Rick Kuwahara
I’m a big believer in buyer personas and how gaining insight into your ideal customer informs a lot of your marketing decisions. A lot of that insight comes from understanding psychology for growth marketing.
For example, understanding how to use decoy pricing on your pricing page can help drive conversions on the plan you want. The same principle can be carried over to other areas, such as a feature comparison against a competitor.
Here are a few of my favorite articles on how to use psychological principles for growth.
Pricing experiments you may not know, but should
Want more detail on the decoy pricing I mentioned above? Then this post from Conversion XL is for you.
Peep Laja does his usual in-depth stuff, and deep dives into pricing experiments that you can easily replicate yourself right away. The post includes insight into:
- Decoy pricing
- The magic of the number 9
- Anchoring and the contrast principle
- Straightforward pricing
- Pay what you wish
- Offering 3 options
- Price perceptions
After reading this, you’ll probably want to re-look at how you’re pricing things. I personally have found great success utilized anchor pricing to help increase ARPU for new subscribers at my day job running acquisition at a telecom.
We’ll also be using these principles over at Paubox. We’ve been experimenting with pricing and have NOT had pricing on our website for a while. But we’re looking to change that real soon.
10 Revealing Principles of Human Behavior
Hubspot is another one of those websites with a wealth of information. They cover a lot of ground, so it’s no surprise they have a great post on Marketing Psychology.
The post covers 10 psychological concepts that are helpful to understand how people operate. Here are a few of the 10 concepts covered:
- Priming – Every small details matter and can build up to a conversion
- Reciprocity – A must concept from Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion that is a must read
- Social Proof – You’ve probably heard about this one
- Decoy Effect – Hmmm, repeated for a reason?
- Scarcity – FOMO is for real
- Anchoring – Hey, we’ve heard of this before too
- The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – A long name, but an important concept
- Verbatim Effect – Remember, people remember the gist of things, not details
- Clustering – Keep this in mind to help people remember key takeaways
- Loss Aversion – This is an important concept in freemium and for retention
5 Psychology Studies That Will Help Growth Hackers
Ross Simmonds does a great job in this post outlining five psychological studies and including takeaways specific for growth marketers.
You’ll find a few repeated concepts that we’ve already seen, but that’s just because of how important some of these concepts are. But there are a couple other concepts that are helpful:
- Freedman and Fraser’s Compliance Experiment – The reason why getting a small “yes” is so important
- Kahneman’s Framing Experiment – There’s a lot of power in how you phrase a statement
- Asch’s Conformity Experiment – Humans are social people, and you should leverage that
Buyer modalities, Myers-Briggs, and more
Another epic post from the team at Conversion XL, this one explores Buyer Modalities and other personality frameworks.
This is different from a buyer persona, but actual personality tests and subsequent buyer modalities speak to the reasoning behind why people buy. It’s different than demographics or psychographics.
For example, a buyer persona may say an ideal customer is in their 30’s, married, a mid-level manager who wants to find a product that helps them look good for their boss so they can get a raise and buy a new house.
But personality-wise, that person may be defined as Spontaneous, which means we should show them “last minute” deals to take advantage of impulse buys.
Of course, there’s more to it than that and the post goes into much more detail, explaining the good and bad of modalities.
I probably explained this horribly, so be sure to read the full article to get some real understanding.
Do you have a post or resource that’s helped you get in the heads of your customers? If so, please share it in the comments below!
