Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree Review: People and Psychology - 4 of 12
Grace - Conversion Copywriter for Wellness Brands
Customer-Centric, Data-driven & Conversion-Focused Emails & Sales Messages that help save time and increase revenue.
Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree Review - 4 of 12
Hey everyone, Grace here #YourPartnerInCopy
I’m back for another review of CXL Institute’s Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree. I have been blessed to be granted with this scholarship program and I’ve been sharing my reviews for the past few weeks.
Today I’d like to talk to you about using psychology in Conversion Rate Optimization. You see, the internet and technology may have changed rapidly but the human brain has been pretty much the same for millions of years. Probably, it will continue to be.
In the conversion hierarchy, Persuasion is at the tip of the pyramid. This means, we have to take care of the fundamentals before we can apply the persuasion techniques.
Some examples of effective persuasion principles are social proof and urgency. These can be used in our design and copywriting.
When we talk about persuasion, Cialdini is the first name that comes up in our mind. If you read Cialdini’s book: Influence, he mainly talks about these principles from the perspective of how to not get taken advantage of when someone tries to use this on you.
In this article, we focus on how you can use the persuasion principles to boost conversions. These work like buy buttons in our mind that tend to always work.
In a nutshell, here are the 7 principles of persuasion according to him:
- Reciprocity: As humans, we are wired to return favors and feel obliged by nature. In other words, we treat others as they have treated us. Now when you keep providing value to your prospects and after a while, ask them to take some action, like buy something, they're much more likely to do it.
- Commitment and Consistency: People are much more likely to first comply with a small request and then if you ask them a bigger commitment later on they're much more likely to do it if they took the first action. Or if people publicly state that they're going to do something, they're much more likely to do it.
- Social Proof: People are more likely to buy or comply if there are a large number of people who already bought or done a certain thing.
- Authority: People are much likely to take actions if a person of authority like an influencer promotes or advertises a product or service.
- Liking: People are more likely to buy from you if they like you or you have something in common.
- Scarcity and Urgency: People are more likely to buy or take action if they’re notified that there’s a certain limit or deadline to a service or product that we offer. A word of caution to never use fake scarcity because it can backfire at your business big time.
- Unity: People are more likely to be persuaded if they like you, trust you and if they share identities with you. As such, you will feel instant connection. To use this principle for Optimization, you can use specific jargon like those in the cases of crossfit junkies. They have terms like WOD which stands for Work Out Of The Day or AMRAP which means As Many Reps As Possible. You can also convey exclusivity, define the out-group, invoke family ties and share experience.
The second sub topic in the People and Psychology course is The Fogg Behavior Model. This model drives behavioral changes. According to Dr BJ Fogg of Persuasion Technology Lab at Stanford University, there are 3 elements that must converge to drive people to take action and boost conversion. The formula is
Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Trigger
If you’d like a conversion behavior to occur, you want to aim for high motivation and high ability(reduce friction and make it easy to do the action). Don’t forget that there must be a trigger in place. If you have high motivation and low ability (difficult to do), what you’ll get is frustration. If it’s low motivation, but easy to do (e.g. take out the trash), what you will get is annoyance.
The 3rd subtopic we will discuss are Lessons from Neuromarketing. In this lesson, I learned that our brains have 3 layers:
- The “New Brain” thinks
- The “Middle Brain” feels
- The “Old Brain” decides
Neuroscientists have demonstrated that the “Old Brain” is the most ancient and primitive. Thus it is called the reptilian brain. According to Neuroscience, the “Old Brain” can be triggered by only 6 stimuli:
- Self-Centered: The Old Brain is the organ of survival and is highly selfish. As such, we need to deliver our message in a way that is acceptable to a highly selfish organ. It’s about your customers. Our message should always be what’s in it for the customer?
- Contrast: The Old Brain is triggered when something changes. It is wired to seek clear contrast and spot the difference. This is the reason why before/after works so well. This will boost conversion because the “Old Brain” makes instant decisions and avoid confusion that results in delayed decisions.
- Tangible: The old brain prefers and scans for tangible input to avoid the extra time and energy involved in thinking.
- First and Last: The old Brain is only triggered by a change of state: when something changes, when something is new. The Old Brain will automatically be more alert at the beginning and at the end of an interaction. It pays close attention to patterns and quickly learns to ignore anything that is routine, repetitive, predictable, or just plain boring.
- Visual: The optical nerve is 25 times faster that the auditory nerve and it is connected directly in the Old Brain. It will only take milliseconds for your "Old Brain" to process visual data.
- Emotion: The “Old Brain” can only be triggered by emotion. This is why we sell with emotions.
The next formula you need to keep in mind is
Selling Probability = Pain x Claim x Gain x (Old Brain)3
You can apply this formula by
1. Identifying and addressing the pain.
2. Differentiating your claims from your competitors.
3. Showing proof of your claims
Deliver to the old brain by starting with a grabber or a headline that really grabs the attention. Use visuals and sell to emotions.
The fourth part of this course on People and Psychology is a big list of Persuasion Techniques we can use to receive the same powerful outcome: persuasion.
Let’s dive in.
- Focusing Effect: People tend to focus only a few aspects related to the attentional bias. This is why we want to keep it short and simple. Keep a max of 3 USPs.
- Context Dependent Memory: In general, we want to create a consistent context in our online presence across platforms and sites using the same contextual cues (from SEO, SEA, display, sites, to apps and social media, etc.) so that our customers and visitors remember us or our offer at some point.
- Self-generation affect effect aka IKEA effect: Lego very successfully employs this tactic with their LEGO ideas product line. People tend to like ideas and information better when they’ve been generated by our own mind even if they invest just a small amount of cognitive energy in it. The self-generation effect is the cognitive version of the physical labor-love effect (also termed the IKEA effect).
- Affect Heuristic: The way we feel influences our decisions and their outcomes made in that moment. We can test inducing a tiny bit of sadness or melancholy if you want users to make a conservative choice (like renewing a subscription) and then clearly provide the comforting and reassuring aspects of our offer.
- Facial distraction: From birth, we’re innately wired to search for faces. Although faces attract attention, they can distract attention from our content. We should use Gaze Cueing to redirect attention to your most persuasive content.
- Attentional Bias: People tend to pay attention to things that touch us (emotionally). So the more something touches us(i.e. pain, fear and sex), the more attention we pay to it. Here some conversion and persuasion tips: Display your USP’s and CTA close to the most emotionally dominant parts of your page (e.g. an expressive image). Then, place counter-persuasive elements (like ‘terms & conditions’ or ‘privacy’) away from the emotionally dominant parts of your page.
- Fear Appeals: This is a persuasive message that scares someone with the intent to motivate him to act against the threat. The most important ingredient in an effective fear appeal cocktail is ‘perceived efficacy’.
- Perceived efficacy is a combination of both self-efficacy (“can I avert the threat myself?”) and response-efficacy (“will the action recommended indeed avert the threat?”). Reduce friction, handle objections and ensure high ability in optimizing for conversion. Make sure you directly boost your customers’ efficacy by convincingly offering your solution as easy and effective. Also 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.
- Reflection Effect: The reflection effect explains that we have opposing ‘risk preferences’ for uncertain choices, determined by whether the possible outcome is a gain or a loss. We’re risk-averse when we have something to gain, but risk-seeking when we’ve got something to lose. Here are some online persuasion tips, when you want customers to make a risk-averse choice (such as staying with you), test by phrasing your USP’s as gains. When you want customers to make a risk-seeking choice (such as switching to you), phrase your USP’s as losses.
- Gaze Cueing: People automatically focus our orientation to the same object that others are looking at. The perceived gaze direction of a face shifts our visual attention as a powerful magnet in the same direction. To boost conversion on our website, we should consistently place important elements such as CTA on the right side, and have faces on your site looking in that direction. Additionally, place negative elements (i.e. prices) outside the perceived gaze direction.
- Forer effect: People has tendency to feel a recognition with vague yet positive traits. For conversion optimization, our messages are supposedly tailored specifically for a certain trait but general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, refer to rather vague and general personality traits (e.g. “Are you the kind of person that likes to share knowledge?”) and then mention that your solution is perfect for ‘these kind of people’ (and test with having ‘an authority’ mentioning it about you).
- Cognitive dissonance: We can’t rewind time to change our behavior, but we can change our beliefs and cognitions to align with that behavior. The online persuasion tips suggest that we need to play hard to get, be hard to get rid of and not to offer large incentives when asking customers for a favor.
- Choice-supportive bias: People have a tendency to remember our choices as being better than they actually were. In order to get your customers to attribute positive features to you (and negative ones to others), you can test by asking your users why they visit your website or use your app, ask them why they bought and use your product. Finally, show previously visited pages and bought items.
- Ambiguity Aversion: People tend to select options for a known or favourable outcome. Humans typically feel suspicious when we’re not told what the probability of an event is. Our brain is simply afraid of, and therefore aversive towards, being fooled. The conversion tips are that we should: > Be specific in your offer, communication and expectation of the outcome. I.e. use fixed discounts instead of a chance to win. Then, guarantee your offer.
- Belonging & Conformity: People conform to a group to belong. Some may even behave adversely towards groups that we don’t want to be associated with. For Conversion Optimization, this means supporting forming of groups and connections as well as encouraging them to be advocates of your brand.
- Paradox of choice: People tend to have a difficulty of making a choice when there's too many options. For persuasion tips, provide one to three choices and avoid too many variations.
- Autonomy: People tend to prefer situations that we have control over. To persuade visitors to repeatedly visit and act, we can introduce choices and allow them to freely step forward and backward.
- Visual Cueing: People's focus of attention is highly influenced by visual cues. Use a visual cue to emphasize your most important content/USP/CTA i.e use of arrows.
- Endowment Effect: People tend to value products and services that they have already own, even for a trial period. A persuasion tip is to show customers the good things they will lose if they end the service.
- Self-Efficacy: People believe that they can be successful from doing somethings that others have already been successful with. Also if we provide instant feedback on correct behavior, social proof, quick wins and "how-to" pages, we can be better at our conversion rates.
- Base Rate Neglect & Base Rate Fallacy: People tend to be bad with numbers and tend to base judgements on known specific numbers. Here are some online persuasion tips, supersize your numbers and percentages by changing ‘the base’ (e.g. 99% of our active clients give us a 5-star rating, instead of 80% of all our clients). Do the opposite for negative numbers (0% of our active users are unsatisfied with our product, instead of 20% of our users are unsatisfied).
- Self-Generation Memory Effect: This persuasion principle implies that we should ask the customers themselves to provide open answer feedback instead of giving them choices.
- Perceptual Incongruence: People tend to be persuaded with something they don't expect. To boost conversion we can use incongruent colors, fonts, images, etc. for important content and interactions. Most of the time, what breaks the pattern gets clicks.
- Status Quo Bias: People tend to go with the status quo so in order to get customers to deviate, we can force web and mobile visitors to make a choice, by making it available to them in an extremely easy path.
- Availability Heuristic: People have a tendency to judge an event to occur based on how available it is. An example of this is when some event is frequently covered in the media.
- Commitment Bias or labor-love effect: People like something more when we have invested more effort into it. This is also known as IKEA effect.
- Conceptual & Associative Priming: People are influenced with subconscious priming or cues.
- Signaling Triggers, Reminders, & Alerts: Even when highly motivated and able, we need a little reminder to make us act. Keep in mind that the Successful triggers have three characteristics: 1. We notice them 2. they bring the desired behavior into our conscious awareness, and most importantly 3. the triggers happen at a moment when we are both motivated and able to perform the behavior.
- Repetition & Direct Priming: This principle implies that the more we repeat something, the easier we process, remember, and act on it. We should show consistent elements and display cross sell combinations as soon as you know which product someone intends to buy.
- Peak-end Rule: People tend to judge an experience —pleasant or unpleasant— almost entirely on how it was at its peak and its ending. Here are some tips, bring your ‘enlightening moments‘ from your sales dialogue together in one happy climax. If possible, make sure that this positive peak is at the end of your sales dialogue such as enticing extra and unexpected good old "thank you", unlocking badges or access to something exclusive.
- Mimicry: People like you more when you mimic their behavior. To optimize conversions, mimic your customers’ terminology and dialogue (social networking sites, reviews, feedback tools, etc. are great places to learn about your customer linguistics…). Also make your customer mimic behavior by using pictures showing actual consumers buying or consuming your product (not only on your site but also on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media platforms). Post videos of actual people shopping for your product. Show who actually buys and/or uses your product (a Facebook pile is easy to implement).
- Hyperbolic Discounting: People tend to prefer the readily available choice rather than waiting. In order to persuade your customers, make sure that your solutions are available as quickly as possible.
- Equivalence Framing: The way things are stated or portrayed highly influences our choices. A tip for persuasion online is to word the features/attributes of your products in opposite terms (e.g. “35% fat” versus 65% fat-free”).
- Front loading: People tend to prefer the conclusion first and upfront. As such we should put our most important content in the upper left corner of your ‘entry-page’ or e-mail.
- Emphasis Framing: People constantly interpret the meaning of the things and events that we notice in order to understand somethings. To persuade our customers, we must find out about the meaningful frames that our customer uses and the values associated with them (i.e. Google searches, subjects read, poll answers)? Then evaluate if the frames are in our advantage. If so, we then emphasize the frame consistent aspects of our solution. Are the customers' frames disadvantageous? Then we can to shift their frame by first emphasizing information that doesn’t fit and try to switch their frames and values to a better solution.
That is it for the wheel of persuasion. That was a mouthful from CXL Institute's Mini Degree on Optimization Conversion. This is such an amazing scholarship program granted to me and I share what I learn every week in my Linkedin account and soon on our website at Negosolution.
At Negosolution, Our Elite, Lean Team Is In A Mission to Help Entrepreneurs and Industry Professionals Amplify Businesses Through End-to-End Digital Solutions thus Building Human to Human Relationships and Transforming Lives Towards A Journey of Financial and Health Wellness.
Next week, there will be more juicy, no fluff content on People and Psychology. Stay tuned for more valuable tips.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far, I'm so proud of you! I will be more proud plus grateful if you don't forget to share this to someone who you think needs it.
All the best!
-G
#YourPartnerInCopy #CopyHeiress
Digital Marketing Manager
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