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Principles of Persuasion - Reciprocal Concessions & Reciprocity in Landing Pages

how to design fans and welcome back, we're gonna continue on in the same vein talking about principles of psychological persuasion getting people to behave in the way we want them to behave. Using concepts of reciprocity. Reciprocal concessions and anchoring three powerful kind of overlapping concepts. So without further ado, let's jump into the slides. These are concepts that are very prevalent in negotiations, which is the same sort of thing. Right? When you're negotiating with somebody, you're trying to figure out the best way to get people to the negotiating table to come up with a deal that values both parties, which is no different than making a sale or getting somebody to convert on your landing page. It has to be valuable for you and it's got to be valuable for them for the visitor, Right? Uh, this is a book give and take. Written by Chester caress caress negotiating. We've seen a few examples of one of our clients, um, also a great book. You can pick it up on amazon talks abou...

t a lot of interesting negotiating tactic, tactics and principles. Reciprocal concessions are where you offer a product or service that's too expensive. The first option and the visitor refuses, which is perceived as you conceding right? You're conceding, okay, it's not it's too expensive, right? This is not a great deal for you. You concede the visitor, your website, visitor or the other party. The buyer is more likely to concede to you on the cheaper option, Right? So for example, say, you know, your kid asks you to take them to the amusement park on a two day vacation with four of his noisy friends, right? And you said no, you can't do that. That's just, that's just ridiculous. And then he says, Okay, well, um, could I have $5 to go to the candy store? You're much more likely to give him those $5 then because you feel in need because he conceded. even though he didn't actually concede, but because he conceded and said, okay, we're not going to go to the music park. Your people feel a greater sense of debt to then concede to the other party. So you'll be more likely to to to acquiesce to that second request more. So when it followed A more outrageous request or harder to fulfill a request, then if your kid just asked, you cannot have $5, you'll be more likely to refuse that. Right? That's the concept of reciprocal concessions. Many of you probably know this. If you've studied any behavioral psychology as the door in the face technique, we'll talk about that in a second. But that's the basic concept of reciprocal concessions. Reciprocity is really the same thing. It's just simpler. Reciprocity is just a feeling of indebtedness caused by small, even small token gestures gifts. Right? So if somebody gives you a gift, somebody does you a favor, somebody treats you nicely. You people feel an innate automatic need to repay that debt. Two kind of spread the goodwill or to to give back goodwill to the person who gave them a gift, right? And these are two powerful concepts that are used in landing page design all over the place with reciprocal concessions, right? You're you're less likely to say no twice. That's ultimately what it boils down to. You said no. Once. It's just another way of saying one person conceded, then you want to concede you're just less likely to say no twice right. The requester lowers that initial request, making it more likely that the subsequent request is fulfilled. It's a kind of, it's like a psychological contract, right? This concept of reciprocity, it's it's an unwritten sort of human nature contract, we should concede to someone else who has made a concession to us. Right? So this is like, like we said, this is the door in the face technique right? Where the first option is too expensive, it's too unreasonable. It's unlikely to actually be accepted. Almost almost truly rejected. This is the concept of decoys in e commerce and services. Um, we'll talk about that in a minute. The the idea of a decoy is like, here's an option that you're not gonna buy its way above like the average price and grade of products in this space. But by virtue of the fact that you rejected, it makes you more likely to accept the more reasonable, more acceptable offer, right? So that's the idea, there's a famous study done um, with, with this idea of reciprocal concessions where people who are working on a political campaign, we're going door to door asking people if they could put some sort of signage in their front yard that promoted their candidates, right? This was done many, many years back, something that we were taught when I was doing my Master's in industrial psychology. So they did, the scientists ran an experiment where, where you had, you had one group of students campaign volunteers would ask, could we put this decal in your window? Right. Simple kind of small window decal. Can we just put on your window and they gauge the response that people said yes or no. The other group of people first went to the door and said, hey, can we put this huge signpost, right? This six ft signpost in your front yard, to which almost everybody said no, right, I don't want this massive billboard looking thing on my front yard. And then they said, okay, well would you be okay if we put this decal, this small decal on your window? And they saw a much greater response rate for people accepting the decal when they first offered when they first asked or requested, they put the billboard in the front yard. So door right there. That's the idea of door in the face, right? You get the door slammed in your face. That's a technique. You're you're trying to provoke the door being slammed in your face and then you're more likely to have the door open for you on that smaller request. But obviously the first option, it can't be too unreasonable. If it's too unreasonable, the rejection of that option won't it won't appear like a concession. Right? So if they first went over and said, hey, could we hang out in your house overnight and do a little sleepover party? And they said no, that wouldn't necessarily increase the acceptance rate of the window decal after that because that first request was too outlandish and it doesn't even feel like a concession when you rejected. Right? So can't be too unreasonable. On the right hand side, we have a picture of the behave annual conference. And this is the classical idea of reciprocal concessions, right? You go on to get a ticket, you have the all access pass regular pricing at $2400 you have the early bird pricing for $ less $1000 less. So right, So you reject that option. Right? So there's this is this conference is usability experts. Right? So putting this together. So this is this is this exact concept in play. They could have just had the early bird pricing, right? Think about it. It would take up less space on the page. Less development time. They had to create the ticket package. They had to create a checkout, right? Why not? Why not just offer me my early bird pricing with the other option crossed out. The answer is because they knew that if I first saw the expensive, almost too expensive costs for a conference of the of the non early bird pricing and I rejected it psychologically very subconsciously. I feel like like, like they conceded and now I'm going to concede And accept or be more willing to accept the early bird price of $1,500 for the conference. Right? So that's done on purpose. This is reciprocal concessions at play in landing page design, right? It's it's it's incredible. Another another reciprocal concession idea is potentially to email your prospects with discounted prices than what they saw on the website. Right? You could have certain prices, your base prices on your website, you can email your potential customers with a cheaper price in the email you and say, you know, this is our typical price. This is the price that we're gonna offer you for a special special exclusive, whatever it may be. Right? So that's the idea of reciprocal concessions. It really works when done. Right. This is kind of the concept of the decoy right? You can create a second package on your price. Let's say you have a service or even even a software package, whatever it is that you sell, even if you're a local service. If you're like we said a local plumber, right? Whatever, whatever might be a local electrician, you could have an additional service package or an hourly rate that doesn't really maybe have like one or two extra features that are not really that important to most of your people. So that would be a reason it might be a reasonable price if it included those features or included those benefits maybe like it'll include like three hours of phone consultation over the course of a year. Some something that people don't really want that in your specific space which then gets rejected as the that with the offer that's too expensive. And then the law of reciprocal concessions says that people would be more likely to accept your regular price more so than if that was the only option they saw. That's another idea. Yes, no exit intent pop overs. Here's an example of one of those over here. Right? So on this website called Optimist to actually sell a B testing software, do you want to convert your abandoning visitors into subscribers? This is a free trial offer. Right, so you're gonna get some value, you're actually gonna get a free day trial. And then that says yes, I'd like to give it a try. No, I'm not interested. Right. So I originally on the main landing page, I originally rejected the offer of actually buying the software for $29 a month and now they're asking me I'll give it to you for free. Right? You can have it for free. So I'm more likely to concede now after I rejected their pay trial than if they just offered me the free trial right away. Right, so again, a powerful example of reciprocal concessions at play. You could offer a page sign up than a free trial. Right? Just exactly this example. And and and you see how it kind of works on the, on the right hand side in this slide. This is actually landing page that that we redesigned for a client of ours that only has one pricing options. Right? When they came to us, this is a cloud computing company. They really only had one option. So we redesigned their landing pages and we said, hey, we want to use this concept of reciprocal concessions were gonna offer the radar entrepreneur plan with some additional features significantly more expensive Than your most popular option which was the $99 a month. We created a much cheaper plan that that was stripped of the main features that we also knew people would would essentially reject. And this also includes the concept of anchoring and I want to talk to you about what an anchor is in social psychology, in decision making and anger is the first and most prominent option that's offered. It could be in a business negotiation, it could be on a website, right? It's just the first information I get. It could be on a sales call robert guilty. He talks a lot about anchoring in his book pre suasion people have a very strong tendency to rely very heavily mentally on that first piece of information that anchor and then all subsequent options tend to get evaluated in the context of how far it is away from that anchor, meaning that's why it's called an anchor kind of stays still in the in the consciousness of the potential consumer and other options. Then get evaluated. Is it is it above the anchor? Is it below the anchor? The anchor is a fixed item in the person's mind. It's the first thing that was kind of thrown out. Obviously this is commonly used with pricing, it's the most relevant application of the idea of anchoring, although there are other applications as well. You offer that expensive, expensive option as the first thing, the most prominent thing a person sees. And then the other options are evaluated within the context of the anchor. And this is kind of why it overlaps with reciprocal concessions a lot. Because if you create an anchor that people will reject not only will be people focusing on that anchor and then you might be able to get a higher price, but they also have that additional 12 punch combo of the need to reciprocate and actually accept that cheaper option. That more acceptable option. The same thing we spoke about with a decoy. You could offer something that you don't really expect to sell. There's nothing wrong with that right. This is psychological techniques at play, right? This is how marketing works. You could offer things that you don't expect to sell. Our clients do it businesses do it all the time, right? It's it's done on purpose. Good use of anchors allows you to convert more people for a higher price. And without the anchor, we're gonna pause here. But in the very next lecture, I'm going to show you a really cool real life case study, a usability test that we ran that proves this concept very clearly of the power of an anchor. The powerful influence psychologically it has. So I suggest you stick around. I think you're gonna like to see this, these these results. And with that I will see you guys in a very few seconds as we will continue Part two talking about reciprocity, reciprocal concessions and anchoring. See you guys in a few seconds.