Choice Architecture: How To “Nudge” Your Website Visitors Into Conversions [Infographic]

While you may have thorough buyer personas sketched out for your customers, there may be one piece of the puzzle that you’re missing: behavioural psychology.

Behavioural psychology often dictates how people make choices, whether it’s what to order at a restaurant or whether to subscribe to a company’s email newsletter. Within your digital channels, you can incorporate certain principles of behavioural psychology into your strategy in order to keep your marketing customer-centered, engaging, and conversion-driven. This will help turn your website visitors into conversions.

Anchoring

This is a principle of behavioural psychology that guides people towards context clues when making decisions. Oftentimes, your audience is unsure about how much time or money they should spend on a certain product or service, and when that’s the case, they turn to context clues to help them decide and usually settle on a middle ground. Incorporate anchoring into your digital marketing strategy by adding an “extreme” to the top end of your options.

Social Herding

Social herding can also be used to guide your audience towards making a desired decision. Instead of acting completely independently, people prefer to assimilate themselves into groups of people with similar beliefs and values. Use the power of social herding (or “peer pressure”) to show your audience that by signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product, they’re joining a group of like-minded people; for example, “Join 2,000 others and subscribe to our newsletter!”

Tyranny of Choice

You may think that offering your customers more choices is the way to their hearts, but actually, the tyranny of choice principle shows that people are often overwhelmed by having too many choices, which may stop them from making a conversion at all. Limit the number of options you offer your customers in order to increase conversions.

Defaults

Incorporating defaults into your digital marketing channels is a quick, relatively simple way to guide your customers towards the action you want them to take. Your audience doesn’t always want to take the effort to think through every decision; you can make their lives easier by checking the opt-in boxes for them and letting them decide if they want to opt-out instead.
Your digital marketing channels are meant to be customer centered. By incorporating behavioural psychology into your marketing channels, you can increase your conversions while improving your digital marketing strategy.

This infographic shows in more detail how behavioural psychology can optimise your web design with actionable examples.

Thanks to Kristen Geil for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Kristen Geil is a Digital Content Writer/Blogger at Digital Third Coast, a Chicago digital agency specializing in SEO. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.