Predictably Irrational & The “Free Line”

Now that I am (slowly) recovering from Mass Control 2.0 over the past weekend, I am starting to reorganize my notes and I kept finding myself revisiting Mike Filsaime’s presentation. In fact, I was planning on leaving the conference in the middle of Saturday afternoon, but I specifically stayed to hear Mike (because frankly, I have never seen a bad Mike presentation…I really like the scientific way he looks at conversation and marketing…I think he and I think much the same, personally!).

Anyway, it really got me thinking.

First, for those of you who do not know my history, I do have a bachelor’s degree in psychology (primarily, at the time, to meet chicks…but that’s another story). I did always love learning about psychology, though, especially social psychology. So Mike gave an example, which was tested and reported by Dan Ariely, at Predictably Irrational, of a chocolate experiment.  The purpose of the test was to measure the importance of Risk versus Bargain.

I discuss the experiment and the results in detail in the video above, but the moral is quite revealing:

People would rather remove the risk of a bad choice rather than get a bargain.

This was kind of a revelation for me and got me to thinking a lot about my current offers, opt-ins, and products.  I now question everything:  Is this a risk to my buyer or a bargain?  And if it IS more of a risk than a bargain, how can I reverse this?

Now there are other factors involved in the whole conversion process, especially when we are talking about selling products for initial profit or back-end sales.  There is a relevancy between free and no risk versus qualified, buying customers.  But the trick here is to find a way to integrate the two.

The “Free-Plus-Shipping” model is an excellent example of this…and it is based more on psychology than anything else.  The product may be free (and therefore perceived “no risk”) even though there is the qualifying action of paying for shipping and handling.  This method is very “hot” right now, especially in the CPA networks, but before you start creating “plus-shipping” offers like crazy, realize that a system like this requires a well planned and proven backend sales funnel to work.  I’ve seen both huge successes and disastrous failure with this model.  Though, whether it is a disaster or failure, the model works on the front end.

Remove the risk while qualifying the lead.  A perfect mix!  And I am sure new methods beyond “free plus shipping” exist and work…our job is to either find them, test them, or create them ourselves.

I have some heavy thinking to do right now.

cheers…matt

P.S. Great Mass Control Event!  I really enjoyed meeting many of you and learning a whole lot of great marketing information, too!

P.P.S. I’m sorry to have offended some of you on Twitter for the http://www.frankkernsextape.com link…It was meant to be a joke, not an advertisement for adult websites!  (Dr. Mike…totally awesome dude!)