People feel losses more deeply than gains of the same value. In other words, it’s more painful to lose something than to get that same thing.
Imagine you overhear your boss talking to the HR manager about giving you a raise of $200 per month. How would you feel about this surprising boost in pay? How would you feel if you hear your boss saying he wants to cut your salary by the same amount?
Losses have less of an impact than predicted. We tend to overestimate and dwell on negative experiences. Therefore, loss aversion is more a property of forecasts than a characteristic of an actual experience (Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson & Gilbert, 2006).
Investors tend to be more prone to myopic loss aversion (MLA), a concept that is a combination of a high sensitivity to losses and a tendency to check their wealth too frequently (Haigh & List, 2005). This bias leads to a short-term view that causes irrational decisions.
Talk about what your potential customer will lose if they don’t purchase, rather than what they would gain by buying. We tend to give losses twice as much psychological weight as we do gains (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992).
The same principle can also be applied to headlines of landing pages or blog posts. We don’t want to lose anything we value. Perform split tests to see which type of headline works best for your audience.
Loss aversion is one of the reasons why free trials work so well for SaaS businesses. When, for example, a 30-day trial period ends, giving up premium features or the complete service feels like losing.
Let your customers enter data into your service before even signing up, so that they get to play with the app and invest time. To be able to save their work, they have to register an account. This step is then smaller than losing what they have already built.
You don’t want to miss out on a great deal, right? What about posts from your favorite blogger? Provide exceptional value to your audience, and they will fear that they will miss out on something.