5 Persuasion Techniques That Get More Attention for Your Business

Attentional Bias

Our brains pay more attention to things that excite us. The Attentional Bias is our tendency to focus on dominant emotions and neglect other seemingly irrelevant data when making decisions. Classic examples of dominant emotions are pain, fear, and sex. Research studying the Attentional Bias effect often involves ‘Dot Probe’ studies. In these studies, a test subject has to look at the center of a screen, where two pictures with different emotions are shortly shown.

Scientific research example:

Imagine you have an intense fear of spiders. Now I ask you to do ‘The Stroop Test’: in this test, I confront you with rows of words that are printed in different colors (e.g., red, green, yellow, and blue). All you have to do is name the color (not pronounce the word).

A consistent finding in Stroop studies with anxious patients is that their color naming of threatening words (spider, arachnid, spinner, tarantula, etc.) is slower than that of neutral words, and slower than with non-anxious patients. This is because it’s hard to ignore emotionally dominant stimuli.

Online persuasion tips:

• If your brand or product is related in a positive way to an intense emotion, promote this visually and contextually.
• Display your USP’s and CTA close to the most emotionally dominant parts of your page (e.g. an expressive image).
• Place counter-persuasive elements (like ‘terms & conditions’ or ‘privacy’) away from the emotionally dominant parts of your page.

Further reading on the reflection effect:

• Attentional Bias on Wikipedia
• Watts, E N., McKenna, E T., Sharrock, R., & Trezise, L. (1986): Colour-naming of phobia-related words. British Journal of Psychology, 77, 97-108

Fear Appeals

“We will fight threats, but only if we’re told how to defeat them”

A fear appeal is a persuasive message that scares someone with the intent to motivate him to act against the threat. But since we don’t like threats, we tend to deny them or use other defense mechanisms in order to lower our fear. Therefore, fear appeal -or ‘fear evoked persuasion’- is a technique that should be used rather delicately.

A clarifying example:

Imagine you’re a smoker and you see an anti-smoking campaign displaying a cruel image and words like “a slow and painful death”.

What would you do? Would you think, “Oh but I don’t want to die, and definitely not slowly and painfully. I quit!” Well, it turns out that smokers simply deny the message. And even if they don’t, they’ll come up with all sorts of counter-arguments, such as “I smoke only 1 cigarette a day”, “but I eat super healthy”, “my family has no history of heart disease”, or “hey, my grandma lived to be 90 and she smoked her whole life!″ You’ve heard them all before.

Online persuasion tips:

• Use personally relevant threats (not too small nor too big).
• Make sure you directly boost your customers’ efficacy by convincingly offering your solution as easy and effective.
• Provide a clear and strong call-to-action directly after / next to your scaring message.

And of course, when your customer responds, make him feel good again by reassuring he took a step towards a better life

Ambiguity Aversion

We prefer options that are certain

People tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is known (over an option for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown).

The ambiguity effect is relevant when a decision is affected by a lack of information, or “ambiguity”. The effect implies that we tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is highest. We’re simply reluctant to accept offers that are risky or uncertain.

Two remarks:

• Over an initial range, women require no further compensation for the introduction of ambiguity whereas men do.
• Curiosity increases attention, thus is induced by mild doses of uncertainty.

Scientific research example:

Imagine a bucket with 30 red, black, and white colored balls. Ten of the balls are red (for sure), the others are ‘some combination’ of black and white (all combinations being equally likely).

Now you can choose between one of two games:

• The Red Game: drawing a red ball wins you $100
• The Black Game: drawing a black ball wins you $100

Which game do you choose to play? Well, most people tend to favor the red game. Now, the probability of picking a winning ball is the same for both games (1 in 3, and we know there are 30 balls). So why is the red game preferred? Simply because the probability of winning is known. The red game is less “ambiguous”.

One of the theoretical explanations for this ‘Ellsberg Paradox’ considers our experiences with deception. Humans typically feel suspicious when we’re not told what the probability of an event is. This is because often – in real life and commercial situations – it’s usually in favor of the supplier. Our brain is simply afraid of, and therefore aversive towards, being fooled.

Online persuasion tips:

• Be specific in your offer and communication style (instead of offering vague information).
• Be specific about what happens when people click on a call to action.
• Provide ‘feed-forward’ information (‘what’s next is…’).
• Use fixed discounts instead of a chance to win.
• Try to find the ambiguities in your competitor’s offer and emphasize your certainty there.
• Guarantee your offer (money back, no cure = no pay).
• Within your portfolio, make your cash cow the ‘most certain offer’.
• Finally: In places that need improvement, experiment with small doses of uncertainty.

Further reading on ambiguity aversion:

• Ambiguity aversion on Wikipedia
• Lex Borghans, Bart H.H. Golsteyn, James J. Heckman, Huub Meijers , NBER Working Paper No. 14713 (2009); “Gender Differences in Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion”

Belonging & Conformity

We prefer to behave in approval with our social groups

Belongingness is our innate need to form and maintain strong, stable, interpersonal relationships. More than we’re often consciously aware of, we want to be part of a peer group, community, and society in general.

Once we feel like we belong to a group, we’ll conform to it and internalize the group’s values and norms. We typically conform to both injunctive norms of our groups (implied approved behavior by the group), and to descriptive norms (common behavior among group members). We may even behave adversely towards groups that we don’t want to be associated with.

Your brand, products, and/or services are social objects that inherently form and play a role within social groups. Therefore, belongingness and conformity have multiple strong, persuasive effects that are relevant to you and available for you to take full advantage of. Does your prospect want to belong and conform to your group?

Scientific research example:

Imagine that a friendly lady knocks on your door and asks for a donation for charity. She hands over the list to write down your name and donation… A recent study by influence guru Cialdini (2011) revealed that you’re more likely to donate when the previous donors are people you know, like your friends and neighbors.

Ryan, Stiller, and Lynch (1994) found that children will increasingly internalize their school’s extrinsic regulations and conform to them when they have a higher sense of belonging to that school (the more secure and cared for they are by parents and teachers).

Paul Rose and JongHan Kim (2011) found that the higher someone’s need to belong is, the more he seeks the opinions of others before acting (and the more someone is self-monitoring, the more likely he is to be an opinion leader).

Online persuasion tips:

• Support the forming of groups, connections, and dialogues among your customers and prospects (be it on your own platforms or on previously existing ones).
• Find and nourish the influencers within the more important social groups (e.g. on Facebook or niche platforms).
• Aggregate as much information about a specific customer or prospect and show that you’re approved of by his or her social peer group (from the device he uses, to more advanced log-in or Facebook profiling data).
• Show your customer that members of his social peer group are buyers, users, and advocates (e.g. with ratings, reviews or Facebook piles).

Perceptual incongruence

“We automatically pay attention to things that we did not expect”

Only 1% of what you see actually enters through your eyes. Your brain itself fills in the rest. Your brain does this by using prior visual information and established assumptions about the real world. 99% of what you see is ‘computed vision’, based on highly advanced algorithms, providing you with a surprisingly accurate visual image.

Perceptual incongruence occurs when the true visual information gathered via the eye doesn’t fit visual algorithms. When this happens, parts of the brain starts asking for more information (because it doesn’t necessarily fit the algorithm).

Therefore, incongruence can have large effects in directing attention.

Scientific research example:

Imagine you visit a website that displays two banners. One banner shows a brand that fits nicely within the theme of the website you’re visiting. The other does not. Which banner do you think you will remember better and find more interesting?

Online persuasion tips:

• Do something unexpected when someone enters your website (or other platform).
• Within your own platforms, use incongruent colors, fonts, images, etc. for important content and interactions.
• Purposely advertise on thematically incongruent platforms.
• Make the total look and feel of your ads incongruent with each advertising platform.

Further reading on perceptual incongruence:

• M Dahlén, S Rosengren, F T?rn, N ?hman – Journal of Advertising, Autumn 2008, Volume: 37 Issue: 3 pp.57-67; “Could placing ads wrong be right?: Advertising effects of thematic incongruence”