How to use anchoring on SaaS landing page

Anchoring is a technique that is used by every single retailer in the world. But it also works wonders on the web. Here’s how

Were there more or less than 50 hieroglyphs in the ancient Egyptian writing system?

If you know the answer, fine. If you don’t please don’t Google it just yet. Remember the number that you have in your mind.

The answer: the ancient Egyptians hieroglyphic system contained over 700 symbols. Though every time I put the question like this people tend to name numbers under 50.

What is anchoring?

What if I asked you in a different way: how many symbols Egyptians had? If you don’t know the answer you would probably play a guessing game. Something like: they had hieroglyphs, and those are different from the letters. What other system still has hieroglyphs? Ah, Chinese. And they say there are thousands of hieroglyphs there. So definitely over 50, maybe 1000. This number would be much closer to the truth. But because I placed 50 in front of your inner mind you made another shortcut, something like: she knows something, so maybe it must be somewhere around that number, probably no different from English language, so 26 maybe 30.

This placing an imaginary or real limit/anchor that would impact the perception and further reasoning of a person is called anchoring. It’s a behavioral marketing concept that is used quite often. Much more often than we would think is possible.

How and where the anchoring is used in marketing?

In many cases actually it is used by chance.

Imagine you enter the store with a desire to buy a new microwave (not likely with online deliveries but just imagine). You see what you need on the shelf and ask the assistant about the price because somehow it’s not specified on the tag. — $299. — says the assistant. — Oh, I apologize, my bad. It’s $199, mixed with another model.