There are two very good things about persuasion.

Firstly, improving your persuasion skills will make your business more profitable. Secondly, you can easily improve your skills by following the scientific research which proves what kind of persuasion works.

There are several steps that business owners can take to persuade customers and prospects to buy more from them. Here are two tips which are scientifically proven to be successful.

Tip 1: Give Something Away that Your Customers Will Value
In his book “The Psychology of Persuasion”, Kevin Hogan identified the Law of Reciprocity and defined it as follows:

“When someone gives you something of perceived value, you immediately respond with the desire to give something back.”

Through his work, and similar evidence from Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence”, many business owners recognized this as a useful marketing concept. Their idea is that if you give someone a gift, they are more likely to buy from you.

However many people who have heard this make the mistake of assuming that it�s as easy as that and works every time. Many ignore the words “perceived value” and wonder why their cheap giveaways don’t work.

It’s also much better if the gift is unexpected. In many fields, such as internet marketing, many customers expect things to be free so the “gifts” don’t deliver the same benefits.

If you want to make this law work, find other ways to be generous to your clients and prospects. This could include gifts, incentives, favors and thank-yous or it could mean selling them high value products at lower cost.

But take care to differentiate between appropriate bonuses or gifts and giving away too much of your core product or service. For example, if you are a consultant, be careful about giving away genuine consultancy time as it will be hard to start charging for it later.

And you should be careful to avoid giving so much away that people are conditioned into wanting everything to be free.

But, used properly, this principle works well. Even by giving something quite small, you are in a position to ask for something in the future. For instance, in return for a free CD, you could request that a prospect come into your office to meet with you to discuss business.

Truth is we are so driven to reciprocate that we will often give much more in return than we originally received.

Tip 2: Develop Regular Contact With Your Customers and Prospects
Kevin Hogan’s “Law of Friends” states that you are more likely to do what someone asks if you believe that person has your best interests in mind.

So as a business owner, you need to show your customers and prospects that you are looking after their interests.

That’s something that can normally only be built up over time - in the same way as strong personal relationships are built as people get to know each other better.

One way of doing that is having a regular newsletter that gives people valuable information rather than only pitching things. There is nothing wrong with selling if you are in business. However if you only “sell, sell, sell” customers will suspect that you are not focused on their interests.

So to put this to work, you need to develop regular contact with your prospects and customers. It doesn’t have to be a newsletter - it could be sending special reports or articles that may help them.

It might simply be giving people a call to check that everything is going well with their purchase - or a handwritten note to say thanks for calling in. Some businesses use a set timetable of following up new customers after say 1, 5, 30 and 90 days to make sure everything is going well.

Whatever approach you choose, the secret is to have a system and timetable so that you are in regular contact - but contact that helps more than it sells.