What are some brain tricks to make customers spend more money? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Marissa Ryan, Creator of Visualfizz, SEO and ASO Strategist, Marketing Strategist at Zymo Interactive, on Quora:
What are some brain tricks to make customers spend more money?
This answer is specifically geared towards ONLINE customers, specifically those who shop from their mobile devices.
- Include fully descriptive and clear product details.
There’s a reason most Amazon listings have extensive descriptions for all of their products. A full product detail description is hugely important to shoppers. Since they are not able to touch and feel the product in their own hands, clear descriptions can be the deciding factor between a sale and a pass. Help your users feel good about making a purchase.
- Make sure product reviews are visible.
Obviously, reviews of a product are critical to those who prefer to shop from their devices than in-store. Actual word-of-mouth referrals are huge, and making reviews prominent and easy to find will help your shoppers feel comfortable checking out with multiple products.
Reviews, in general, are a one-two punch: You've got to make it as easy to read them as it is to leave them. Many shopping brands rely on reviews and even have a reputation in their communities about them. A brand that does an awesome job of displaying reviews is ModCloth (even before they were bought out). ModCloth is a brand whose community relies heavily on thoughts and opinions of other reviewers, even going as far as allowing reviewers to include their body type and measurements in their reviews of products. This makes their shoppers feel informed about the products and definitely makes them eager to leave reviews of their own to contribute to the community.
- Suggest related products and keep your users circulating around the site.
Many storefront CMS’s have plugins and options to include “related products” on the user interface (UI). For example, here’s a Shopify plugin that does the trick: Cross Sell for Shopify. (More on How to Build a Customizable Related Products Section by Shopify)
Note: I’m a bit of a Shopify expert, which is why I’ve included the example. Regardless of what platform you use, there are likely plugins that will help you add related products. If you’re a savvy web/app developer or know one, you can customize this feature and add it through hard coding.
Keep your users interested in your products, use verbiage that makes them feel like they’re missing out (FOMO), and Focus on KPIs like Cart Value and Revenue per conversion.
- Get Your Users to Sign Up - But NOT before Shopping.
Asking users to register up front before they can view products or make a purchase is a huge barrier to entry and conversion. “Do this or else” rarely works well for the seller. Experts have even recommended not requiring registration since 1999. Remember what online shopping was in 1999? Check out the Neilson Norman Group's article explaining why developers should avoid pre-checkout registration here: Summary: Demanding that users register or log in before they can use an app or see website information has high interaction cost and defies the reciprocity principle
While of course it is important to get a user’s email address (or social media account info, if you allow for social sign-in) so that you can market them in other ways (think email marketing campaigns, which have the highest conversion rates of any channel, social retargeting and Facebook Ads, etc.), what’s more important is to allow the customer to feel comfortable enough with you that they will willing give you this information.
A few ways to still collect user information without requiring it for checkout:
- Utilize "Log in with Google" or "Log in with Facebook". This is likely the easiest route that keeps everyone happy. You still get your customers' info, and the customer gets to experience the speed and ease of checking out from their mobile devices with a single tap. This is often not ideal, however, since many users use fake or invalid email addresses for Facebook or other social channels. The benefits of allowing your users to log in this way usually outweigh the negatives, but it is something to take into consideration when developing your user's shopping cart experience. Social logins have other benefits as well, such as presenting you with opportunities to drive sales from your brand's social channels.
- Give users a really really good reason to register. Most brands will do something like "get 10% off when you sign up" or something similar to incentivize their shoppers to register.
- Give the option of a Guest Checkout. If your users truly don't want to give you any more of their information then they absolutely have to, you can offer a "checkout as guest" option that allows the users to just put their payment information in. Speed this feature up even further by allowing Paypal integration, which means they won't need to give you their shipping and billing addresses either.
The best shopping experiences are the ones that give the user control, make reviews easy to find, make for easy checkout, and allow the user to interact with your brand how they wish.
I wrote a full post about these concepts, specifically geared towards those who actually build e-commerce platforms, but many industries can benefit from the knowledge shared. Check it out: e-Commerce App Design That Will Make Customers Spend More.
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