This week is all about simplicity, how less can so often be more, and how this can all translate into better sales and happier customers in your business.
Years ago I was listening to a photographer on Creative Live speaking about how she only had one package, and I thought she was nuts. I was offering my clients all sorts of things. Different packages. Different products, and all sorts of options for each. I wanted them to have freedom and choice. I wanted to make sure that I had something for everyone and for every need. I wanted them to feel like a kid in a candy store with a million options and to know that I had thought of everything. So this concept of only offering clients ONE package and having a take it or leave it attitude about it seemed completely crazy to me.
And yet… here she was, speaking on Creative Live about her success. Her numbers were way better than mine, she was booking like crazy and seemed to be having a great time in all of it. I on the other hand was struggling so hard. I was a single Mom who had about a 1.68 in my bank account, no clue where my next sale was coming from and a whole heap of fear that I was going to fall flat on my face and fail not only myself, but the little boy that I had brought into this world and loved so fiercely. So I listened to her.
For a while I did her one package system. It worked. Since then I have flipped it around a few times, but I never have more than a few options at a time. I will never go back to having a novel for a price list, and offering my clients a million different choice. Since listening to her I have actually done my own research on the topic as well, and I completely understand why what she said makes so much sense, and it all basically boils down to one thing, that most of us are bombarded with every single day – overwhelm.
If a customer or client walks into your store, or is browsing the options on your website and there are too many choices they will get overwhelmed, frustrated, sometimes even angry, and they will walk away. Decision fatigue is real guys!
Their brain becomes exhausted from trying to sift through all of the choices and figure out what makes the most sense for them. They get discouraged, feeling like they might make the wrong choice, and then they either opt to not buy or they go to a competitor who has simplified the process.
There was a study done in 2000 by psychologists Sheena Iyangar and Mark Lepper, who did a series of tests to see how consumers reacted to choice. They did things like setting up a table of jams in a grocery store and tracking how many people came to look, and how many purchased. On one day they would have 24 exotic jams to choose from. There were sales people there to offer free samples so people could test and trial, peruse all of the jams and then make a purchase if they wanted to. The next day they would run the exact same process, but only have 6 different flavours of jam to choose from. The result was that while more people were attracted to and came to see the 24 jam set up, they were almost 10X more likely to actually make a purchase when visiting the 6 jam set up. 10X! That is huge!
They repeated similar trials with chocolates, and then even with university students and an extra credit essay assignment, and the result was the same. When offered a chance to write an essay for extra credit, students were far more likely to follow through and earn the extra credit if they were given a short list of 5 essay topics to pick from, than an extensive one with 30 topics listed. What is happening here? Especially in the case of the jam, when having more options attracted way more people, which you would think was a good thing, except that the higher traffic didn’t actually result in any more sales – just empty traffic. In the case of the higher traffic it is likely that people who weren’t actually interested in purchasing jam that day where drawn in out of pure curiosity. 24 flavours!? Whoa! What are th
