Pre-career, I had a few different jobs, from working in the video store after school rewinding the weekend’s videotapes to merchandising greeting cards for one of the giants in the industry.
When I look back, the job that taught me the very most that applies to what I do today was my five-year stint working in supermarkets over high school and college. The two stores I worked at couldn’t have been more different, but let me tell you, it was an education in customer service, human behavior and, most of all, psychology.
While I was a cashier, I loved nothing more than when I got to work in the back on displays, merchandising, stocking, and more. Nothing is left to chance in a supermarket, which is the exact way our websites should be—we want to be intentional and guide people to the right place so they behave in a certain way.
Before you have a moment and think, “Um, isn’t this manipulative?” the answer is yes, it is. But you can choose to be smart about your website, or you can leave it all up to chance and see what results you get. Every retailer, corporation, and business is doing it, so if you want to compete, you’re going to have to play ball.
Sounds pretty much like the last time you lost yourself on Facebook or watching cat videos on YouTube, doesn’t it?
While Scamell-Katz’s tools of choice are brain scans, footage of volunteer’s eyeballs, live bird’s-eye views of the supermarket, and more, on websites we use heatmaps, conversion rates, split tests, A/B tests, and Google Analytics to get our data.
Here are a few of the lessons we can learn from supermarket psychology secrets for our own websites.
We’ve got more choices than ever before, but too much choice is a bad thing. This article shares that the average household uses only 300 products in a year, but a large supermarket stocks over 80,000 products.
An increasing number of brands and stores are dropping the number of products in their line in an effort to simplify. Danone cut their product line by 40%, and their sales went up 20%. And in early 2015, UK supermarket giant Tesco announced they were cutting their range by 30% across the board in an bid to simplify the experience for shoppers. After all, do we really need to choose from 98 different brands of rice?
If you think about your site, how many products or services are you offering? Are you providing too much choice? It may be time for you to cull the herd and focus only on your top sellers. While less may seem like you’re going to cut into sales, more focus and simplicity will benefit both you and your potential buyers.
Start by looking at your revenue. It may have the answer of what product or service you may need to eliminate for the sake of a simpler, streamlined experience.
I’m willing to bet that you frequent the same supermarket week after week and you run off a mental map as you go through and pick things up. As shoppers, studies show that we disregard signage that tells us what’s in an aisle, favoring signpost brands. We concentrate towards the middle of an aisle and look for the recognizable brands, such as Coca-Cola or Nescafé, to tell us where we are.
The positioning of signpost brands makes a significant impact on how we shop and have been shown to increase sales of all products in the category. In a study by Scamell-Katz, he advised a firm to place four-foot cardboard Guinness pint glasses at either end of the stout shelves. Overnight sales of all drinks in the category increased by 23%.
Why? It’s simple: People were being guided. Having a clear marker told them exactly where to go. So while we don’t necessarily have signpost brands for our websites, we need to look at how we can tap into the fact that people have a certain set of expectations for a website.
Just like in the supermarket, our visitors are looking for the familiar and need to be guided. If you have a site that doesn’t follow a particular format or have a clear path to get them from A to B, you risk losing them. This is why clear will always trump clever, as people don’t want things to be that hard.
You’ve probably heard that most supermarkets place essentials like bread and milk at the back of the store to help entice us to buy more along the way.
New studies have shown that these distraction tactics can be a major problem, as forcing the shopper to deviate from their plan can result in negative feelings. One study showed that placing quick-buy items close to the front door made people more apt to return to the store for their weekly shopping.
The message for our websites is clear: don’t make it hard to shop or try to be overly clever. Distracting us along the way means we’re less likely to return, and it’s harder to build that know-like-trust factor. When you force your visitor to work too hard for what they want, it doesn’t create a positive experience with your brand. And on the web, people have so many choices that in a click of a button, your relationship is done.
There are so many secrets lurking in the supermarket that give us serious clues about how to tap into the psychology of our visitors and give them what they want.
Just because we’re on the web doesn’t mean we should sacrifice common sense for creativity or a profitable website for something pretty. With the right planning and focus on user experience, we can have both. The key is understanding the psychological principles at play and assuming nothing.
Maggie Patterson is a communications strategist and copywriter who works with entrepreneurs and small business owners to help them craft intelligent marketing strategies that drive business results. She’s the host of the Marketing Moxie podcast, and you can learn more about website conversions with her free 7-Day Conversions Challenge here.