Neuromarketing — CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree Review — Part 3

This is part 3 out of 12 reviewing the digital psychology and persuasion minidegree at CXL Institute. For 12 weeks, I will deep-dive into areas such as psychology foundations, neuromarketing, persuasion models and behavioral psychology. Each week I will post one article reviewing the course content and discuss my learnings as well as my personal thoughts on it.

This weeks’ course has been instructed by amazing Roger Dooley and André Morys. I mentioned Roger Dooley in my previous post, he is a neuromarketer and the author of the bestselling book Brainfluence. André Morys is a frequent speaker at conferences, the founder of The Global Optimization group and the blog konversionsKRAFT and he has also written books about conversion optimization and growth strategy. Before jumping into what I’ve learned this week I want to start by saying how impressed I am by the extensive course content and how lucky I am to be able to learn from some of the best. I would encourage everyone working as optimizers or interested in web psychology to attend this course at CXL.

Neuromarketing tools

So, let´s start, in the first part of this course different tools for understanding what is going on inside peoples brains are presented. Neuromarketers can use a number of different tools for this such as fMRI, EEG, biometrics, facial coding, eye tracking and self reporting.

fMRI machines create 3D images that show which areas of people’s brains that are lighting up when people view content, make decisions, etc. EEG is more common for commercial use though because it is cheaper and faster. EEG can be combined with biometric measurements such as heart rate, breathing rate or galvanic skin response, and eye tracking. Another tool is facial coding, a method of measuring people’s emotions through facial expressions via webcam for example. People’s emotions can also be measured by using implicit testing or timed testing. In these tests, people have to choose between two alternatives, and the test measures how long it takes to make a choice. When it takes longer for someone to make a choice this is likely to indicate they are thinking something else, and it reveals their real emotions. The best practice today is to combine multiple technologies and also use self reporting which means asking what the customers are doing or thinking.

The persuasion slide

In the next part of the course, a framework called the persuasion slide created by Roger Dooley is presented. The framework consists of four different components that all influence the persuasion process. By applying this framework to digital marketing or websites the conversion rate can be increased, to get there, the trick is to reduce friction, increase motivation and create triggers and nudges.

Gravity

Gravity is what the customers bring to the site and this can be both their initial motivation, their needs, wants and goals. Here it is important to meet the customers’ needs, wants and goals by using the right messaging, call to actions, etc.

Nudge

Nudging the customers starts with getting the customer’s attention. Nudges can be popups, CTA:s, search ads, etc. Once you have their attention you can start persuading them. A nudge needs motivation to be effective.

Angle

This is both the conscious and non-conscious motivation you provide for the customers. Some examples of conscious motivators could be discounts, product features, or price whereas non-conscious motivators could be appeals based on cognitive biases or psychology or emotional appeals. Ideally, you want to use both conscious and non-conscious motivators on your site.

Friction

There are two kinds of friction — real and perceived. Real frictions could be steps in the checkout process, long forms or instructions. Perceived friction is fonts that are difficult to read or long texts for instance.

How to control the user’s attention

In order to control the customer’s attention, it is important to be relevant. This goes for content, value propositions, implicit codes as well as emotional relevance (resonance). It takes us less than 50 milliseconds to decide if a website is relevant or not which means it is super important to make sure the customer gets the feeling of relevance quickly. In this part of the course André Morys presents 7 principles of attention.

1. Contrast

2. Space

3. People/face

4. Movement

5. Breaking rules

6. Directional cues

7. People’s name/their own face

These are all things that draw attention. By using these principles on your website or in your digital marketing you are able to control the user’s attention. What I found particularly interesting about this part is how to use people looking at something, a CTA for instance, as a directional cue. Our own gaze is drawn by someone else’s gaze and this has been shown in eye tracking studies.

By adding these parameters in your A/B-testing prioritization framework you make sure you reach the customer’s mind and thereby reduce the risk of testing the wrong things.

Credibility based web design

I mentioned BJ Fogg who is a behavioral scientist in my first post. According to research that he has done this is how users evaluated the credibility of websites:

46,1% web design (color, form, etc)

28,5% information architecture

25,1% information focus (clarity)

15,5% key visuals

14,85 useful information

All this is perceived within milliseconds.

Optimization

Finally, I want to share some things about a/b testing that I learned this week. The following are important KPI:s to measure the success of your optimization process.

Agility — how many experiments do you run each year?

Success rate — how many successful experiments did you have?

Cumulated uplift — how big was the business impact and how much uplift did you create in total?

Prioritization

According to André Morys, one should prioritize high impact a/b tests over low effort.

Summary of the third week

I have now completed 25% of this course and I am really looking forward to the remaining 9 weeks. I enjoyed this week’s courses about neuromarketing a lot and next week I will continue on the same topic. Stay tuned for future updates, see you next week!