Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree Review - 5 of 12

Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree Review - 5 of 12

Hello, I’m here again for another review on my scholarship from CXL Institute. On this week’s Conversion Optimization Minidegree, are the remaining lessons from People and Psychology. 

This week, I’ll share about Cognitive Biases.

As Optimizers for Conversion, we need to be aware of the more common biases such as 

False-Consensus Bias - It’s the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them. Never assume that people – especially target users of a website you’re working on – thinks the same way as you do. 

The Curse of Knowledge - Once you know something, it’s impossible for you to un-know it. If you added new buttons or links onto the website, you can’t analyze the site like a user – trying to figure out whether people will see the button or not. You know it’s there. Ask someone else to look at the page.

Anchoring - Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions. 

Egocentric Bias - This bias is about recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one’s exam grades as being better than they were,

Recency Bias - This cognitive error tricks you into preferring fresh data over older data. The key is to remind yourself that newer is not always better.

Selective Perception - This means that expectations affect perceptions. This is critical in qualitative research: the way you phrase questions will affect the responses. You must do your best to not lead people.

Confirmation Bias - This bias makes people try and reinforce their ideas, which isn’t always the best result.

Congruence Bias - It’s the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.

Clustering Illusion - The clustering illusion is the tendency to erroneously perceive small samples from random distributions to have significant “streaks” or “clusters”, caused by a human tendency to underpredict the amount of variability likely to appear in a small sample of random or semi-random data due to chance.

In other words, you think you spotted a trend – and base all your optimization and hypotheses off that trend. But in fact it was not significant at all, but a small sample. Just because there is a similarity, doesn’t mean there is a pattern.

This is critical to be aware of when doing conversion research, especially qualitative – you think you see a trend, and start looking for it, ignoring other, often more valuable nuggets of information.

Emotional and Rational Decision Making

People make decisions using both emotions and logic. However, even if with what we believe are logical decisions, the very point of choice is arguably always based on emotion. As such, we should sell to the old brain. The old brain is very emotional, and the key to emotional sales is selling to the reptilian brain.

When we’re selling a product, we need to make a compelling emotional and rational case. We should lead with emotional and inspirational content and once our customers make a decision that they want our product, people want to be able to justify the purchase. Hence, we should back everything up with specifics, so they can rationalize the decision.

How People View Websites

Most people don’t read, but scan. When users land on your site, their eye path starts from the upper left corner and moves on from there. Since the top left corner gets the attention first, we should check our site and move the value proposition to the top left zone. Yes, there can be exceptions, but we can use this as a starting point and test from there. The bottom right terminal area is where we should place our call to action. 

Cognitive Fluency is the human tendency to prefer things that are familiar and easy to understand. For marketers this means that the easier to understand your offer is, the more likely people are to buy it. This topic on Cognitive Fluency suggests to make our offer and pricing as easy to understand as possible, and also make our website easy to read. 

Cognitive fluency also explains why you stick with brands and service providers you have used before and why you often order the same thing from the menu. This is because people tend to repeat customers if they have already tried a product or service and proven that it has worked for them. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching alternatives and risking a bad purchase.

As a marketer, this means it’s super important to get that first purchase from a customer. Make your first offer packed with value and as easy as possible to buy. Once they have their first positive buying experience, it’s much easier to get repeat purchases.

That is also why you prefer visiting sites where you instinctively know where everything is at, and you know what actions you’re supposed to take.

The next course is about Social Proof. In this course, we will learn how to identify, gather, and display the optimal social proof our customers subconsciously hope to see on your website. 

In the first video, experienced copywriter and content strategist Joel Klettke breaks down the ways that a compelling story drives customer engagement. He also gives us some tips on writing and structuring stories in a way that is both believable and compelling.

1. Specificity

2. Relatability to audience

3. Ability to support an actual claim

Joel also shared on lesson number 3 that a strong interview is the backbone to a compelling testimonial. Even more, a bad quote or the wrong choice of interviewee can actually have a profoundly negative impact on trustworthiness.

We’ll learn to identify who to interview, how to structure the interview process, missteps to avoid, and which questions to ask to get strong quotes.

More in depth discussion on Social Proof on my review next week. I will share how to:

• Craft compelling case studies
• Conduct meaningful customer interviews
• Strategically place social proof on your site
• Better discern between Action-based & Preference-based
• Keep your social proof inventive, new, & fresh

Stay tuned and follow me at Negosolution for more lessons like this as well as on Digital Solutions, Business Continuity, Financial and Health Wellness.