There’s a lot of psychological stuff happening around SaaS, ecommerce and anything to do with online sales. Landing pages, color of the CTA buttons, onboarding emails, blogpost titles, the last line of a blogpost (I’m tempted to call them endgame)… everything is crafted with manipulative psychological principles we’ve learned in the recent 50 or so years.
Sales is not about manipulation. Marketing is not about manipulation. Yet, psychological results are being used to manipulate people. Let me put it in a better way: we’re tricking people into buying things, paying for services, subscribing for things etc.
Here’s the deal: people catch up to manipulative things so what works for a few days, weeks or even a couple of years, will go out of service easily. Cue: Buzzfeed’s clickbait headlines. They stopped creating clickbait content and switched to producing really entertaining and worthy-of-perusal content once they realized that everyone was talking about the manipulative clickbait techniques they were using.
People aren’t stupids for a long time, dude. Information wants to be free and because there are some people who always write / speak about these things out in the open, people learn fast. People know - and eventually come to know - when they are being manipulated using the latest fad in psychology.
What’s the reprieve to those of us who have to sell but not go the “manipulative” path?
Tell people the truth.
Behind every psychological effect, there’s some core truth about human nature. We know the effects of priming and we know why it happens: so use that to tell the truth about why people find other services better than yours when yours is logically better.
Use the truth about everything - psychology, emotion, rationality, irrationality, stories… to sell what you believe will help others. (and this means if you don’t believe in the helpfulness of what you sell, don’t sell at all).
It has been demonstrated that people react better to emotions even if it’s irrational than logic just because it’s rational.
But I think in the longest-run, truth trumps even emotion.
Sell honestly.