Imagine this…

The holidays are around the corner.

You’re feeling particularly responsible this year and are getting a head start on your shopping. Go you!

Step One: Start playing holiday tunes (duh).

Step Two: Grab your laptop and start shopping.

Your fingers dance across the keyboard as you make a quick decision to look through a few gift guides for inspiration.

You Google, “2022 gift guides” and open the first 2 links in new tabs.

You go to the first tab and start scrolling. There are about 15 gift options, and they’re pretty decent.

You open up the second tab and are quickly met with a half-loaded page. You can see the ads littering this website and causing a delay.

You close a random popup. Then another one. Then you click on an ad by mistake and have to navigate back to the site.

“Man, these websites are really trying to make as much money as possible,” you think.

Fifteen seconds later, it’s still loading.

What do you do?

In today’s edition of Why We Buy, we’re taking a look at Cognitive Miser – why our minds choose ease and efficiency over effort.

Let’s get into it…
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🧠 The Psychology of Cognitive Miser

You might have found the PERFECT gift option on that second website.

But, because it loaded so slowly, you chose to go back to the first website that loaded in a few seconds.

You love your friends and family.

Why did you give up on potentially finding them the perfect gifts?

When given the option, people will choose to avoid expending effort when an easier option is presented.

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Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman figured this out through their research on heuristics.

Our minds love shortcuts and are willing to take them at the cost of finding or thinking through a better option.

This research, as well as a few other psychology experiments, led psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor to their theory on cognitive miser.

Cognitive miser is one of the reasons why a 1-second improvement in a metric Google uses to measure page speed (LCP) can lead to a 13% increase in conversions.

Yep, a 1-second faster site can have THAT big of an impact on your buyers.
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🧐 Inside Your Buyer’s Mind

Your buyers don’t want to think too hard. They’re looking for a quick fix.

They’re less interested in shopping around, building out a spreadsheet for comparison, talking to customer service, testing out 5 options, and then deciding which one they like the most.

Friction in the buying experience stresses people out.

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When buyers are confronted with too many choices or distractions, they’re likely to bounce.

But, if you can create a reputation for an intuitive customer experience—like Apple has—you’ll turn more visitors into customers and customers into fans.
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🤑 How To Apply This

Alright, so how can we apply this right now to sell more?

Reduce (most) friction

Every extra hoop prospects need to jump through or popup they need to close can increase the chances of a lost sale. How long your website takes to load leads to increased stress levels and buyers wondering who will solve their problem faster.

Not surprisingly, Amazon has mastered the zero-friction marketing funnel. More surprisingly is that they had the foresight for it in 1997. Amazon patented the one-click checkout process long before they were the mega-mogul they are today.

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Their hyper-focus on the customer experience showed them where friction occurred in the buying journey (having to enter your billing details repetitively).

They used their Amazon magic wand to take the friction away… and strategically make themselves the only company with such superpowers through their patent.