddy.

Another example is when stores give you samples in the hopes that you will like what you use. In your website, you can give free trials and hope people will like your product and will agree to pay for it next time. Supermarkets will sometimes give you time-limited coupons. Similarly  online sales are sometimes time-limited as well, such as in the following example from eBay.

 

 Next time you go shopping, look out for the tricks and manipulations the store is pulling to make you buy more. For example consider which products are at eye level and which products are more hidden? What music is the store playing in the background and how does it make you feel? Do you have anything in your shopping cart which you didn’t plan to buy before entering the store?

Did you notice anything unusual about the title of this post? Did you notice the word “THAN” repeats itself? If you didn’t, you’re not alone. Many people miss this repetition thanks to the law of experience – a principle in gestalt psychology that suggests that people use prior knowledge in order to understand certain elements, and look at sentences as a whole and not at each individual word.

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism aims to understand how people perceive and make sense of visual information. According to gestaltism, perceptions are merely the products of complex interactions among various external stimuli. Gestaltism states that objects are considered globally, as a whole before, or in parallel with, perception of their individual elements.

Gestalt psychology claims that wholes are structured and organized using grouping laws. If you learn the grouping laws well enough you will see great change in your conversion metrics and be able to help users complete your funnels quicker and simpler. These laws help design better user interfaces for your site.
Below I have listed the important laws of  gestalt:

 

Law of similarity

This law is often applied in form building.

What do you think, which of the following forms is better?

A:

B:

 

Because of the distance between the labels and the fields in example A, we perceive them as two different columns, making them seem like two different and unrelated groups. By placing them closer together, like in form B, they are emphasized as horizontal pairs. Make it easier for your users to fill in forms in your website by placing labels and fields closer together, and separating each field with a different background color.

 

The law of proximity

This law can, for example, be used when placing radio buttons. Radio buttons are used when the user must select only one choice out of several options. To signal this association to the user, simply place your radio buttons as a horizontal row so that they are closer to each other.

The same principle of proximity is what makes navbars, and related items in checkouts so useful, it is the idea of placing related objects close together. This is applied in the following example from ebay.com, where they offer other items you may also like, and they place them close together in the same area of the page.

 

 

The Law of closure

Think of the Apple logo. Our minds fill in the missing gap and therefore understand this shape as an eaten apple. If our minds didn’t make this completion, we would not understand what it is.

There are plenty of other logos that use the law of closure, here are some examples.

The fact we are able to make these completions and understand  simple shapes as a concept is very useful when coming up with ideas for logos. The advantage of designing your logo with the help of gestalt principles, is that you can create a very simple logo but convey a complex idea. Try to think of some other logos you know. You will find that usually, memorable logos are the most simple logos.

 

The Law of continuity

Here , the principle is that lines that are continuations of each other are perceived as the same line, even in the case of multiple line segments.

For example, when you see the Chanel logo

 

you see it as a regular C and a mirrored C joined together.

 

you don’t see it like this

 

This is another great principle to follow when designing a logo. Very similar to the previous law, this also gives you the option to create a very simple yet unique logo, which will be memorable not despite, but because of its simplicity.

 

The Law of ”Figure-Ground”

This principle describes our ability to identify a figure from the background. This law applies for example in Disqus, notice how there are many things happening on the page, like different colors, shapes, images and texts. However it is still easy for you to tell the figures from the background.

 

Figure-ground lets us know what we should be focusing on the page. This law can also be applied in call to action buttons. For example take a look at this button.

Its got rounded corners, well defined borders, gradient color and resulting illusion of 3D depth.  All of these elements combined differentiate the button from its surroundings. Since your call to action button is the most important element in your page, you want it to be pronounce. Use the above elements to make it easier for the user to notice and identify the button as something that can be activated.

 

Conclusions

Using gestalt principles in user interface design helps us gain functionality and aesthetic appeal and increase the likelihood that your message is communicated to your audience. Perceiving objects as a whole is what makes us recognize objects even if they don’t appear as we are used to seeing them, for example when they are animated.

If we didn’t have this ability, we would not be able to recognize any of the objects you see in this landing page from giftrocket for example.

 Gestalt laws have proven to be very useful in conversion optimization. Do you use any gestalt psychology tricks on your site? Tell us how.

A while back we discussed “Anchoring” the emotional trigger used by Steve Jobs, that increases conversion rates time after time and helped sell millions of iPads. Similar to Anchoring, there are many other psychological triggers that affect our decision making process we aren’t aware of. The one we’ll discuss today is Loss Aversion, “discovered” by the same researchers whom determined “anchoring”  Tversky & Kahneman.

Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Some studies show that losses are twice as powerful psychologically than gains. It implies that one who loses $100 will lose more satisfaction than another person will gain satisfaction from a $100 gain.

Loss aversion is used a lot in the world of marketing as people will make an irrational decision to avoid the loss. For example, manufacturers of books, washing machines etc. send out their products without requiring prepayment. They say, “Use them a week, and if you don’t want it, send them back.” Most people don’t.

Increase conversion using loss aversion:

• The world of free trials: Loss aversion is the exact reason companies offer full free trials for a limited period of time. It’s based on the fact that once you have this product and you get used to it, you’re not going to let a little thing like a payment issue, get in your way.

• In the 1970’s cigar salesmen used to give packs to their customers and tell them to smoke 10 of them. If they don’t like them, they can send them. I wonder who sent them back..

A good example from the online world is Kaspersky. Dealing with your computer security, once you’re protected, you’re not going to go back to the insecure world…are you?

• It’s all about timing: A limited time offer with an expiration date on it triggers that exact emotion. People are people, and they do not want to be the ones losing out on an amazing one time offer.

A while back ago we used the loss aversion trigger on the banners we designed for one of our clients. As you can see below there was a counter working it’s way backwards warning users of the amount of time left for the one time sale.

• The world of unknown: Rather than talking about what people may gain from your services or product, researches have shown that talking about missing out on a special offer will increase your revenue much more than talking about gaining from it. Interesting strategy for PPC campaigns.

 

• Wheel them back again: A good example of bringing back the customers is the punch cards people collect at coffee shops. As apposed to a 10% immediate discount on their daily coffee, most people will prefer a punch card that grantees the 10^th coffee for free. People will keep going back every day to get that coffee and not miss out on it.

The key to conversion optimization is recognizing your audience’s emotional triggers and using your messaging and design to express them.

People don’t like losing things they already have, or are very close to having. So much so they will often make irrational decisions to avoid the loss, and as we already know 90% of all our decisions in life are irrational so why not use it to your advantage and increase your conversion?

In one of my recent posts I discussed the fact that 90% of our decision-making in life is irrational and that marketers could use this fact to benefit their marketing efforts. Why am I telling you all this again? Because Evan Spiegel (Snapchat’s CEO) just acted as a live case study to prove it.

23 years old Evan Spiegel, CEO of a revenue-less app turned down a $3 billion offer. Why you ask? Because Mark Zuckerberg didn’t treat him nicely. Because of EGO.

Triggered by the “Self-image” emotional trigger, Spiegel decided to give up on what may have been the deal of a lifetime.  Self-image is an emotional trigger that exists in most of us on all different levels. People who are motivated by “self-image” are people who think highly of themselves, do not appreciate being put down, will not settle for second place and care a lot about people’s perception of them, they want to be the winners or at least look like winners.

At conversioner we recognize these triggers and use them. After running our psycho-emotional research we profile our client’s users and find the right emotional triggers that will motivate their users. For example, a self-image person, like Spiegel, may need to be dared.

In one of our most successful tests we used the sentence: “Real winners play for real” – meaning: You’re only a winner if you’re playing for real cash.  It’s all about the messaging and the design. Trigger your users, light up a fire you know exists in them and wait.

For years now offline advertising is based on exactly that; don’t show the product, make them feel it. Think about all those perfume ads on TV, when was the last time you understood one of them?

People buy a product or service for what it makes them feel. Not its features, services or cost, they might say they do but they don’t. People will spend a lot of money to feel good.

And, people will give up on a lot of money ($3 billion to be exact) to feel good too.

Use it or it will use YOU.