Eight Mind Hacks for More Money

 10/14/2019 12:00:00 AM
Views: 6,675
3 Minutes, 12 Second
 Written By John Marx
Tags:eCommerce

Eight Mind Hacks for More Money

There are eight proven mind hacks to get your customers to purchase more, spend more, and add more profits to your bottom line. These are some of the tactics we use for all of our clients with their eCommerce and in-store sales.

Overly Priced Item

When you list your pricing, you have one item that is priced 30% or more from other products. Businesses use this trick to get you to realize all of the other products are also be priced higher but are a "good value" due to being a lower price than the overly priced item. When you list rates in this way, you are using a technique called price anchoring and works in getting people to spend more than they originally intended.

Happy Coupons

Coupons themselves will not make you happy. Businesses use discount coupons to change the chemical balance in our brain to be satisfied. Dr. Paul J Zack conducted an A/B study in 2012 looked at how coupons impacted our happiness, stress, and health. The study showed that the test group that received a discount coupon:

  •  38% increase in their brain oxytocin
  • 11% happier feeling
  • 32% reduction in their respiration rate
  • 5% reduction in their heart rate

People purchasing with discount coupons were less stressed and more relaxed. This increased spending more money than the non-coupon group.

First time buyers are 57% more likely to purchase as they don't want to lose the money savings from the discount coupon.

Buy One Get One Free Offers

Everybody loves free, and if you can offer something to them for free, they will purchase the product more often. If you give someone a discount coupon or offer them free many will take the free option over the discount coupon. The word free tricks the mind that they are getting a better deal even if the discount coupon would give them a better deal.

Volume Purchases

Many of us are extremely bad at math. When given a discount coupon or a volume discount, many will choose the volume discount. Given a 33% discount coupon or a 33% increase in volume, often the discount coupon will give you a lower cost for the item. People tend to see 33% more in size and make a quick assumption that the better deal is 33% increase rather than a discount.

Remove the decimal (Prestige Pricing)

When pricing your goods and services by having your price as a round number, people are more prone to purchase. When we see a product like 399.99 our brain takes longer to process the amount. This makes us think about the pricing more and see it as not as good of a deal. When we switch the pricing to 400 we can understand the number easily and make a decision more quickly.

Note: Prestige pricing is done for luxury brands.

Keep the decimal

Above, we were talking about our luxury brand clients. Here we are talking about us regular folk. JCPenney did a test of changing prices from 19.99 to 20.00. A price change of just a penny. What they saw was a 30% decrease in sales. Our mind looks at the first digit and determines that the 19.99 is the least intimidating price

Font Sizes

Here are some other mind tricks that we will routinely use to get people to spend more money. We show the regular price (with a line through) that is a few font sizes larger.

More free stuff

Including words like "complimentary shipping & returns," we know is backed into the overall pricing. What we're doing is we're pulling someone in based on a feeling rather than logic. Included shipping is based on the furthest shipped distance. Items shipped closer are usually cheaper, and increasing the overall business bottom line.