Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree — CXL Institute Review #4
Introduction to People and Psychology
People are irrational, people are cute, people are bad, people are good. People are all kinds of things — and science hasn’t figured out yet.
It is important to keep in mind that while the internet and technology have changed at a rapid pace, the human brain has been pretty much the same for the millions of years and it probably will continue to be.
As I mentioned in my first three blog posts, in this series, I am going to talk about conversion rate optimization (CRO). This blog is part 4of the 12 reviews that I would be publishing based on my learnings from the CXL Institute’s Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree program. This post is all about People and Psychology.
CXL Institute offers some of the best online courses, mini degrees, and certifications in the field of digital marketing, product analytics, conversion rate optimization, growth marketing, etc. I am a part of the Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree program. Throughout the series, I would be discussing the content of the course as well as my learning and thoughts about the same.
When to use psychology in Conversion Rate Optimization
Remember the conversion hierarchy? Persuasion is the tip of the pyramid — one has to make sure that everything else, the fundamentals, have been taken care of before we move on to applying persuasion techniques. The main idea of any business is to convince the customer to buy a product. To make this happen, we need to provide tools and the possibility to do it. Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are top experts in online marketing, conversion rates, and persuasive content had created a conversion hierarchy model to make all conversion process clear. Eisenberg model below, place “persuasive” on the top. This means that it is based on all previous levels, so start to worry about persuasion; you need to be sure everything up from the bottom is already fixed.
“Selling is the process of persuading a person that your product or service is of greater value to him than the price you’re asking for it.” — Brian Tracy
That doesn’t mean that we should hold back from using them. “Social Proof and Urgency” — can be very effective. Some principles should also inform our design and copywriting.
One needs to be aware and try not to go overboard with these techniques. If one tries to apply all at once, they won’t work as well. They should be used sparingly for full effect and depends heavily on the particular case.
Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Referring back to the blog post 3 — Cialdini’s research discusses 7 principles that are well-known today:
→ Social Proof: People are more inclined to trust other people’s opinions of things, especially if they’re coming from someone you’re familiar with. This principle suggests that it is always good to have customer reviews and ratings on your page.
→ Authority: People have a tendency to believe in what a person with higher authority has to say. Let’s consider an example of an influencer promoting a product. The audience who follow this influencer is more inclined towards buying the product. Hence, It is always good to have a 3rd party authorization statement on the webpage.
→ Likeability: you are liked more if you share things in common with your audience. Make your website more relatable by including profiles of your team. This is hard to measure but people say yes to things/people that they like.
→ Scarcity: People are more likely to convert if there is a sense of urgency/scarcity. We need to make sure that the scarcity badge is relevant. It doesn’t make sense to have a scarcity badge on a pdf. It might affect your conversion negatively.
→ Reciprocity: the idea that we are built to return favors, so it’s important to offer free things, guides, blogs, and learnings.
→ Commitment/Consistency: The idea is to get your prospect to do a small act. This will increase the likelihood that they will say yes to a bigger ask later.
→ Unity (Us vs Them): people will be more attracted to those who are similar in behavior and way of thinking. Make your customers feel like a part of a group if they end up performing the key action.
Fogg Behavior Model
Iryna Manukovska in one of her blogs explained Fogg Behaviour Model wonderfully by stating — Is motivation enough to do the action? I’m’ sure it works but only in a death-and-live situation. It’s hard to start running outside in winter if you leave in New York, more comfortable to do it if you are in California, cheerful countryside. There are lovely views, fresh air, warm sun, and no need to wear a lot to start your workout.
In online marketing, we need to create the right environment for our customers — we need to design their actions, behavior itself, like a road sign on the highway. To make this efficient, you need to know how to impact behavior so that you can design for it.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, Dr. BJ Fogg from the Persuasive Technology Lab, has created The Fogg Behavior Model to explain how behavior occurs. According to his research on behavioral design, three elements must come together at the same time: motivation, ability, and trigger. If the behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. This quite simple model creates a checklist for us and fundamental for all customer satisfaction metrics.
The basic idea is behavior = motivation x ability x trigger (prompt)
FOGG behavior model is a very important framework to keep in mind. Desired paid behavior happens when 3 things converge —
- High Motivation: “I want to do it”
- Peak ability: “It is easy to take action, it’s easy to do”
- Trigger: Something that compels us to take action
Playing with these three things, high motivation, ability, and the trigger are how you get information about when to ask people to take an action.
As per Iryna’s blog,
Motivation
People came to you because they were looking for something. Your task is to create additional reasons for them to go deeper. Looking for a dress, we ensure you in which it can change your life or make a date goes smoothly.
Can we help customers ger additional motivation? For sure. Street sellers are using these for centuries, and they are still working: pleasure vs. pain, hope vs. fear, social acceptance, and rejection. We can increase motivation with an effective sales copy and what nit, but if you are artificially trying to create motivation to make a behavior happen, you are swimming upstream (and the current is strong)
BJ Fogg created a framework for motivation that has three core motivators, each with 2 sides:
Motivator 1: Pleasure/Pain
Motivator 2: Hope/Fear
Motivator 3: Social Acceptance/Rejection
Ability
Is it easy to buy, order, and fill all the fields, or can I fill them for the customer (location & social-media-based information)? Ability is about how easy is to do what you to from customer, fewer efforts from them brings more results to you.
Trigger
Common headlines could be a basic trigger you are looking for. Do they compel? Are they visible?
The right trigger helps behavior to occur; if it is absent and motivation and ability are high, this won’t work. Customers need to understand how to make an action. CXL institute recommends being obsessed with triggers as your business really depends on them.
Perfect trigger checklist:
- Tigger people at the right time — when both motivation & ability are high
- Lack of ability leads to frustration
- Lack of motivation is annoying
Actually, two types of triggers work — hot and cold. First, one can be used right now, like subscribe, ask for advice, Get access buttons. Second own look like a friendly reminder — billboards, advertising — they pushing you until you would have and ability to make an action.
Lessons from Neuromarketing
Let’s try to answer the biggest question in our minds, what is neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience to marketing. Neuromarketing includes the direct use of brain imaging, scanning, or other brain activity measurement technology to measure a subject’s response to specific products, packaging, advertising, or other marketing elements — Roger Dooley (https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/)
If we narrow down the main 3 things our brain is concerned with, its the 3 F’s:
→ Food
→ Fight or Flight
→ Fornication
As we have discussed in previous blogs, we have 3 kinds of brains:
- New Brain — This brain is responsible for the thinking
- Middle Brain — This brain is responsible for the emotions and feelings
- Old Brain — This brain decides; it reviews inputs from the other two brains and decide.
Neuroscience indicates that the old brain can be triggered only by 6 stimuli —
- Self Centered — The old brain is highly selfish. One needs to deliver the message in a way that is acceptable to a highly selfish organ. It is about your customers. They don’t really care about you. Hence avoid language that’s about you and make it solely about your customers.
- Contrast — The old brain is triggered when something changes without a contrast. It can’t make a decision. This is the very reason why before and after works so well.
- 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. It pays more attention to the start and end of the message, the sales copy, or the marketing email.
- Visual — The optic nerve is 25 times faster than the auditory nerve and it connected directly to the old brain.
- Emotion — The old brain can only be triggered by emotions.
Review —
I find the CXL CRO Minidegree very insightful. The instructors are champions in their fields and they know exactly what they are talking about. Being an experimentation analyst, I understand the importance of experiments (A/B testing) and I have seen numerous examples where the outcome of the test was contradictory to public opinion. The emphasis on testing and learning from it is something that I admire the most about the course.
The material that I went through for the fourth week helped me understand the basics of people and psychology and how neuromarketing plays a vital role in optimizing the conversion of a website.
The concept of psychology and neuromarketing is explained in so many details. It is hard to put it in one blog. Therefore I will discuss more about this topic in my next blog. Everything about the course is so descriptive. Something, that can be easily implied in real-world scenarios/ and business problems.
The detailed walkthrough of performing user experience research and quantifying the results into actionable insights. I am eager to learn more about social proof, and people and psychology during my week #5.
That’s all folks. See you next week!
