When it comes to eCommerce, behavioural psychology is more relevant than ever. From power words to colourful CTAs to genuine interest in our customers, Behavioural psychologist, Padraig Walsh joins us to help get our heads around the role of consumer psychology in eCommerce and how to improve our online presence with behavioural design.
Padraig has worked internationally exploring influences on human behaviour. He uses his expertise to support behaviour change in commercial, educational and healthcare settings. Padraig also hosts a weekly podcast The Behaviour Vaccine which explores how Behavioural Science influences everyday issues such as habit change, well being, financial health and more recently Covid-19.
What has behavioural psychology got to do with eCommerce?
Human behaviour is motivated by its consequences and influenced by the physical environment and previous experiences.
Physical stores and eCommerce websites are both informed by behavioural science and set up in a particular way to lead customers towards either habitual behaviours or specific buying behaviours.
As eCommercers we have to understand what our customers want and what motivates their behaviour. How do we engage with them and what prompts do we use on our websites to influence their behaviour?
But first, we need to understand how our brains influence our behaviour. Simply:
Our unconscious or emotional brain drives our behaviour without us even knowing, also known as our habits.
Our conscious brain, which contains our frontal lobe, gives us the ability to think and feel a particular way.
When we are first learning a new skill our conscious brains are on overload but as time progresses we build habits to make the new skill easier and allow our unconscious brain to take over. Our brains are always looking for mental shortcuts to make decisions.
This tactic feeds into our availability bias or in that we are more likely to recall or choose things that we are familiar with. It’s designed to influence the behaviour of a customer more than they are consciously aware and nudge them towards a particular product with as few steps as possible.
And this is where eCommerce becomes informed.
On eCommerce websites we need to look at how many steps our customers need to take to get to their goal.
With the familiarity of websites like Amazon our unconscious brain takes over because we are already in the habit of buying by two clicks. It’s a habit by which we are removing the step of thinking and instead just seeing and doing.
Three key things to remember when designing a website:
1. Stick with the familiar. Don’t try and go against the norms.
There's a really good reason why so many websites have now taken the Instagram model of a story followed by a story followed by a story. They take the habits that we have developed on one platform and try to model that environment into another because they know that our environment influences our behaviour.
When we go onto a website and are motivated to purchase something, we don’t want to be floating around trying to navigate through a new system. We just want to get to our goal as quickly as possible without having to overwhelm our brains - the path of least resistance.
By having a website that functions the way everyone expects it to, it will make it easier for customers to make a purchase. Familiar environments kick in habits and paths of least resistance.
2. Engage your customers without overwhelming them.
People need to understand what our websites do very very quickly. Our goal is to create a simple user experience that is full of white space, visuals and bite sized chunks of information to help them decide where they want to go. They don’t want to be overwhelmed by having to use their conscious brain.
Based on Padraig’s initial point about our behaviour being influenced by what motivates us and by consequences, one of the things that he is doing on his own website is funnelling people to see what exactly they are interested in.
Good websites engage and ask questions at the start to understand motivations and pressure points and create a conversation to help the customer rather than talking about themselves.
Instead of filling your homepage with everything that you do and offer, build in the information at the customers pace to engage them.
Focus on simplifying with lots of white space and building that momentum.
3. Lower barriers to purchase
In this pandemic we have all seen the surge in people purchasing online because frankly, going to the shops is far more time consuming and overwhelming with having to remember to take a mask, use hand gel and stay socially distanced.
Since there are now more barriers to go to the shop, people are more likely to register on websites and be more open to putting up with the inconvenience of setting up accounts to provide their name, address, email address etc etc. This hassle has been removed during the pandemic.
Once you have the consumer on your site, Padraig stresses that the one click model of purchasing and upselling are really important and useful because they feed into habit.
He also talks about the importance of understanding an anchoring bias - our tendency to base value on a reference point that we understand to be good value and what the alternatives are. The reference point of our customers has a direct connection to when they will reach the sales point. Our job is to remove the barriers so that they can reach the sales point more quickly and easily. Create membership models so that customers who have signed up can simply login instead of having to re-enter details.
Takeaway #1 Stick with familiar website design instead of trying to go against the norms.
Takeaway #2 Engage your customers without overwhelming them.
Takeaway #3 Lower barriers to purchase.
Connect with Padraig Walsh
LinkedIn:Padraig Walsh
Podcast:The Behavioural Vaccine Podcast
Website:Actualise Academy