How to Increase Conversions and Make People Buy Your Popcorn

Don’t know about you, but I am the kind of person who always buys popcorn at the movies. Yes, that ridiculously expensive paper bucket of overly salted corn, which is worth maybe 50 cents. And each time, I spend 10 minutes at the bar struggling to choose the bucket of the right size. 

Seriously, it’s impossible.

Small seems like it’s not enough; the middle is okay but kinda pricey for its size; the big one is a nice deal, but I definitely don’t need that much. Or maybe I do… Long story short, I always end up buying the large one, even though I never finish it. 

And every time, I ask myself: why do I keep doing something so stupid? 

That, my friends, is all because of the dirty psychological tricks that marketers pull off on us in order to sell us their stuff. This particular trick is called the decoy effect, and it makes people instinctively pick an option if it looks significantly better than the other one.

Those tricks are very popular and you can find them in pretty much any marketing campaign. So, first, let’s find out why they are so effective.

Why do people fall for this stuff? 

Okay, time for a big revelation. All those psychological tricks work because of the cognitive biases that all humans have. 

That’s just how our brains work — they are “lazy” and constantly look for ways to spend less energy on decision-making. Biases provide our brains with a short-cut, offering a decision that doesn’t require too much horse-power to come up with.  

Speaking of powers, that of cognitive bias is so strong, that even knowing of its existence, we simply can’t resist falling for it. That’s why they are so widely used in marketing and advertising, and that’s why you should use them, too.

In this post, I want to show you how you can exploit cognitive biases in your campaigns, improve your CTRs and conversions and eventually make people buy YOUR popcorn. 

The most common cognitive biases and how to use them in your campaigns

These methods are actually common knowledge, so I’m confident that you’ve seen them in practice. Moreover, I’m certain that you used some of them in your campaigns, maybe without even knowing it. So, it probably won’t blow your head off with novelty, but it’s always nice to have a few extra tricks up your sleeve.

The decoy effect

When people make purchasing decisions, the key factor is usually the price. You pick the option based on how much it costs, other things being equal. However, there’s a certain pricing strategy that makes you switch to a more expensive option — it’s called the decoy effect.

Let’s bring up my popcorn example. If there were only two options in front of me, small and large, I’d probably go for small, because it’s cheap and that’s just as much as I need. But the sly marketers added the third option, the mid-sized bucket, and this is what broke my thinking process.

The mid-sized bucket costs almost as much as the large one but contains disproportionately less popcorn. That makes the large bucket look superior as an option. And not only compared to the mid-sized bucket, but also to my initial choice, the small bucket. This is what the decoy effect is about: by adding an option that looks significantly worse than the other, we make this other one look more appealing to the consumer than all other alternatives. 

How to use it: The decoy effect can be used on pricing pages, landing pages, when upselling and anywhere you want to convince the user to go with a more expensive option. Decide on which option you want to push forward and add a decoy to highlight its value. 

Analysis paralysis

The choice is good, but having too much of it can be paralyzing. In today’s world of abundance, people are facing an overwhelming amount of choices every day. Your job is not to make their life harder.

The effect called analysis paralysis, or analytical paralysis, takes place when the user has too many options to choose from and none of them dominates the others, as it was in the previous example. In this situation, it becomes too complicated for a user to make up their mind, which often results in them refraining from making any choice whatsoever and leaving. 

This issue was well demonstrated by the classic Jam Experiment. A grocery store in California built a display to sell jam. At times when there were 24 flavors at the stall, the conversion was at a mere 4% level. And when there were only 6 flavours, it got to as high as 31%.

How to use it: this effect should be taken into account every time you provide people with a list of options. Pricing plans, landing pages, CTAs — they all work better when the user doesn’t have any trouble focusing. The ideal number of options is 5+/-2 and anything above that will be significantly harder to manage. So, here’s my pro tip: avoid cluttering your pricing pages or landing pages with too many options. Sometimes, the liberty of choice is just too much to handle. 

Next, we’ll have a bit of a far-fetched example, but here’s how Apple prevents analysis paralysis when selling iPhones. They never display all the models on one page not to overwhelm the shoppers. Instead, they give them the ability to compare up to 3 options by price and other characteristics. 

Anchoring

One of the things that make humans’ brains special is our ability to make comparisons, like, really fast. Its inevitable consequence is the anchoring bias. When learning something new, we place an “anchor” to the first piece of information that we find about the topic and base all our future decisions on this anchor, regardless of what information comes afterwards.  

For example, if I tell you that the prices for Kytombrian wine start from $250 a bottle, and then tell you about a shop that has a few cases on sale for only $150 a bottle, you might consider it a good deal. Even though that’s just something I made up, including the wine itself — what kind of a name is it anyway? — your brain automatically compares the “discounted” price to the original one, because the original price is the first thing you’ve learned. 

Availability heuristic

This bias demands us to go with the easiest choice. In other words, our brain thinks that the best solution is the obvious solution, or the first one that pops into our mind. To take advantage of it, you need to give people obvious solutions. Or rather, make the solution that you want them to pick seem obvious. Classic brainwashing. 

The herd instinct 

As I said, people are social animals, even if you’re not happy with the analogy. The 21st century changed it, but before humans could only survive in groups. Having a community to contribute to and take care of you guaranteed survival, that’s why the necessity for connection with other people is hard-wired into our brains. 

There are many cognitive biases that arise from it, and first of all, it’s the herd instinct. People have an instinctive desire to follow the lead of the majority, because it sends a signal to our brain that such behavior is right because it’s safe. 

How to use it: the ways of exploiting this feeling are innumerous, but you can start by capitalizing on any kind of hype. Create connotations with trending events, run seasonal campaigns, mention anything that everybody else is doing. A good example would be everything that happens on Black Friday or during the World Cup series. Betting and e-commerce are the two verticals that benefit hugely from it, but it works just as well for others. 

The bandwagon effect

Alright, so you’ve jumped on the hype train, how do you make other people join you and pump up your conversions? That’s what the bandwagon effect is for. 

The bandwagon effect is similar to the herd instinct, but it a way that it makes us believe in things if others express belief in it, too.

For example, reviews or customer stories work as social proof and serve to convince more people to try the product. And it doesn’t have to be a top-notch layout page. There are many examples in affiliate marketing when the review section imitates social media comments. 

The likeability effect

There’s one big “but” to the bandwagon effect. It only works if the people talking about their experience with your product are likable by your target audience. 

The paradox of likeability is that people have a special connection to everything and everyone that reminds them of themselves. So, if you use storytelling, make your characters relatable, let your target viewers recognize themselves in those characters. By analogy, they’ll find your product more likable.  

Unit bias 

That’s one of my favorite biases — if there can be such a thing as a “favorite bias”, but anyway — because I have a few mild OCDs, so I can completely relate. According to it, people are programmed to complete all the stages of a given task, or a task unit, simply because not finishing makes them feel “itchy” in their brain. It mainly relates to activities such as eating but also shows in other areas of life. 

Imagine eating a piece of cake. It’s creamy and spongy, and it’s your favorite flavor, and you have only one spoon left, when suddenly you hear a phone call. The natural reaction is to quickly eat the last spoon and answer it. Now imagine not doing it. Chances are this unfinished spoon will haunt you for the rest of the phone call. That’s because the task unit wasn’t completed. 

What does it have to do with advertising? Funny as it sounds, this cake thing can be applied to affiliate marketing. When the user performs a certain action, such as filling out a registration form, they invest their time and effort in it. Leaving the page with an unfilled form would make them uncomfortable on a subconscious level, so they are motivated to finish it.