I have been working as a brand graphic designer for 20 years now, and here I am to share my wealth of knowledge with you. I teach people to design, market, promote their t-shirt business.
Today, I have created the list of the five best Psychological tricks to make people buy your t-shirts and increase your conversion.
So, let’s get started!
5 Psychological tricks to make people Buy T-shirts
- Use discount codes.
The easiest way to make people buy are ‘discount codes’. Because people are always looking for this, as they say “Save a buck or two”.
There are multiple ways to provide discount codes:
- Website Plugin
The first method and a rather interactive one is by using a website plugin.
You can do something like a spin wheel where the user participates for free and after spinning the wheel, and he/she gets rewarded with a discount code.
One good example here:
Step 1: Customer enters a contest for a sale via spin wheel.
(Use Alt text: Top 5 psychological tricks to make people buy t-shirts)
Step 2: The customer wins a discount code.
You can use the codes on multiple occasions such as Black Friday, Independence Day, World Pizza Day, etc.
- Put all your discount codes on your social media
Putting discount codes on social media helps to keep all your clients updated for all your discount codes.
Again, you provide these codes on numerous occasions, and keep posting them to get the maximum engagement and sales from returning customers.
- Add a coupon code inside of your delivery package.
If you package your t-shirts yourself, then you can try this out. Whenever a customer purchases at your store, you can add a custom coupon code for them in the packaging itself.
This takes your customer’s excitement to you new level, where along with that awesome t-shirt, that customer receives a coupon for the next purchase.
It goes with the famous saying that “80% of your sales come from 20% of your audience”. Which means that the people who have bought from you already are 10 times more likely to buy from you again.
This means that when your sales depend on repetitive purchases made by clients. As a happy, satisfied customer will buy again from you.
- Keep all choices simple: Do not provide too much.
The trick is that you don’t want to have too much stuff on your store, because you don’t want your customers to keep scrolling your page and get confused.
Don’t put too much of a particular style options, especially color options, as it gets confusing. It somewhat may look like this:
(Use Alt text: top 5 psychological tricks to make people buy t-shirts)
This is something we call as the “Chinese Menu Takeout Syndrome” in the t-shirt industry.
It relates to the situation where a person looks at a Chinese menu with all this delicious food and gets confused because everything is so tempting. At last, it leads to a lot of confusion, and sometimes they leave without buying anything.
To avoid this from happening to your T-shirt store, keep your choice simple. Don’t confuse your customers.
Fun fact: Do you know that black t-shirts sell more than all the other colors combined? In fact, dark colors sell more than lighter colors.
- Include the shipping costs in your price.
Include your shipping costs in the cost displayed on your t-shirt store.
This may sound like a sneaky one, but it has been working for years now.
For example, you can make a t-shirt for $19.99 and then sell it for $24.99 and show “no shipping”, or “shipping included”.
Now, you may think that nobody would buy this at a high price.
However, it works, it’s a psychological thing that can make people buy your t-shirts.
In fact, I personally would buy something a little more expensive, go to the checkout page, and with no shipping, and I will buy it. But, in the case of shipping costs it’s a “hell no!” for me.
So, include your shipping costs in the price of your T-shirt.
One-way people used to do it in the earlier days was by offering “Buy one Get one free.”
Now nothing is free; what they used to do is to make something very cheap and then increase the profits by selling two of them at a higher price.
All the credit goes to the “free” word. It makes people buy them.
Again, it’s a psychological thing. But, even if you can’t do the “Buy 1 get 1 free”, include shipping in your T-shirt price.
- Make sure that you use a clean theme
You may have a Shopify store, woo-commerce store, or even a custom-made website.
Make sure that you use a clean theme with a white or light background for your online t-shirt store.
Now, there have been studies that show that websites with darker backgrounds don’t do well in comparison to websites with white or lighter background.
One more thing to make sure is that you don’t have too many objects or clutter running on your website.
Notice any Shopify theme; you will see most of them with a white background because they have studied this for years.
keep it clean and simple. Also, there is a Thirthelpdesk theme you can check out:
Check the Tshirthelpdesk theme.
- Put in-person photos of all your garments.
When you are doing your website, make sure that you put in-person images of all your garments.
It can be the hero image or the thumbnail image of your T-shirt, and I suggest you put photographs of models wearing your T-shirts.
It’s a psychological phenomenon, that whenever a person sees another person who looks good, confident in your garments. They tend to think that if this person is looking good and confident, I will look the same as well in this T-shirt.
Therefore, they will make the purchase.
Now, I know that doing model photoshoots can be expensive. But one great place where you don’t need a photographer, models, and still get the right photos at an unbeatable price for your t-shirt brand is Placeit.net.
Placeit.net is an amazing marketplace where you can get images of models of all age group, ethnicity, gender. All you need to do is to upload your artwork and download the image. All of this, combined with an unbeatable price, is same as the old saying that’s known as “a little enough.”
Summing it up – Make it happen!
These tricks, as mentioned above, we’re the ones that can take your t-shirt business to a “whole ‘nutha level.”