Many Body Theory

One of the best books ever is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini. This is a six chapter book where each chapter is a different “weapon” on how to influence people. What I love about this book is that he takes examples from what people have done in the past — what is also great is that he takes a scientific approach versus the MBA approach when showing how tests were run.

Seriously, read this book. Whether you’re an affiliate, in-house marketer, selling your services.. whatever it may be: this is a must read and should only take you a week if you spend 1 - 2 hours a day on it. I have seen offers go from barley profitable to 2x-3x ROI when making changes based off of these six weapons of influence.

Reciprocation - People tend to return a favor. Thus, the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing.

Affiliates — That “free trial” where you’re giving away a month’s free of your product and all you ask in return is for the buyer to pay for the shipping/handling.

Commitment and Consistency - If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement.

Affiliates — this is why email/zip submits work. Just get the person in the funnel and interacting with the website.

Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing.

Affiliates — Doesn’t this sound like those “Ashley placed this game on Facebook” or “5 people think they are smarter than you” type ads? It also should remind you of all of those fake blogs.

Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures.

Affiliates — can you say: Oprah? This is why affiliate offers leach off of celebrities and the offer page will mention that the product has been featured in 60 Minutes, NY Times, etc.

Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people that they like.

Affiliates — This is why you always want to have attractive people in your creatives and landing pages. People like attractive people.

Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will generate demand. For example, saying offers are available for a “limited time only” encourages sales.

Affiliates — how many times do those landing pages have a countdown clock whenever an order is supposed to be made?

This entry was posted by Nicholas Abramovic on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a thought provoking comment, or trackback from your own site.