Entice Your Customers to Lust After Your Products

{Image from Jamie Anne on flickr}

Lust sells products. I’m not talking about sex and half-naked women—even though those things do sell products. Using lust means engaging your customers’ senses in the shopping experience and making them want your products, because they can feel what it would be like to have them.

When a potential new customer stumbles across your shop, will her mouth start to water, will she want to reach out and touch your products, and will she bypass rational thinking? In Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, Sally Hogshead writes, “Lust offers four pillars: Stop thinking, start feeling. Make the ordinary more emotional. Use all five senses. And tease and flirt.” {By the way, I highly recommend this book—and no, I don’t get anything out of saying that.}

Take a look at your latest product or service. Do you engage your potential customer’s senses? Can they feel, see, hear, smell, and taste your product? Okay, maybe it would be ridiculous to include all five senses, especially if you sell something like necklaces. You might not include how they taste in your descriptions—and if you do, it might provoke nausea instead of lust.

Let’s take a closer look at making something more lustful. I’ll pretend that you sell hand-knitted items online, and you want to sell a scarf. You could include the following:

• Macro pictures of the soft yarn to engage the senses of sight and touch.
• A description of how soft the yarn is—you might say, “The softness of this scarf will rival your favorite, worn-out t-shirt.”
• A description of the subtle scent of organic, cotton from the cotton yarn that you used to make the scarf.

Including those things would allow the potential customer to feel as if she’s already wearing the scarf, what it would be like to finger the soft yarn, and how it would look wrapped around her neck. You want her to imagine a fall day, with leaves on the ground, as she walks down the street wearing your cozy scarf with a cute jean skirt and boots.

When you lust after something, it’s not always logical. For instance, you might lust for a pumpkin spice latte with whipped cream from Starbucks even though you shouldn’t be spending four dollars for a beverage—not to mention the crazy consumption of calories. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not encouraging you to trick your customers—just make them lust after your products. Let them decide whether or not to indulge.

Take action today by using this information to make one of your products more lustful. Switch up the pictures and description, and see if you get a different response.