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The psychological triggers in this post is one of the oldest persuasion techniques people have ever used.
The “foot in the door” technique is popular among door-to-door salesmen. If you’ve bought anything from them (who hasn’t?), you probably already witnessed the power of this trigger.
The idea behind “foot in the door” technique is basically to get someone to agree to something small, so that they’ll agree to something bigger later on. For example, door-to-door salesman would ask the owner of the house if he could come in to demonstrate just how powerful the product he’s to trying sell.
That’s a small request - to get their foot in your house. Allowing him into your house involves relatively low commitment and risk than say, buying whatever he’s recommending. So it’s way more probable for you to say yes to this seemingly small request - just like there’s almost always a higher chance that you would subscribe to a free newsletter online than you would buy something.
The Driving Force Behind The “Foot In The Door” Technique
What this does is set you in an “agreeing mood” with the salesman. The psychological theory is called cognitive dissonance. The theory states that it’s difficult for someone to go against what they first come to believe is correct.
For example, even though a smoker is aware of the dangers of smoking, he refuses to quit smoking. A big part of that refusal is due to cognitive dissonance. He/She finds it difficult to reconcile the two conflicting thoughts:
- I love smoking.
- Smoking is bad.
So he/she comes up with self-justifications to stay the way they were. Justifications such as:
- Smoking curbs appetite. Obesity is also a major killer.
- Smoking allows me to be alert.
- Smoking allows me to “fit in”.
And so on and so forth.
Point being, once you come to hold on to a thought, it’s difficult to change them.
So back to the salesman example, once you agree to let him in, and perhaps agree to accept a freebie from him, it’s difficult to refuse when he’s trying to sell you his product. You come up with justifications such as:
- I do need this in the future anyway, might as well get it now at a discount.
- I should buy this just in case the old one breaks down.
- He already gave something, I think I should give back the favor.
In other words, you start to convince youself to buy. That’s the power of the “Foot in the door” technique.
A Different Approach - The “Face In The Door” Technique
The “face in the door” approach is very different to the “foot in the door” technique. Instead of asking a small favor and gradually build up to larger favors, you ask an absurdly large favor first then gradually tone it down.
The idea behind it is basically to “guilt” someone into doing things and since the second request is much smaller than the first, the person is more likely to agree with you. And since as humans we tend to make decisions based on comparison, it’s quite inevitable that most of us would fall for this.
Here’s an example: If someone you don’t very well were to come up to you and ask for personal details, such as monthly income, would you give it to him? Not a chance in hell.
But what if he persist and said something to effect of, just tell me how many figures is it? You’d probably agree.
How about in school? If your friend wants to copy your answers to an entire project you spent the summer doing, would you agree? No way.
But what if he continues and begs just for the answer to number 7? You’d then probably agree. And get this: This can work in a very wide variety of circumstances.
Which one works better?
In my personal experience, I find the “face in the door” works better than the “foot in the door” technique, although the former do not work well online.
If you were to extend an offer so absurd right in the beginning online,
- First, it wouldn’t capture the attention of a reader and even if it does…
- It’s highly likely that the reader would go on to reject it and move on, not giving you a chance to extend the second redeeming offer that makes the technique work.
And that is why the “foot in the door” technique is still my preferred technique for use online. If you take a look at the upper right hand corner of this blog, or go to www.salescopyquickfix.com, you would see that I offer a free invaluable guide to online copywriting (Which you should download if you haven’t already done so).
The purpose is of course to get someone to say yes to downloading my free course and hopefully from there I can build a win-win relationship with them.
But that’s just my opinion. What do you think? Which technique do you prefer?
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