It is crucial that you understand the emotional reasons why someone will part with their hard earned cash to purchase a product or service. When you understand this, you have an incredibly powerful tool to help you to influence or persuade someone, to choose your product or service over anyone else’s.
This was referred to as Pathos by the ancient Greeks. Pathos describes a level of persuasion, which understands and uses people’s emotive state to motivate them to change or move in a specific direction. The challenge we face as marketers is that people can be persuaded either by positive or negative emotions. They will respond to positive emotions like: Love, compassion, meaning contribution, joy, happiness, pride, fulfilment and recognition or negative emotions like: guilt, shame, fear, prejudice, uncertainty, greed, hate, doubt and desperation.
It is a well-known fact that we all make decisions about what we want to purchase, based 100 % on our emotions. After making any decision based on how we feel about something, only then do we use logic to justify our decision. As stated previously, both positive and negative emotions can be used by marketers as tools to persuade prospective clients to buy their products or services. My belief is that as people always buy from businesses or people they know, like and trust, it is always better to focus your message on the positive side. As you send out a message that builds positive emotions in your prospects and clients, the law of reciprocity, will ensure that you and your business will receive back positive emotions and people will begin to know, like and trust you and your business. This will turn into long term sustainable success and a positive relationship with all your clients and prospects.
Present Fewer Choices
Experience has shown me that people get confused and indecisive when they are offered too many choices by marketers or sales people. When presenting ideas or making offers to prospects or clients, it is always best to limit your offer to a maximum of three choices. All great marketers know their markets and clients so well, that they are able to sift through all the clutter and present the person with only the three most suitable options. This reduces the level of frustration on the part of the prospect or client and shows that you are in touch with their needs
Numerous studies over the past few years have shown that companies that know their markets intimately and offer their clients fewer, more well directed choices, have far better conversion ratios than companies that offer a large number of random choices to their clients. The next step is to understand the expectations of your prospect or client and to then contrast these three choices, against each other, so that they can decide which of the three choices is best suited to meet their needs.
Take a close look at your current marketing efforts and look for ways to use people’s positive emotions to help them make decisions about your products and services. An intimate knowledge about your market, prospects and clients, will put you in a great position to positively influence them to know, like, trust and see your product or service as the one that offers them the best value. Lastly make it easy for your clients or prospects to make decisions by skilfully narrowing the choices to a max of three and then helping them to choose between these three by contrasting the three choices against each other. Creating high and low contrast points that will allow them to easily compare the choices against each other, shows that you have their best interest at heart and that you know your market really well.
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