4 copywriting skills to turn users’ NO into YES!

The user's decision-making process is never a completely rational thinking process. Whether it is the choice of YES or NO, or the choice of A or B, it is easily affected by suggestion.

But sometimes, influencing user choices doesn't seem easy. In order to help users make a more favorable choice for us, we have written a lot of text, introducing many product features and advantages, and comparing them with similar products. But for most users, these words are often roughly skipped and fail to leave a deep impression.

When users make a choice, what we can definitely convey to them is the options we give them. As long as the appropriate copywriting techniques are used here, it can have a significant impact on the user's decision-making, allowing the user to make a choice that is more in line with our expectations.

1. Wrong premise selection - skipping the real question

Many times, users will hesitate on the question of YES or NO, for example, after browsing the details page, users need to make a decision whether to make a purchase.

Requests that are too direct can easily make users alert. When the information they receive is incomplete, out of human self-protection instinct, requests that directly carry a sense of benefit will make users more inclined to choose to refuse. Instinctively, the rejection at this time is just a subconscious choice of wanting to learn more before making a decision. However, in actual scenarios, because the products are extremely rich and various types of information are expanding, once the user "temporarily rejects" our product and closes the page, it is very likely that he will never open it again and will miss our product forever.

This is when you can use the technique of false premise selection. Usually in people's psychological process, after facing the choice of YES or NO, they will immediately make the choice of A or B. Just like when we decide to pay for a service, we have to choose the detailed type, duration and other options of the service. We need to perform a frame conversion to change the user's choice of YES or NO into a choice of A or B.

When users are required to make a choice, we assume that they will choose YES and directly give them the choice of A or B. Although users actually have the right to choose NO at this moment, the choice of A or B will make the user's subconscious mind judge that they have already chosen YES. Let's take a simple example: if you want to invite a lady to dinner, you usually need to ask:

"Would you like to have dinner together tonight?"

At this time, using the false premise selection technique, when inviting him to dinner, you can ask:

"Would you like to have Western food or Japanese food tonight?"

Many front-line salespeople also use this technique:

"Would you like a drink?"

becomes

"We have juice and soda for drinks. Which one would you like?"

The cleverness of the false premise selection lies in that while we quietly take away the user's choice, we give the user the freedom of choice on the surface, making the user feel that they can make their own choices.

The application of false premise selection is very simple. As shown in the figure above, on the product page of Taobao , before the user decides whether to buy, the user is asked to choose the size, color, and style of the product. Allowing users to select specific purchase details in this way is more conducive to closing deals than asking them to decide whether to buy first.

2. Induced Choice - Follow the Answer I Want

There is more than one technique to change NO to YES. In addition to skipping the real question, we can also use the technique of inducing choice to make it easier for users to make YES decisions. Before explaining induced choice in detail, let us first understand the basis of induced choice - the default option.

Default options are a common way to influence user decisions. In their early days, they mainly took advantage of people's mentality of "avoiding choices" or "being too lazy to choose" to make people follow the default options. The US health organization once used the default option technique to increase the number of people willing to donate organs by 4 times. But today, default options are increasingly annoying to users:

Today's default options are increasingly moving in the direction of "how to make it more covert". Default options like the one shown in the picture or even more covert are very common. If users are not careful, they will experience a feeling of "falling into a trap". Therefore, the setting of default options has begun to be disliked by more and more people, and is regarded as "rogue".

Despite being criticized, the default option is still an effective way of inducing and can significantly change the choices of some users, so the default option is still widely used. We can use it with slight modifications.

Before using induced choice, it is important to note that the psychological factor used by induced choice is that when the chooser is faced with a choice that does not directly involve interests and will not bring about immediate huge changes, he or she is unwilling to spend too much energy to study the options in depth, thus avoiding the mentality of making choices. Therefore, induced choice is not applicable to some options that directly and clearly involve interests. In addition, when we use this technique, we need to do some packaging to transform our inducement from the most primitive default option into a less "rogue" form of expression.

(1) Automatization

Make the judgment questions appear to be multiple-choice questions. Just like in the previous picture, if the user is given a single option that has been outlined by default, it may give the user a sense of pressure to make a choice. We need to superficially give users some choice. We can turn the single judgmental choice into two choices. For example, after installing some programs on your computer, you will see the following options:

This is a passive choice, and it is easy to turn it into an active choice:

Although the strategy of default options is also used, this choice will give users less subconscious pressure.

(2) Detailed

Under our applicable premise, because there is no direct benefit and no immediate obvious change, users want to avoid making choices and are unwilling to spend energy to study each option. But that doesn’t mean we can avoid explaining the options. Of course, the explanation at this time is completely different from the detailed explanation when direct interests are involved. We only need to give a simple explanation so that users feel that the default options given are meaningful. "Since there is no interest involved, there is nothing wrong with following meaningful options" is what we want to achieve at this moment. Let’s take the example we just mentioned:

becomes

(3) Clarification

Now that we have used psychological factors to influence users’ decisions, let’s put our options on the table openly. Deliberately hiding the options, or even using font colors close to the background color, can certainly increase the chances of user consent in the short term, but it does not do much good for the growth of the product, and may even be labeled as "malicious" in people's minds. In addition, for some products that rely on bundling third-party software for profit, sometimes they are really helpless and it is understandable.

3. Avoidance Choice - With the Strength of Benefits

It is human instinct to seek benefits and avoid harm, and benefits are one of the factors that can most influence users' choices. As long as we make full use of the user's psychology of seeking profit and avoiding harm, and make our options carry the power of benefits, we can effectively guide the user's final choice.

In people's general understanding, advantage and disadvantage are two different factors, but in fact, advantage and disadvantage are one and the same. It is just describing the same emotion from two different aspects. From each specific example, we can also find both advantages and disadvantages.

For example, the act of losing weight, from a profit-seeking perspective, is to obtain an ideal slim body and gain people's recognition; from a harm-seeking perspective, it is to avoid excessive body shape change and avoid people's ridicule. In psychology, people are divided into two types: approach type and escape type, based on the perspective each person usually chooses to look at things.

Ideally, we would push the most appropriate copy based on the user's preference type, but many times, it is difficult for us to quickly determine the type of each user and push appropriate text content. Fortunately, both advantages and disadvantages describe the same type of value factors, which are essentially the same and can therefore interact with each other. To give a simple example, a company is planning to hold a sale day event to give customers who feel the prices are high another option besides leaving. From a profit-seeking perspective, we can say:

"Lowest price sale, grab the biggest discount of the year"

From the perspective of harm, we can say:

"Lowest price sale, miss it once and wait another year"

Since we are talking about interests, specific and detailed interest values ​​will naturally attract more attention than implicit and distant interests. When we reflect interests in options, we must make the value of the interests concrete so as to better guide users' choices. For example, if we are developing a weight loss product, in the fee options provided to users, the non-concrete benefit description is as follows:

"Professional weight loss consultant guidance, get a personalized weight loss plan"

By making the concept of a weight loss plan concrete, it can be changed to:

"Professional weight loss consultant guidance, lose 5 catties in 10 days"

Because people's ability to delay gratification is generally poor, describing specific, clear, and immediate benefits, even if the benefits are relatively small, is more attractive than distant values.

4. Interpersonal Choice: The Value of Social Recognition

Human beings are social creatures. It is difficult for everyone to leave other people and to leave the embrace of the group. The ability of people to influence each other is enormous. We can make full use of this factor to guide users to make the choices we want.

Social identity exploits the ability of groups to influence individuals. American psychologists once conducted an experiment. Eight people participated in a test together, seven of them were actors arranged by the experimenter and only one was a subject. In the experiment, the interrogator asked eight people the answers to some multiple-choice questions at the same time. When testing a certain question, seven actors would say the same wrong option was correct, and then observe the choices of the real subjects. Multiple experiments have found that most subjects will follow the group and choose the wrong answer.

What we need to rely on is the human instinct to follow the group. When some stores open for business, they will offer special offers, free gifts, or even hire people to create a queue in front of the store. The essence of this method is to use the power of the group to guide customers to the store through the queue scene.

When giving users choices, using social proof is actually very simple. Just tell users how many people have chosen this product and how many people have gained value from the product. This is enough to quietly influence users who make choices.

Regardless of whether the number of people who have used the guidance method shown in the picture is true or false, once this form is used, it has invisibly changed the user's choice, causing some users to quietly move their mice from the close button to the enter button.

Social proof works better in the more closely connected circles an individual has. For example, a WeChat official account will show how many friends have followed the official account . In addition to avoiding the wrong official account, the display of this data also adds weight to entry and retention when users make decisions.

Allowing users to choose is just the beginning. Every time a user makes a decision you want, it also represents further contact between you and the user. As for whether users are satisfied or regretful about their choice after contact, there are still more links waiting for our efforts.

The author of this article @墨饕 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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