12 Ways to Persuade People to Buy From You

I’ve pre­vi­ously men­tioned Robert Allen and believe him to be one of the vision­ar­ies in the sub­ject of cre­at­ing streams of rev­enue in your life.  In Mitch Mey­er­son’s Suc­cess Secrets of the Online Mar­ket­ing Super­stars, Robert Allen teaches that there are 12 ways (or prin­ci­ples) to per­suade peo­ple to buy from you.

1. Give Gifts — I dis­cussed this in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle about How to Make Money by Giv­ing.  It doesn’t make sense at first, but giv­ing gifts increases cus­tomer trust in you and makes them more open to buy from you.
2. Take Baby Steps — tell peo­ple they don’t have to make big com­mit­ments so there is less resis­tant to tak­ing the plunge to buy your product/service.  The clas­sic exam­ple I can think of here is a car deal­er­ship giv­ing you the oppor­tu­nity to “try before you buy”, let­ting cus­tomers drive a new car for a week­end before mak­ing a com­mit­ment to buy the automobile.
3. Pop­u­lar­ity — show that your prod­uct or ser­vice is pop­u­lar with other peo­ple.  That’s part of why you see the heavy use of tes­ti­mo­ni­als of prod­ucts so much out there.
4. Cred­i­bil­ity — This estab­lished how believ­able you are and whether your prod­uct or ser­vice will help them.  For exam­ple, Mercola.com has a tremen­dous amount of cred­i­bil­ity because of these two let­ters behind the founder’s name — M.D.
5. Cre­ate Scarcity — you want peo­ple to act sooner rather than later when it comes to buy­ing your product/service.  A sales line like — “First 100 peo­ple who buy get a dis­count” is one way of cre­at­ing the feel­ing of scarcity.
6. Hon­esty — when peo­ple know you aren’t per­fect but you are truth­fully try­ing to help them, they are more likely to trust you and your product.
7. Cre­ate Rap­port — Build a rela­tion­ship with peo­ple and they are more likely to buy from you.  With all the social mar­ket­ing tools — like Face­book and Twit­ter — the abil­ity to inter­act with people’s com­ments on blogs, this job has become easier.
8. Cre­ate Urgency — while scarcity is a lim­ited num­ber, urgency is a lim­ited time.  It also urges cus­tomers to act now rather than later.  Depart­ment stores do this all the time: “Sale Ends Saturday!”
9. Greed for Plea­sure — I would re-phrase this to “desire” for plea­sure since greed con­notes some­thing that is bad.  Peo­ple nat­u­rally  seek plea­sure — that is not a bad thing.  Sell your product/service as a solu­tion to add more plea­sure to their lives.
10. Fear of Loss or Pain — Another nat­ural char­ac­ter­is­tic is to avoid pain.  Sell you prod­uct or ser­vice as a solu­tion to avoid a spe­cific trou­ble or pain in their lives.
11. Belong­ing — Join­ing a group spurs some peo­ple to buy.  They want to be a part of what your are doing.  Newslet­ters lend them­selves to this prin­ci­ple of persuasion.
12. Curios­ity — Mr. Allen says he uses the phrase “If you miss this, you’ll kick your­self.”  It helps pro­mote action because peo­ple nat­u­rally want to find out more because of curiosity.

You will be more suc­cess­ful in per­sua­sion if you can incor­po­rate these prin­ci­ples in your busi­ness plans.

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