Using simple psychology techniques can allow you to increase your registrations dramatically with very little work. In this series of articles we’ll be posting some simple and quick changes based on people’s behaviour that can quickly increase your visitors to sign ups ratio.
The first tip is very simple: provide a reason to guests for signing up. Let’s go back to the 1980’s when Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology, carried out some simple but revealing studies. Langer would interrupt the person using the copy machine in the office, asking to jump in line and make copies. 60% of the time the person using the copier agreed to let Langer jump in front. However when Langer attached a reason as to why the person using the copier should let her in front, such as “because I’m in a rush,” 95% of people allowed her to jump in front.
That makes sense, however when Langer replaced her reason with one completely meaningless, for example, ”because I have to make copies,” people still stepped aside for her nearly 95% of the time. Langer explained the behaviour, “the listener at the copy machine heard a two-part statement: a request and something like a reason. That was all their mental script for such a situation required. They never did reflect on the fact that the interrupter’s ‘reason’ was not meaningful.” The name given to this behaviour is called “mindlessness” – basically people acting on “autopilot” with little thought.
So what do you do to take advantage of this behaviour? Simply outline the reasons why guests should join you forum, take these examples on forums hosted by FreeForums and ZetaBoards:
Welcome message on ZetaBoards
Welcome message on FreeForums
Check our tutorials on adding a guests only message in phpBB3 and in vBulletin.. Using MyBB? Check out this modification.
All of these changes will take only minutes but can increase registrations to your forum easily so it’s a worthwhile exercise!
