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If you are constantly thinking about increasing your conversions, you need to understand why people buy. People usually buy for subconscious reasons, they have their motives and you need to dig deeper to identify them and know how to influence their behavior and buying decisions.
The Hidden Motivations Behind Customer’s Purchase Decisions
Many buying decisions are not made on a conscious level, people don’t just buy because of the product features or service’s direct benefits, but their buying decision may be influenced by their emotions, desires, and needs. Psychologists suggest that people buy either to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but the pain each person is trying to avoid and the gain differs and for simple products, the pains and gains may be simple. This is why you need to understand your target audience’s needs.
The Power of Emotions to Drive Consumer Behavior
People often make buying choices based on how a product makes them feel, or in other terms how they need to feel. There is a famous expression that summarizes this statement “People buy with emotion and justify with logic”. An example of this is when people buy from expensive brands.
The logical reason may be higher quality and durability which will save them money as they won’t need to buy a new product every few months, but the emotional reason may be that it gives them a feeling of self-esteem or self-worth or belonging to a specific community.
In general, people buy because they have emotional needs that may revolve around their need to gain pleasure or avoid pain.
Connecting Emotionally with Your Customers
One of the main factors that can highly influence customers’ buying decisions is your ability to understand their emotions, identify their needs, and address their concerns. This is why marketers use emotionally driven marketing campaigns and techniques like storytelling to tap into the consumer’s subconscious minds, attracting them and influencing their emotions, creating a connection that impacts their purchase decisions. This is also the reason why many brands use hidden messages or subliminal marketing as a tactic to influence consumer behavior and increase sales. Subliminal messaging is a tactic that sends a message to the customer’s subconscious mind and this usually happens by using a stimuli that the individual is not able to consciously perceive.
How Brands Use Emotions to Increase Sales?
Your audience is more likely to engage with your brand and trust you if you appeal to their emotions. Understanding the emotions that motivate prospects to act is essential.
Avoiding Fear and Fear of Missing Out
One of the powerful emotions that makes people buy is fear. People buy when they feel the fear of loss or the negative consequences or cost of not buying. This emotion is used a lot in creating awareness about social issues.
Since fear is a strong negative emotion, it is also important for brands after evoking the emotions of fear to use with it the emotion of security associated with the product they’re selling.
Gaining Self-Confidence or Avoiding Shame
Here are two ads selling the same solution for bad breath issues, but each with a different approach. The first is showing the gain and pleasure of solving the bad breath problem.
The second ad is focusing on avoiding the pain and the emotions of shame. Shame is another emotion that motivates people, people try to avoid things that make them feel shame.
The Use of Positive Emotions
Feelings of happiness and belonging and feelings of security are also two motivational emotions that make people willing to act. Remember the happiness campaign for Coca Cola “Coca Cola A7la M3” that focused on friendship, sharing, and happiness. This campaign was able to spread among young people and families and the demand to buy a bottle or can with someone’s name on it was amazing. They were able to amplify those emotions with personalization.
The Power of Urgency and FOMO
Fear of missing out on something (FOMO) is also very effective, when people feel they will lose something they are more willing to buy. This creates a sense of urgency to buy, which is a great ad tactic that many advertisers use. FOMO and urgency work well when the audience has an interest in the product or service because no one wants to miss out on a great deal for a product they like. Usually, urgency is created by offering limited-time offers, flash sales, and limited stock. This is why people buy more on black Fridays and when there are offers because they are sure that if they don’t act now they will lose a great deal.
Conclusion
To increase your conversions, you need to understand your customer’s hidden motivations and needs. You need to appeal to your customer’s emotions, and also give them logical reasons to justify their purchase decisions. When people feel understood, they are more likely to buy from you. To understand your customers, you should ask them questions and listen to their answers. Highlighting the gains of the purchase decision and the pain they can avoid, will directly influence your customer’s buying decisions. Targeting emotions can help your business develop a deeper connection with clients, as people rarely forget brands associated with strong emotions both positive and negative.
