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Post-purchase rationalization known as buyer’s remorse is a cognitive dissonance in human psychology that discusses how we tend to overlook any defects or faults after an expensive purchase in order to justify our decision.
According to a survey, it was found that over 50% of customers tend to experience post purchase rationalization quite often or sometimes. When the buyer's remorse is in action, we tend to overlook some obvious defects just to justify our decision. Think about this. You have just bought a new phone and after a couple of weeks the latest version comes out. You will regret purchasing it early, obviously, but if you are one among many of us, you will never go on to say that, Oh, in vain, I should have waited!" Instead, you will try to come up with the reason, "it is great I bought this because....."
There are many reasons why the buyer's remorse is in action. Even though this tendency of human psychology works to the favor of businesses at a certain time, it is absolutely vital for every digital marketer not to take this bias for granted.
Once the customer places an order, you can pop a message denoting how well the sold product or service was admired by the previous customers. For instance, the ratings or quotes can be displayed in order to Soothe any future post purchase rationalization as it can help you towards Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
As we have discussed previously, a person who had purchased an expensive product with some unexpected defects tend to justify his/her choice as a result of this bias in human psychology. This is the high time that you suggest your customer that the product experience is indeed great. Through this suggestion, you can encourage them to add a review via call to action. As to justify their decision, the people who have experienced buyer's remorse display a higher tendency toward a positive review in such a situation.
You can never promise that a customer who has experienced post purchase rationalization will come back to you even after they have posted a good review. It is important to understand that such a review is not 100% genuine but just an attempt of your customer to justify his or her decision. We all know that it is much more efficient to retain existing customers than obtaining new ones.
However, biased remorse can be addressed by a high level of customer service. Make sure your customer service is top notch. You have no right to drop off a customer just because they have ended up purchasing your product, if your goal is to work well towards conversion rate optimization (CRO). Keep in touch with your customers through email or social media to make them feel that they are valued because it can weaken the impact of regret, to help them to ease any regret left.
Buyer's remorse occurs because people are held captive by their decisions of purchasing, even though the product or services they obtained contain faults. As a digital marketer you have to pay serious attention to this important question," Will they never come back?" If you want to be successful towards conversion rate optimization (CRO), then you have to make sure they come back.
In order to do this you can take actions to weaken post-purchase tension beforehand, find the issues via surveys and fix them and reassure your target audience that they made the right decision. If you act accordingly, it will be a great support towards conversion rate optimization (CRO).
The references contain experiments and studies that prove this bias is there.
Are you curious about how to apply this bias in experimentation? We've got that information available for you!
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