Many business owners are comfortable using sales psychology to bring in new customers to their physical stores. The problem arises when they want to increase traffic, sales and conversions on their website and become unsure of what does and what doesn’t work on the internet.

As with any sales technique, you need to understand the triggers that make people buy, and you need to provide a solution to their problems.  With a website, as opposed to a physical store with sales people on hand, you only have the words and images on a page to convert your visitors.

So your web copy and sales messages need to hit your visitor’s trigger points and draw them successfully along the sales funnel. Let’s take a look at one of the most successful uses of sales psychology, which easily translates to online marketing, and that is how to focus on our pain and pleasure triggers.

The psychology of pain/pleasure triggers

Why do people run marathons, climb mountains or jump out of planes? At our most basic level, we do it for pleasure. The sense of fulfilment you feel when you complete a marathon, reach the top of the mountain or make your first parachute jump are all related to the feeling of pleasure.

On the other hand, we might procrastinate about learning a new technique at work, about fixing our budget or writing a resume, because we want to avoid the feeling of failure, loss or a lack of self-esteem. You could say that we avoid them because we want to avoid pain.

You may or may not agree with the above examples, but it is fair to say that most of us do things that give us pleasure and avoid those that cause us pain. This is the heart of sales psychology and if you can identify the psychological triggers that cause people to feel pain or pleasure and use these in your sales copy, you can increase your sales and conversions significantly.

Using pain/pleasure triggers to make sales

To use the pain/pleasure triggers in your sales copy, you can either focus on how your service helps them to achieve a goal (pleasure) or helps them to overcome a frustrating problem (avoid pain).

When you want to introduce the psychology of pleasure into your sales copy, think of the benefits of your products or services to your customers.  For someone who needs to write a resume, they might look for a service that provides online templates, making the writing process easier, less taxing and faster.

When you want to introduce the psychology of pain into your copy, think of the problems that your products or services are designed to overcome. For example, someone who needs to manage multiple social media accounts, might look for a service that lets them manage all their accounts on one platform, avoiding the frustration of juggling so many different accounts.

Sales psychology is a fundamental part of online marketing and using pain/pleasure triggers in the right way, can be a very successful strategy, increasing your traffic, sales and conversions. If you need help with marketing your online business, contact us on 02 8097 7957, email us at hello@conversionworx.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.