How to Use Powerful Psychological Triggers in Your Sales Letter

Words have a significant influence on how we react to things. Let’s drill down a little deeper and look at some powerful psychological triggers or “hot buttons” that you can use to persuade your visitors to take action.

These techniques are known as psychological triggers because they trigger certain actions or thoughts in us subconsciously. These could be words, images or sounds. People use them all the time – not just in sales letters, but also in everyday life.

1. Power of association:
Association is a trigger where the person using it wants his/her audience to associate a certain emotion or  thought when using their product.

For example, a print ad or a TV commercial that shows a good-looking woman or a successful man driving a luxury car. Automatically you associate beauty and success with that image. It triggers a desire in you to want to own that same car for you to look as good or be as successful as the model.

2. Power of reciprocity:
It is human nature to reciprocate when someone does something nice for us otherwise we tend to feel guilty. That is exactly what clever copywriters are counting on when they use reciprocity as a trigger.

The reason it works so well is that we have an innate need to repay a “debt.” When someone gives us something, we feel the need to reciprocate and give back.

Think of the Hare Krishna followers that used to hang around the airports. They would give you a token gift like a flower or a pack of incense sticks and would refuse to take it back even if you said no. Out of sheer guilt, you would make a donation, probably larger than the norm. I know I have been a victim of this marketing strategy.

In the world of online marketing, the equivalent is your free giveaway. If you have useful content in your freebie, you are more likely to keep that subscriber for a long time and convince them to buy a paid product from you.

Don’t go overboard with this technique because people online are very suspicious. They may be thinking, “What’s the catch?” which is exactly opposite of what you want them to think.

3. Power of reasons:
To overcome the “what’s the catch” syndrome, you need to provide compelling reasons for your offer. Reasons can go a long way in lowering their resistance if your reasons are believable enough. To demonstrate this phenomenon, Harvard Social Psychologist, Ellen Langer and two of her colleagues did an experiment at the university library to see how people would react to someone asking to cut in front of them to use the copying machine.

At first, the request was a simple “Excuse me, I have five pages to copy. May I use the copy machine?” It was found that only about 60% of the people in line complied.

When they added a reason to the request, “…because I’m in a rush,” almost 94% of the people agreed to the request. Strangely enough the compliance rate remained at about 93% even when adding an obvious reason like “because I have to make copies.”

It seems clear from that experiment that adding a reason, no matter how obvious can have a huge impact on people’s reaction.

So if you have a reason, even a transparent one, then tell the prospect that the $1 trial is because you hope they will be so impressed with it that they’ll either continue with the subscription or pay the full price for future products or they will buy other products from you.

4. Power of curiosity:
Curiosity killed the cat is a common saying to warn us against being too curious lest we come to harm. Yet, even the cat falls prey to this ploy each time. If you can make someone curious about your sales message or your product, then you can grab their attention long enough to persuade them to take action.

Curiosity is a powerful emotional trigger to overcome our natural tendency to tune out sales messages because we are constantly bombarded with them. The key is to incorporate curiosity in the normal flow of your message. Where can you leave them hanging in anticipation to learn more?

I remember reading a sales letter about a product for driving traffic to your site. I was about to dismiss it as just another ho-hum IM product, when I noticed that the copy mentioned that this product focused on teaching you one powerful technique. Then they showed a long list of what the product was not.

I was curious enough to scan through the list to get to what was the one powerful technique. I don’t recall whether I bought the product or not but I do know it stopped me from closing the page after 10 seconds.

5. Fear of loss:
We all fear losing things, losing our pets, our loved ones, or even our favorite items, but we also fear losing a good deal or offer.

That is why people give time limits on special offers. If you were planning on going to the store, it entices you to go while the special offer is good and not wait.

This works extremely well as long as you combine it with a reason like discussed before and as long as you haven’t destroyed your credibility by doing it too often in the past, especially if you failed to take the offer off when you said it would end.

Add some genuine fear into a reader with the loss of certain bonuses or make it available only in a limited quantity. You could say you want to reward the first 50 customers only with the bonus. That sounds more real than saying limited stock when you are selling a digital product.

Use these five powerful psychological triggers in your sales letter and you’ll get a positive bounce in your conversion.

My eBook, “Words to Profit,” will teach you how to get inside the head of the reader and to write words that plug directly into their brain so they are hardwired into your sales message until you choose to let them go. Write powerful words to get the results you want. Learn more about writing powerful words that sell »