This is a warning some people may think the following as sexist, but really its all about marketing. I know a lot of people as they are selling online will use images of attractive females to hopefully entice a response and get a sell, but does this really work? The reason I ask is because there was just a story on Fox and Friends about a study done in Australia about this very subject.
According to the study women between the ages of 18 and 35 where less likely to purchase from a female salesperson who may have been considered more attractive than them. They even asked a profiler on the show about this and she agreed. As a marketer my ears immediately perked up when I heard this as it goes against what most people will tell you about images of people.
Well asking my wife who is a little out of the studied demographic about how she would feel. She said that in some instances this may not be true. She said if she was purchasing a beauty product then its likely she would purchase form an attractive person, but at the same time if the female started flirting and perhaps her husband( me) was present then she would probably change her mind.
So what is the point? As marketers we need to understand our audience. If you understand your audience then you are much more likely to create sales copy that speaks to that person. If you speak to the person and connect with them then you are much more likely to convert. After all conversions are what we are all after, correct? It does not matter how much traffic you drive to any offer, if its not converting then you may as well not have the traffic at all.
So test your market, understand who is visiting your website and your conversions will have to increase. This is just common sense, but many marketers miss this point. They write copy like they would like to read it, but that does not always work. Understand your target demographic and you will make more money. If that female picture needs to be something else, then understand that and change it. Don’t just follow the current trend. Break out on your own and as Seth Godin says, be a purple cow.
Nice article. Never thought of this context, attractive females selling to females. I know they are effective selling to men:) It makes sense that the opposite emotion conflicts a woman from buying from what appears to be a superior or threatening salesperson.
Curious if they performed a wider study of the sales rates of women customers buying from attractive women, normal women, attractive men, and normal men. Would be interesting to see what those results would tell us.
I don’t think they did that and I’m even having trouble finding the exact study. I would like to read the entire thing and see if there was any additional insight in it. Looking across demographics in the areas you mentioned would be very useful. Understanding your market is key to any marketing endeavor. You can get some information about a site’s demographics from quantcast, but it does not really help you to understand the mindset of the various demographic groups.
I’m going to keep thinking about this and see if I can come up with any interesting studies in this area.
I’d be interested to know if women are more likely to respond to a female picture or even just the name when it comes to female health issues. My gut instinct is that they would see a female writing about ovarian cysts for example as having more credibility than a male. They would probably see an older woman as having more credibility than a younger women too.
Maybe for selling woman product, woman is better.
David
In as much as I would like to say no, I think its always a factor. How a person looks always plays a role on selling..
so, depending on your demographics you have to either chose a male or female persona that does the selling ?
Sometimes that is correct. But it sometimes depends on the audience and no two is exactly the same. The only way that I know of you figure it out is to test. It may not be enough to just say have a male or female to a certain audience. Your goal if you want conversions is to connect with the audience in the context of your content.
For example, I was at a seminar a few weeks back where David Bullock spoke about this very subject, since this is a topic dear to me, I really paid attention. He told of a site that received a mixture of gender. The site was designed to sell a how to book on plumbing. Orginally he went with the attractive female approach and conversions sucked. Then he tried a young good looking guy, conversions still suck. When he added a picture of an old guy who really looked like he was a plumber then conversions improved dramatically. The other pictures did not biuld credibiliity in the visitors eyes, but an older guy who looked like a plumber was able to connect.
This is what is needed for really great conversions. You must speak to the visitor in a method which they understand and establish a connection with them. The hard part is that many times you only have a few seconds to get them interested so they will read the rest of the data and determine its something of use to them so they will stick around. Visual clues such as images can really help this is the connotation of an image is conveyed much faster than text