Persuading effortlessly with Influence

Do you want to know how website copywriters write sales pages that jiu jitsu readers to take action?

Picture this… You walk into a business where you’re greeted by a friendly salesman. The salesman explains his products to you while handing over free samples. You thank the salesman for the samples. Not at all, he says, while pointing to a wall of photographs of happy customers. After the salesman runs through the features and benefits of what’s on offer, he lowers his voice. He wants you to know, sales are going crazy and everything is nearly sold out. In no time at all, he won’t have anything left to sell you however much you want the products.

You walked through the door mildly curious. Now, through some Jedi mind trick, you’re opening your wallet, relieved that you got here just in time.

Actually, there was more than one Jedi mind trick in that mix and all of those “tricks” can be found in Robert Cialdini’s incredible book, Influence. These principles can be used to sell any product or service in person or in words. If there were a copywriting Wikipedia, you can bet Cialdini’s principles would be there as a cornerstone.

There’s more to persuasion than a killer value proposition

Your audience is doing its research but making decisions fast, maybe on the headlines only. You might have a great value proposition, but you might still miss out if you don’t know how to benefit from your audience’s mental shortcuts. But once your copywriter has your marketing and advertising dialed-in, your content and sales could be benefiting from primal psychology.

The best ever copywriting book that isn’t (explicitly) about copywriting

Back in 1984, Robert Cialdini was moved to write Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. His words detailed the research behind what would later be known as Cialdini’s Six Principles of Influence. The research resulted in principles can be used in any business or industry for face-to-face sales, copywriting or content marketing. These incredible tools of persuasion are

* Likeability

* Reciprocity

* Social proof

* Commitment

* Scarcity

* Authority    

Copywriters make these six principles the bedrock of successful copywriting for the products or services they’re marketing. In fact, if you’ve ever been persuaded by any marketing, scratch the surface and one or more of the six principles will be at work. That’s why the principles of influence are taught in our landing page copywriting course.

So there’s nothing new about the principles, they just get put to new uses by copywriters. Today, for example, Influence is applied by businesses to their conversion rate optimisation (CRO) for websites, landing pages, social media and anywhere they write marketing copy. CRO is just like any form of marketing: it’s all about content for sales pages that taps into human psychology to persuade potential customers to take the action you want them to take: a conversion.

By understanding how these principles work on readers, your copywriter can use the principles in your copywriting and website design to turn your readers into clients. 

In this lesson, we’ll look at all six of Cialdini’s principles of influence as they apply to website copywriting.