Addressing Objections & Risks

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>> Okay, so let's look at 4 psychological principles that you can actually use that's gonna help you engage with your audience and encourage them to take action. The first one I wanna look at is the need to address objections and reduce risk in people's minds. Because that is absolutely fundamental to your success, if you wanna encourage people to act on your website whether that's sign up for your newsletter or download your site or your product, I was gonna say a SaaS product.

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You don't download one of those or buy something on an E commerce site, addressing people's fears and concerns is fundamental to success and that's all because of this guy, again, the primal brain, right? Because the primal brain is constantly looking for danger, right? Unfortunately, it's not really got much work to do these days, well, I don't know what I'm saying unfortunately, it's quite opposite, it's fortunately that we're not about to be leapt on by a saber toothed tiger at any particular moment.

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But the result of that, is that it's kind of flailing around looking for dangers that aren't really there. And so, it starts to grab hold of anything, anything that could potentially be seen as a risk. So let's take a really classic example, like signing up for newsletter. So I've mocked up a particularly manipulative newsletter sign up here that says yes, I'd like a good deal.

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And then the other option is no I prefer to waste money. But obviously that is exactly what you shouldn't be doing, but what can be illustrated here? Is that, that actually the primal brain when it's faced with something like this goes into overdrive of looking for concerns and dangers and worries, so let me just give you a few examples, what if they sell my email address to a third party?

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Right, that's a concern that goes through our head not necessarily consciously, but it's there nagging away in the back of our brains, or what if the contents rubbish? Right, and it's not relevant to me, or what if they make it hard for me to unsubscribe? Another common one is what they send me too many emails, it's really annoying isn't it?

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When you sign up to a newsletter and they just bombard you with emails, and what if they pressure me into buying something? All of these are negatives objections problems that put us off of signing up to newsletters, and then of course there's what if I get hacked or what if they get hacked.

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So, dealing with these risks and objections that are whirling around in people's heads consciously or subconsciously, is so important when it comes to giving people the confidence to sign up to your newsletter or whatever else you're asking people to do. The problem here is that we're often afraid to address these objections for fear of bringing them up.

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So really classic example of this. If you've ever done any design work, right? And you've done a design mock up for a client and you've got to present it to the client, and you know that there's something in the design the client doesn't want, right? Won't like, maybe that they're gonna go the logos not big enough or they're not gonna like the color or whatever.

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But what we often do is we go into those meetings and we go, don't mention it, don't mention it, don't mention it, you kind of hope that they don't bring it up. And of course, inevitably they do. And that's kind of what we do on our websites. I hope they don't have this problem with it, or, and so we don't address them.

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But just as it's much better with a client to actually come out and talk about the problem in advance the same is true on websites. So let's take a really classic example right which is McDonald's, okay? We have all heard things about McDonald's, haven't we, right? And about their food.

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We've all heard things like chicken nuggets. They may contain chicken, but we're not gonna say which parts of the chicken. Okay, there is this implication that chicken nuggets have got dodgy bits of chicken in or that french fries don't actually contain any potato but they're all these kind of myths that are flying around.

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Now, McDonald's are clever enough to know that they need to address those objections and address those concerns, they don't come out and say it that blatantly but what they do say on their website is, it's always 100% chicken breast meat. And in fact, if you click through that and find out more that the expanded title there is it's always 100% chicken breast meat even on chicken nuggets, it actually says even our chicken nuggets.

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So McDonald's have had the confidence to address those objections head on and that's really what we need to be doing when it comes to our calls to action, when it comes to our value propositions. So going back to the newsletter example, let me show you my own newsletter on one version of my newsletter cuz I do a lot of AB testing.

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Everything about my call to action to encourage people to sign up to my newsletter on my website is designed to deal with objections. So for example I say how often they'll be emailed every 2 weeks, right? You will receive support improving your site by creating a better user experience a more effective digital strategy.

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So I actually explain what the content is gonna be as well and how it's gonna benefit people. But then I go on and say, you can unsubscribe in one click, and we will never share your email address with anybody. So everything there is about dealing with those objections and concerns people have at the moment that they're making the decision to take action.

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And so that is this idea of addressing these objections and concerns is so important to your success and we'll get into that all a little bit more later. The other thing that you can do when it comes to addressing these objections because sometimes the objection isn't something that you can overcome, right?

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Sometimes there are certain objections kinda baked into the experience that there's no way of dealing with, so your alternative approach is to make it a risk worth taking, right? So people will object to spending the money for example and obviously you're not gonna give the product away for free, so they're gonna have to suck that up.

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But what you can do is make it so obvious that it's a great, it's an objection worth dealing with. So you can focus on the benefits before features and this is a common mistake I see on a lot of websites. Is that jumping straight in and saying what the thing does, right?

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What the functionality is, what the details of the offering is. And they don't take the time to say how this is gonna change your life, how is gonna make things better for you as a person? So we see this all the time on something like car advertising, right?

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Car advertising isn't kind of listing all of the features of the car, it's not talking you know about its technical spec or anything like that, what they're doing is they're talking about the benefits. So you'll see everybody who ever sees to drive a car in an ad is either incredibly beautiful and gotten an attractive partner with them.

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You know that. So basically the implication is it's gonna make your life better. That's the benefit, you're gonna be more sexy or whatever. Or it's a family going off kayaking or something like that, it's all about self improvement and self filming, so talk about the benefits of your product if you want to help people overcome their natural hesitancy and fear of taking action.

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And then we can also do what's called introducing a new reference point so you can reframe somebody's thinking in terms of their objections, so I can give you a real world example of this one. So you've probably heard of Mailchimp, right? Mailchimp enable you to send out email marketing to people.

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Now, Mailchimp is really good. So great tool, but I kind of come to the point where I wanted a different too, all right? For reasons I bore you with, so I started looking around at what was in the marketplace. And I came across a tool called ConvertKit that basically, yeah, did the same fundamentally the same thing, and the first thing I saw was, it was more expensive, the Mailchimp.

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So I was immediately gonna dismiss it at that point, but right next to the price, it had a link that said, explicitly, ConvertKit compared to Mailchimp cuz Mailchimp is the leader in the field. So just I happen to click on that link, it was enough to grab my attention, it pulled me through to a different page, and that page basically did a side by side comparison of features, the Mailchimp had compared to features that ConvertKit hat.

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And as sheep, I read down that list of features and I'm just like, wow, ConvertKit is really good. I ended up moving across to it, even though it costs me more some, so notice what happened now. I had an objection, discuss more, but they reframed my thinking away from worrying about price and on to thinking about features and its capability and what it can do.

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So it changed my reference point. So that's another thing that you can explore. And again, we'll touch on that more later. And then the final final thing you can do is appeal to the Selfish Gene. Now, what does that mean? Well, there are a lot of products that people buy that you're not really buying for yourself, but you're buying for somebody else, whether it be a gift, or obviously in the B to B sector, often the people buying something aren't gonna be the end users.

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Charity giving is another example where you're giving money and you're not actually personally getting the benefit back from it. It's going to another person. Now in those kinds of scenarios, often our tendency as we design and create websites around those kinds of things is refocus on delivering to talking about the benefit to the end user.

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But actually, we need to be talking about the benefit to the buyer as well, to appeal to them selfishly. So for example, with charity, giving your heart, you wanna talk about how it makes the giver feel good about how it, there might be tax breaks to it or whatever else.

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Don't just focus on the end user but also focus on the other person because that helps and overcome their own fears and their own concerns and their own objections and makes it a risk worth taking. Another thing that you can do with these objections and these risks that people are struggling with on the website is give people a sense of control of those risks.

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When we feel in control of something, it feels less dangerous and less concerning to us, and there are a couple of ways that we can do this. The first is to not leave people wondering what's going on. Right, one of the biggest problems is a kind of a natural hesitancy on our part because we feel out of our depth, if we don't know what's going on, we feel out of control, we worry.

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We become anxious, our primal brain kicks into high gear, but when we're given a sense of control by being informed about where things are, everything changes so that I can give you a real example of this, so, I was flying from London Heathrow to Austin, Texas. And you have to change or did have to change at Dallas.

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So we flew into Dallas and as we flew into Dallas, it started snowing in Texas. It was just ridiculous. Nobody knew how to deal with this, the whole airport closed down instantly, right? They just couldn't cope with the idea of snow in Texas, everybody panicked. So all the flights were grounded, and I wandered over to the information desk, the British Airways information desk.

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Along with pretty much everybody else and to try and find out what was happening, and there were two information desks side by side, there was the British Airways information desk and the American Airlines information desk, okay? And as I sat there and watched what was going on cuz I ended up sitting on the floor a few meters away, and I was like watching these two information desks.

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It was fascinating to know the difference that occurred, okay? Outside the British Airways information desk with just one or two people just kind of standing around casually bored, right? And then, everybody else was sitting around nearby chilling out outside the American Airlines information desk. There was a ruckus.

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There were people frustrated, they were getting annoyed and they were getting angry and it was this big thing going on. Now my incredibly xenophobic view of this as a British person was, well, that's Americans for you, they like to make a fuss about stuff. But obviously, that wasn't the reality of it, because in British Airways have Americans flying on it and American Airlines having British people on it so it's obviously nothing to do that.

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What it was, was how the two communicated differently, both of them came out at the beginning and said I'm really sorry but the planes have been grounded but then their response was slightly different. The British Airways person said, we'll come back to you in 10 minutes and give you an update, and the American Airlines said, we'll come back to you when anything changes and nothing changed for a long length of time, right?

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So there was this long period of time where nothing was going on. But every 10 minutes the British Airways woman came out and said sorry we've got no more information nothing's changed but we'll be back out in 10 minutes to give you another update. So even though they weren't providing any value, it still made everybody calmer, and the same is true on your website.

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So think about when you place an order on a website or whether you fill in a contact us form and then the email or the transaction disappears into the ether and you don't know what's happening, has my order been dispatched? Is someone gonna get in contact with me?

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What's going on there? And so giving people a sense of control and answering their concerns and objections reassures them and I'm gonna give you an example of that later. But the other way you can give people control is allow people to undo their mistakes, right? For example, can I return an item easily or can I easily cancel my subscription?

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These are all fundamental things to help people, have the bravery to take the step to overcome the risk. So that's a little bit about objection handling and taking risks.