What can convince your customers to make a purchase without using a single word? Design. Check out this article to see five strategies that will help your products fly off the shelves.
Every time you use the web, you're subconsciously being persuaded. Whether it’s The Gap telling you to shop their latest styles, or Best Buy asking you check out their one-day-only deal, online stores are constantly using design techniques to motivate and persuade their customers. Question is: Is your online store doing the same?
By emphasizing certain elements, you can guide your users to shop a specific category or add an item to their shopping cart. While a website’s usability allows for a good shopping experience, persuasive design gets users to buy.
Here are five persuasive design strategies that turn shoppers into buyers:
1. Visual emphasis
If you want your customers to take a certain action, put more visual emphasis on it. While they're free to choose something else, you’ll plant the seed for them to pay attention to what you want. Lovably Me does a fantastic job of this. By making the main image larger than others, they visually persuades their customers to click and shop wall art.
2. Element reduction
Reduce the amount of elements on your page keeps to your customers focused on what you want to highlight. Spirulo does a great job of removing other distractions and using whitespace to guide the users to the main objective.
3. Tunneling
Consider hiding the interior left navigation during the checkout process. That way, as your customers move through the purchase funnel, they won't get distracted and navigate away while making their purchase. While we wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for everyone, it's a good option to consider if you or your designer are familiar with JavaScript.
4. Social proof
Customers love products that are proclaimed to be the “Best Value” or “Most Popular Choice.” So try adding phrases like “Most Popular,” “Our Favorites” or “Special Deals” to your featured products' names and see what happens to your conversion rate. Another way to show social proof is so display customer testimonials alongside your products.
5. A sense of urgency
Put a time limit on certain products or deals. Volusion software makes this really easy with our Deal of the Day functionality. If someone is on the fence about buying, a limited time discount may tip him over the edge from shopper to buyer.Another time limitation strategy is showing how many of a certain item you have available. If a customer sees there are only four of those snazzy latte frothers in stock, they may be more persuaded to buy before it’s too late.
Take a look at your store, and determine if there are any design elements that encourage your customers to make the choices you want them to make. But remember: You don't want to cross the line between being persuasive and being deceptive. Persuasiveness and trustworthiness go hand in hand.
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