Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree — CXL Institute Review #6
Influence & Interactive Design, and Neuromarketing
As I mentioned in my first few blog posts, in this series, I am going to talk about conversion rate optimization (CRO). This blog is part 6 of 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 Influence and Interactive Design, and Neuromarketing.
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.
If you are unemployed, underemployed, or interested in learning more about marketing from some of the best in the industry, look into the 12-week Minidegree scholarship program from the CXL institute while the offer is still available.
Who should apply for the CXL Institute Scholarship?
If any of these describe you, you should apply:
- You are looking for a serious transformation in your career, and are willing to put in the hours to accomplish that transformation.
- You are not afraid of hard work.
- You embrace any challenge you face and are determined to do whatever it takes to succeed.
- You are a self-driven individual that takes the initiative to learn.
Influence and Interactive Design
This course is led by Dr. Brian Cugelman, a Senior Scientist at AlterSpark (digital psychology and interactive design training center). In this course, Dr. Brian presents an original framework synthesizing research on behavioral patterns from a neurochemical and evolutionary psychology background.
Dr. Cugelman shares his unique model on the stages of behavior change:
Before any design principle comes into play, one should be able to define their intended consumer outcomes. In this lesson, we talk about 7 desired outcomes which serve as the backbone for our marketing plan moving forward.
This model is the amalgamation of the classic behavior change models with a little bit of modern updating. We talk about the actual outcomes.
- Concentrating (aware): this is the first step in his model. In this stage, we need to make the visitor aware of something we are trying to sell.
- Learning (informed): the first thing we need to do is make them aware of what we are offering in order for them to become informed.
- Desiring (motivated): in this stage, the visitor needs to be motivated to continue to the next stages.
- Deciding (intent): at this point, the visitor is aware, informed, and motivated to take action, however they are still looking for more information and considering whether to continue.
- Trust (confident): in this stage, the visitor needs their anxieties addressed. Social proof, for example, is a good way to make visitors more confident in their choice.
- Acting (short term): here, the user makes a small action, such as purchasing one item or signing up for a newsletter.
- Maintaining (loyalty): in this last stage, we want to retain the customer.
- Abandoning: At a certain point, people stop taking actions. It is very hard to have people sustain their behavior for the long term without giving up, or checking on competitors. So we have to deal with abandonment from the beginning.
For each stage, there are specific ways to design a sales page in order to make it easier for visitors to go through this process. Theodor Andrei in one of his blog described the process as following -
- In order to grab attention and make visitors aware, apply what is referred to as “pre-attentive processive”. An example of this is breaking patterns in order to make something stand out (bigger CTAs, contrasting colors).
- In order to inform visitors, you need to give visitors a simulated experience of what you’re selling. Focus on both the features and the benefits (technical details and the unique value).
- In order to get users motivated, you need to offer visitors a promise of what they get out of it. Motivation is tricky to fully understand (this is something consistent in all of the course material so far). Dr. Cugelman recommends testing incentives and loss aversion principles derived from evolutionary psychology.
- In order to help visitors make a decision easier, avoid creating instances of analysis paralysis. Offer the right amount of options and make it very simple for them to understand the value of what you’re offering. Sell to both the rational and irrational parts of the brain.
- In order to establish trust, make a good impression first because it will matter later down the line (the halo/devil effect). Credibility can be established based on perceived expertise, honesty, and integrity.
- In order to get visitors to take action, make the user experience as frictionless as possible.
- In order to re-engage users, this will require the right levels of motivation and ability. These levels will fluctuate in time and should be understood well, but the ability can be influenced if you make it as easy as possible to take action.
Introduction to Neuromarketing
According to HBR, “ Nobel Laureate Francis Crick called it the astonishing hypothesis: the idea that all human feelings, thoughts, and actions — even consciousness itself — are just the products of neural activity in the brain. For marketers, the promise of this idea is that neurobiology can reduce the uncertainty and conjecture that traditionally hamper efforts to understand consumer behavior. The field of neuromarketing — sometimes known as consumer neuroscience — studies the brain to predict and potentially even manipulate consumer behavior and decision making. Until recently considered an extravagant “frontier science,” neuromarketing has been bolstered over the past five years by several groundbreaking studies that demonstrate its potential to create value for marketers”
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.
The instructor for this course was Roger Dooley. He suggests that we sometimes fail as marketers because we’re only focusing on the conscious side of the brain (5% of our thought process vs the non-conscious part which is 95%). Dooley explains the difference between these two “systems” very well:
- System 1: Fast, emotional, based on intuition (reptilian brain)
- System 2: Slow, calculated, conscious thought process (new brain)
Neuromarketing studies focus on two main areas, neuroscience, and behavior. Knowledge learned from neuromarketing can sometimes be applied universally. For example, the Fogg Behaviour explains that actions require a combination of motivation, ability (or lack of friction), and a trigger. As another example from neuroscience, fMRIs are sometimes used to track brain activity levels in response to different forms of marketing. EEGs, biometrics, eye tracking, and facial coding research is also commonly used in prominent commercial marketing studies.
Dooley discusses what he calls the “persuasion slide”, a framework that allows you to make a better persuasive argument based on addressing both the conscious and non-conscious parts of the brain. This framework is similar to the Fogg Model (motivation, trigger, ability). Here are the elements of the persuasion slide:
- Gravity: Gravity is what makes playground slides work, and in our persuasion model, it represents the customer’s needs, wants, and desires. The user’s initial motivation, needs, or desired outcome. Don’t fight it, so don’t ask them to do something for you. Ask them to do something for themselves.
- Nudge: When you are at the top of a slide, you are on a little horizontal ledge. You won’t budge from that ledge unless you propel yourself forward a little bit, or someone gives you a shove from behind. This is the “nudge” in our model — it’s what you do to get your customer moving down the slide. Similar to Fogg’s trigger element, the nudge is about getting the customer’s attention and influencing them to take actions (they should also mirror their motivation somehow, or it won’t be effective).
- Angle: the benefits and the value of what you’re selling. Emotional appeals, features, discounts, and so on. What do visitors get out of it? The angle, or slope, of a slide, is critical. Without a steep enough angle, slides don’t work. In our persuasion model, the angle is determined by the motivation you provide. If this motivation isn’t strong enough, the customer will begin to slide and then stop. The angle is broken into two types of motivation: Conscious and Non-conscious.
→ Conscious motivators are what many marketers focus on: features, benefits, price, discounts and sales, and so on. These appeal to the rational decision-making part of your customer’s brain. These are important in many situations, and also help customers justify an emotional purchase in rational terms.
→ Non-conscious motivators are the many elements of your offer that appeal to the customer’s emotions or how his brain works. Cialdini’s six big persuasion factors (liking, reciprocity, authority, etc.), appeals to our “mating” instinct as described by Geoffrey Miller, BJ Fogg’s behavior model, and grid, all fall in this category. Many other factors, like our brain’s aversion to loss and avoidance of things that require hard thought, also fit into the non-conscious motivator area.
- Friction: It is the enemy of an effective slide. We’ve all seen a child get stuck halfway down a slide because it was rusty or poorly maintained. When a physicist looks at a slide (or an “inclined plane,” if you want to get technical), friction is a force that directly opposes motion down the slide. In our model, friction represents difficulty, both real and imagined. The conscious and nonconscious elements that produce friction on your website. This is about making everything short, simple, and easy to use and understand.
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 sixth week helped me understand the basics of interactive design and neuromarketing plays a vital role in optimizing the conversion of a website.
The concept of interactive design is explained in so many details and so is emotional strategy. 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 Google Ads and Landing Page optimization during my week #7.
That’s all folks. See you next week!
