Using Cognitive Bias to Increase Product Sales, with James Swanwick

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In this episode, James Swanik, co founder and CEO of Swanik Sleep, goes through a checklist of cognitive biases our potential customers experience while deciding if they're going to purchase a product. This checklist has resulted in double, triple, and even sometimes quadruple the amount of sales for any given product at Swanik Sleep when applied correctly. This is part of the reason why James and his brother were able to build a million dollar brand in only 11 months. So now, without any further ado, here is James Swanik on Freedom Fastlane podcast.

Hello Freedom Fastlaners. James Swanik here. I am the co founder and CEO of Swanick Slee, which helps people sleep better through our Swannies blue light blocking glasses. I'm also the founder of the 30 Day no Alcohol Challenge program which helps social drinkers reduce or quit alcohol. And I'm also the host of the James Swanick show podcast which you can find in itunes. You may have heard me on a recent episode of Freedom Fastlane where Ryan interviewed me about how my brother and I were able to build our blue light blocking glasses company from zero to a million dollars in sales in 11 months on Amazon. And all I did was really follow Ryan's blueprint. And I said it on the podcast recently. Thank you very much to Ryan for showing me what the blueprint was. It was awesome. So I did follow Ryan's blueprint for Amazon and now today we actually make a lot of sales of our Suan's Blue out blocking glasses off Amazon on Shopify. And I know Ryan is huge on wanting to build a brand rather than building an Amazon business, you want to build a brand. Now in this particular episode, I'm going to share with you what we do over at Swanic Sleep to try double, triple and sometimes quadruple sales by just going through a checklist of cognitive biases. And cognitive biases are little things that you can put on your website that make the prospect want to turn into a customer. Okay, so during this podcast I'm going to be talking about things including highlighting your prospect's pain, talking about the benefits of your product and not talking about the features, how and why to use testimonials, how to use scarcity, how to demonstrate to your prospect that your product is affordable and an amazing deal. I'm gonna be talking about the use of video, how to make things so easy for the prospect to Buy and removing obstacles that get in the way of them buying. And if we can do all of these things, and if you follow these things, what we're trying to achieve is this thing called a lollapalooza effect. It's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it? A lollapalooza effect. And what a lollapalooza effect is, is that when you combine everything that we're going to talk about all together, you kind of get the prospect into this frenzy in their mind, either a subconscious or a conscious frenzy where they're like, I have to buy. Okay, great, I'm going to buy. So now it's moved from you like, oh, you should buy, you should buy, you should buy. To them actually saying, oh, I've got to buy this, I have to have this. That's what a lollapalooza effect is. Okay, so let's get into it, shall we? I'm gonna give you all these ways that we use to help people take action and buy our Suwannee's blue light blocking glasses and ways in which you can implement it on your website, whether it's on Amazon or off Amazon, to help people make the buying decision with your product. So first of all, you wanna always talk about benefits. Not features. Benefits, benefits, benefits. Okay, so that means what will your product do for the potential customer? How will it benefit their life? You don't want to talk about how big it is and what it's made of and all this kind of stuff. You want to talk about how that person's life is going to change as a result of using your product. So for example, on our swanwicksleep.com homepage, we have a big headline that says sleep Better. Now, that's benefit, that's not features. Right? That's a benefit. The benefit is that people will sleep better if they use our products. If we did what most people do on their websites and put features, and a feature would be blue light blocking glasses with acetate frames and fits perfectly on your face. And it's made from AC40, special ingredients and all this kind of stuff, no one cares. All people care about is how does your product benefit them? So our headline is Sleep Better. Everyone understands that you can go on and on and on about benefits and people are like, yes, yes, yes, I get it, I want to buy. So an example of talking about benefits versus features. Let's just say you're trying to sell a hair iron to a woman, okay? You wouldn't tell them what the product is. And you know how heavy it is in your hand and how much heat it generates and what plastic it's made of. Nobody cares, right? The woman just wants to know, like, what's the benefit to them of using this particular hair iron? And, and what you may do is say something like, you know, oh, guess what? There's something that just came out of Hollywood that all the celebrities are using that you have to know about. Have you ever wanted a guy so badly that it hurts? Have you ever been hurt by a guy so badly that he left you at home crying? If you're walking down the street, I can show you in 30 minutes how you'd be prettier than all the other girls that you had got. You could get any guy you wanted, that guys would be turning their heads at you and would be paying attention to you. I'm going to show you what it is. And then that would be the hair iron. So that's an example of talking about benefits. So a feature is talking about the hair iron. It's like, this is so great and you can hold it and it has all this heat. And the benefit is how to turn guys heads, right? So you're talking about the benefit versus the features. So if you go to swanicsleep.com, you can see on our site, the benefit is sleep better. And then we say fall asleep quicker, sleep deeper, wake up feeling great. So I would encourage you to look at your Amazon page, your off Amazon page, and just look on your homepage and ask yourself, are we leading with benefits? Are we talking about benefits, not features? The other thing there is you want to talk about pain. Okay, you want to talk about pain. So in that example of the woman, I use the pain of, you know, not being seen by guys, right? So for our product, we know that the pain for our potential customers is that they have trouble falling asleep, they toss and turn in the night and they wake up feeling tired. Okay? So all over our website we have that language, we have their pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. So we say things like, do you have trouble falling asleep? Do you toss and turn in the night? Do you wake up feeling tired? That's pain, right? Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. And so we've identified what our customer's pain is. And then we plaster that all over the site. And what that's doing to someone subconsciously and consciously is going, yes, that's me. This person gets me. This company understands. Yes, yes, yes, I do have trouble falling asleep. I do toss and turn in the night. I do wake up tired. Yes, this person gets me. So we're talking about pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. You just go on and on and on about talking about people's pain. So people go, yes, they understand. I understand this. You had a product rather that was selling pickup for guys. Like how to approach women, for example. If guys were hopeless with women and you're trying to sell them a product on how they could be better with women, you might say, hey, have you ever seen an attractive girl in a club? You've walked up to her only for her to laugh at you or ignore you and walk away. Do you remember how lousy that made you feel inside? And so by asking that, you're getting the person going, yes, yes, yes, I feel that pain. So again, look on your website. Try and find if you've identified what your potential customer's pain is and then put it all over your. Your website. Okay? Count how many times you use the word you on your sales page or on your Amazon page, or on your Shopify page or wherever it is. Why ou. You have to speak to one person, not a group of people. You want to speak to one person. You want the reader or the viewer to feel like you're talking to just them. So an exercise I do whenever I want to figure out whether I'm talking to the prospect directly or not is I will count how many times I use the word you on my sales page. And whatever that number is, I will then try to triple. Sounds crazy. But if you do that, if you use the word you, you, you, you, you, as many times as you possibly can, the person that is reading that will feel like you are speaking to them. It's so powerful. So go to your website, have a look, count how many times the word you is there, and then triple it. It increases conversions. Scarcity. So scarcity is a. Is something that you can put on your website, and that may mean putting up, you know, something that says limited stock in limited supply. You might, if you're selling an information product or whatever it is, you might say, this is a test product for a small group, doors closing soon for a limited time. For example, scarcity can be very good when there's like a holiday weekend. If you're doing sales, like if, let's say it was Memorial Day weekend, or it was Thanksgiving weekend, or it was Black, Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Scarcity is great because you can say, you know, the deal runs out at midnight on the 27th. Scarcity. So they. So it's scarce. They only have a certain amount of time to Be able to make a decision. Likewise, if you're running out of stock, rather than just saying, oh look, we're running out of stock, you might want to put up a sign next to, you know, your product on your page. It says limited stock. Amazon do this very well. They put up a little thing that says like 9 left or 20 left or 30 left in stock. It creates scarcity. And when you create that scarcity, it tends to make people want to make the purchase right there and then so they don't run out. Okay, so scarcity. Have a look on your websites and see if you've got enough scarcity going there. Testimonials is a huge thing that's worked really well for Swanee's blue light blocking glasses. And that is we get people to wear our glasses and then we asked them to send us through a selfie video of them saying, before I wore my Swannie's glasses, my sleep was awful. And then since I've been wearing my Swannies blue light blocking glasses, my sleep is terrific. And what testimonials does to the human brain is it creates social proof bias or social proof tendency. It's one of these cognitive biases that I was referencing at the top of this episode. And social proof biases is a tendency to, to think and act as others around you are thinking and acting. So if you can show that there's a whole group of people who love your product and you can show proof of this through video testimonials or photo testimonials or written testimonials, the human brain tends to feel safer with that, which makes a prospect go, oh, I see everyone else is buying this. Oh, this person had results. I want those results. Well, everyone else is doing it, then I should definitely do it. So that social proof tendency kicks in and it makes the prospect want to purchase. It makes the prospect feel safer just on safety as well. And some things you can do to make your customer feel safer about buying from you is to put on your homepage a phone number and an address. So if you go to the top of the swanicsleep.com page, you'll see it says call us toll free USA. And there's a phone number there. We also say email us and we have an email that says support swanicksleep.com and we do that deliberately because we want people to think that we're a real company. It's amazing. Like when we didn't have that, our conversions were a certain way. And when we added that, our conversions increased not a lot, but enough that it was noticeable. So if you don't have a toll free number at the top of your website and you don't have an email address and you're not encouraging them to email you, you could be hurting your conversions. Okay, so making people feel safe, you can do that by putting an email address and a phone number. Authority bias is another cognitive function. Authority bias is when you might put something like as seen on the Huffington Post or as seen on CNN.com and this authority bias, it's basically making your product seem like it's an authority or it's making you seem like an authority. So again, if you go to swanicksleep.com youm'll see underneath the video we have as seen on Live with Kelly. That's the Live with Kelly show, Bulletproof Radio, Ben Greenfield podcast, Yahoo Health, the Huffington Post, Entrepreneur magazine, Elite Daily, Channel 7 News, which is a TV show in Australia. We put that as seen on there for authority bias. Now, authority bias means is that people that wow, you know, if the Huffington Post wrote about this product, it must be legit. Oh my God. Well, if they were on the Live with Kelly show, then this is the real deal. This is not a scam after all. So even if you haven't got on mainstream television shows or mainstream press, even if you've been featured in a blog, a health blog, even if it's not particularly well read, you should put on your page as seen on and then put the name of that blog. Because when you do that, it increases your authority bias. And subconsciously and consciously, the prospect is trusting you a lot more and is more inclined to buy. Just going back also to social proof as well, There's a product on our Shopify page. It's an app plugin called yo yo. And basically in the bottom left of our Shopify page, every five to 10 seconds, something will pop up and it will say, someone from this city just bought Swannie's blue light blocking glasses. And it says three hours ago. And then 10 seconds will go by and then it'll pop up again and say, hey, someone in Paris, France just bought Swannie's blue light blocking glasses. And as I'm recording this now I'm looking at it, it says, someone from Austin just purchased 100% pure silk sleeping mask four hours ago. And it pops up with a little image of the product that you're selling. So if you have an off Amazon website, I would encourage you to download that app. It's called Yo Y y O. And that again will just show your prospect. Oh, look, people around the world are actually buying this at the moment and they're doing it like in real time. The other thing is, if you can add reviews like the stars, like if you've got four and a half or five star reviews, if you can somehow add that and put it next to your product, that is good social proof as well. And a lot of these things you can actually, when someone leaves an Amazon review, you can actually suck those Amazon reviews to instantaneously go onto your off Amazon website and to show as testimonials, which again is more social proof. Availability bias, okay. Is one of the cognitive biases, availability bias. And what that means is that you want to make sure that what you want the prospect to do is available to them. And I know this sounds so simple, but you want to add CTAs, which stands for calls to action. So you have to tell people what to do. You have to tell them. Click here. Click this button. Shop. Now you have to put a little arrow. If you're doing a video, you have to say something like, hey, there's a little button below this video. Click on the button right now. You wouldn't believe how many people get this wrong. Where the availability of the, of the buttons are buried deep down below the fold. Below the fold means sort of below that, that first screen. If someone comes on your website, above the fold means what they see on that first screen. Below the fold means they have to scroll down to see it. You have to put call to action CTAs in very prominent places on your website, either above the fold or scattered all the way through below the fold. And like I said in a video, you got to tell people, hey, there's a button down below. Click that button and you can even use your finger and point to it. Like literally point down below. You have to tell people what to do. Click here. Click this video sign up. Now there's a little box right here to the left. Click on that box. It's going to take you here. Like you got to tell people what to do. If you don't tell people what to do, they won't know what to do. And you're going to be very poor at availability bias. Okay? And that's going to hurt your conversions. There's a lot of different personality types of people who are going to buy from you. There are people who are very emotional. There are people who are very logical. There are people who are action takers. There are people who have very practical personality types. You want to cater to all of them we have on our homepage@swanicsleep.com we appeal to emotional types as well. So we have there, our mission is to help you and 1 million others sleep better tonight so you can live a healthier, happier life tomorrow. And so we're appealing to emotional types who believe in a bigger mission. And we believe in a bigger mission by the way, like we do have that mission. We want to help 1 million people sleep better. But we make sure we tell our prospects that we have a mission and that our mission is to help 1 million people sleep better so they can live a healthier, happier life. Now notice in that particular sentence that I used the word you two times. In that sentence I don't say our mission is to help a million people sleep better tonight so they can live a healthier, happier life tomorrow. No, I don't say that. I say our mission is to help you and 1 million others sleep better tonight so you can live a healthier, happier life tomorrow. So there's the use of you there. And then appealing to the emotional type, which means appealing to a bigger mission. There's a company I think called Toms Shoes and they do this really well where for every pair of shoes that are bought, they give away a pair of to people in need. That's great. That's appealing to a, to a mission and appealing to emotional types. Let's have a look here. Video, video, video, video killed the radio star, right? If you can put lots and lots of video on your website that is going to increase conversions. That's what we have found. So on our product page we used to have still photos of our Swannies blue light blocking glasses, of our sleeping mask, of our magnesium spray, of our supplement which is called Better Nights. We used to have these photos there and we have put a little blurb next to it and we talk about the benefits, not the features. And we were doing all of that. Right? Okay. But then we ran a test and I'm going to talk about the importance of testing in just a second. But then we ran a test and the test was this. Let's put up a video demonstration next to each of our products. So I literally just got my iPhone and I did a little selfie video and I recorded myself wearing the Swannie's glasses. And, and if you go to the products page@swanicsleep.com, you can see now that we have a little 1 1/2 or 2 minute demonstration video next to each of the products. Now some people may think, oh you Got too much video there. Like it's slowing things down. The load page load times will take forever. Well, what we found is that before we put the video on our page, the average amount of time that people spent on our page was 25 seconds. So when we had images, the average amount of time that people came to our website and spent on our website was 25 seconds. When we added the video, the average time spent on our website jumped to just over two minutes. That is a huge increase from 25 seconds to just over two minutes. And guess what happened? Our conversions increased exponentially. More people bought. The idea behind it is that the longer they're on your site, the more they're engaging with your product. The more they're seeing you talk about your product, the more they're moving around and they're engaged with interesting content, the warmer they are getting to want to purchase from you, the warmer they're getting to want to pull out a credit card, enter their details and buy from you. So what we found is by doing video, video, video and as much video as we can, it builds rapport. It increases the trust factor. It increases the amount of time that people spend on your page. And when you can do those three especially increase the amount of time on their page, your prospect is getting warmer, warmer, warmer. And getting ready to pull out their credit card and purchase from you. So much. So on our landing page of Swanick Sleep, we didn't used to have a video. We just had a picture and we had the headline and we had some people wearing the glasses. Subsequently, I've just recorded a video, I did it at home as a selfie video and I put a laid some, some other music to it and I added a couple still images and things like that. You can see it on the, on the landing page there's. And just putting that landing page video as a little six minute video right on the homepage increased conversions as well. So if you're not doing video, I implore you to start doing it. Think about how you can talk about your product or engage with your viewer with great footage of you demonstrating your product. Remember when you're demonstrating to talk about the benefit, not the feature. Talk to the customer as if it's going to solve their pain, how your product can help them. And if you can use that video, it increases that rapport. Helps people want to make a buying decision even more. Okay, so video is huge. The other thing is make sure that when you are, if you are going to upload a video on the homepage of your Off Amazon website, make it a YouTube video. I'll tell you why, and sorry. And make it a YouTube video that's public, not private. And I say that rather than using Wistia or some other site. And the reason is, is that you get a lot of SEO juice if you have a YouTube public video, your website tends to show up in Google searches a lot easier. I've actually got an SEO manager who gave me that little tip when he went through and had a look at our site. Initially we had our video hosted on Wistio on our homepage and he said, no, no, no, we got to get you some more SEO and organic traffic here. Turn, make that a YouTube video. Make sure it's public, not private, and that will increase organic traffic to your website. So there you go. There's a little tip there. Price drop is a good one as well if you're trying to get people to buy. So if you're able to say, you know, your product was usually $97, but now it's $89, you can put a big line through 99. Don't lie, don't be disingenuous, don't trick people, obviously. But if you have genuinely sold your product for a certain price or the recommended retail price for your product is a certain price, put there like $97rrp, like recommended retail price. Put a lot, put a red line through it and then put whatever the new price is like 79 or 89. This helps people like go, oh, look, that product's worth 97. But look, it's, it's being sold for, you know, whatever. 79, 89. That price drop and demonstrating that visually that it used to be this price and now it's this price again increases conversion. So if you can do that, do that versus just sticking up the price. Okay, I said I'd talk about testing things. You have to test, test, test, test, test. That means don't just put up one headline on your Amazon page or on your off Amazon page and go, great, that sounds like a pretty cool headline that's making sales great. We'll stick with that. No, test it against another headline. So for example, if we go back to the Swanic sleep example, again, at the moment it says, sleep better, fall asleep quicker, sleep deeper, wake up feeling great. Now the reason that we have that there is because at the moment, that is the best converting headline. But it wasn't always that headline. Previous to that, we had something that said, wear Swannies, sleep better and look cool. And then I think the sub headline was burn fat, sleep deeper, look cool. Something like that. Now, we studied the results of conversions from that headline, and we used a piece of software called VWO, and that lets you send traffic to two versions of a page. So we sent 50% of our traffic to that original content that we had. And then we sent 50% of our traffic to the new test page. And then the new test page, which is what we have at the moment, one, it increased conversions. I think it increased conversions by like 8 or 9%, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's huge. It's. It's a monster amount of money. You think about all the people that are coming to you. If you can get 8 or 9% increase in your conversions just by changing the headline, that could mean tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to you over time. Time. So I would encourage you to test, test, test, test, test. Here's the other thing. I would start by testing price. So here's a mistake I made, and I spoke to Ryan about this when I was on his podcast recently, and that was when we first launched the product. For about eight months, we sold out our Suwannee's blue light blocking glasses at $89. We stuck it up $89. Great. That's converting. That's our price. Terrific. Yeah, look, we're selling. We're making money selling at $89. And then about eight, nine months later, one of my mentors said to me, have you tested price? And I was like, oh, I'm so dumb. I'm so stupid. I knew that I should have tested price, but I just hadn't done it. So we ran a split test, and that means we sent half of our traffic to $89, where the product was selling for $89. And we sold half of our traffic to where the product was advertised at $69. Well, guess what? We made more money selling our product at $69 more people bought because it was $20 cheaper. We made more sales. We ended up making more money. I estimate that we left probably about somewhere between 100 grand and 130 grand on the table over the course of that first year because we didn't test the price. We didn't test the price quickly enough. I stupidly waited like eight or nine months before doing the test. If I'd done it from day one and said, right, let's split test. 89 verse 69. Let's split test, you know, 69 verse 59. I would have known that the sweet spot for customers to buy from us is 69 would have made more sales. I estimate we lost. Probably when I say lost, it means we didn't make an additional hundred, 120 grand. So if you're going to test, start with price. It's such a huge thing. I don't know how you came up with the price on your product, but. But definitely test. Okay. Secondly, to that, I would definitely test headlines. So just like I was talking about how we change the headlines, a headline is huge. In fact, David Ogilvie is considered the godfather of marketing and advertising. He was around. He was huge in the. In the 50s and 60s and responsible for. I think he was actually responsible for Tiffany the jeweler being such a huge success with, with their marketing. He says 90% of getting someone to buy is in the headline. Isn't that amazing? So you can write like 2000, 5000, 10,000 words of prose talking about your product and all the benefits and features and everything, but ultimately, whether someone buys or not comes down to the headline 9 out of 10 times. So the headline is super important. So go and have a look on your Amazon page, and what is your headline like? What's the headline that you're using to promote your product? Test the headline. Test the headline. The other thing is simple. Things like the color of your Click here now button or your Shop now button can make a big difference. They've done these studies that show that if you're Shop now or your Click here, if Those buttons, those CTAs, those call to action buttons is the only color or is the only time that that color is used on your website, and nowhere else is that color used that people tend to click on that button a lot more. So, you know, whether that's green or orange or yellow, you want to make that cta, that Call to Action button really pop. Just go, oh, look. And so now the human eye is looking at that. It's noticing it. It's like, oh, okay, right. That's where I got to click. That's where I got to enter my details. That's the action that I'm gonna take there. All right, there's a few things. Now, if you add all those things up, and that means that you're. You're leading with benefits, not features. You're talking about the pain of your prospect and how your product can solve that pain. And you've counted how many times you've used the word you because you're speaking to one person. You've used scarcity. So people are like, oh, I better take action now versus later. If you've done a price drop where you've said the price is usually a certain thing, but now it's this. If you added testimonials to your product, so you're using that social proof bias, that social proof tendency, you're showing that other people are using your product and enjoying your product. You're showing the five stars on your page. You've got those written testimonials. You're using video. Everything's video, video, video. You're building that rapport with people. You've got made sure that the video is a YouTube video and it's public. You're using authority bias. You're putting that as seen on this blog or as seen in huffing your post or as seen here, you've increased the trust by putting a phone number and an email address and a physical address up the top of your website. You're using, you know, something like yo, which is that app where it tells the prospect that other people are buying this right now. You're using that more scarcity. You're appealing to all the personality types. That means you're writing for an emotional person, you're writing for a logical person. You're writing for an action type person. And you've got availability bias, which means that you're removing obstacles. You're making it so easy. You're telling people, click here, do this action. You've got lots of CTAs and you're making them pop. If you do all of those things combined, you will be well on your way to achieving the Lollapalooza effect. And the Lollapalooza effect means that you have a combination of all of these subconscious biases which makes the customer go, hmm, I need to buy this. I'm gonna buy this now. And they reach into their pocket or they reach into their purse, they pull out their credit card, they enter their email address and they buy from you. They become a customer. So there you go. I hope this was helpful. Try adding those things throughout your Amazon site or your off Amazon site. It will increase conversions, it will help turn prospects into buyers, and you'll make more money and you'll be a lot happier and you'll be high fiving Ryan Moran saying, thanks, Ryan. This was awesome. Yes, thank you so much for tuning in today. I really appreciate it. If you have questions about this, feel free to email me@jamesamesswanic.com or you could visit jamesswanic.com, i'll spell it for you because I have one of those funnily spelled names. Swanick is S S W A N W I C K. So it's it's spelled Swanwick even though it's pronounced Swanick. So yeah, email me@jamessonswanwick.com you can visit james swanick.com and if you want to check out the Swanick Sleep site, it's swanwick sleep.com even though it's pronounced swannicksleak.com I thought I'd just pronounce it the way it's spelled just to make it easier. Anyway, I'm rambling enough for me. Hope you enjoyed this and go and make more sales.

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