Part [2/12] Review of CXL’s Digital Psycology and Persuasion
This week I enter part 2/12 of my review of Conversion XL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion Mini degree program.
This week we take a closer look at the field of Neuromarketing. We looked at the positives and negatives of designing your marketing strategy based on Neuromarketing fundamentals.
After going through the content for this week, I can really sum up all the learnings into one word.
Design.
Without proper design on the correct assumptions, you cannot design a test that will result in reliable improvements
Without proper design, you will not be able to design better digital experiences.
Without proper design, you won’t be able to layout a proper strategy to connect to your customers.
During this session of the program, there were many concepts that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. The topics were unique. This week’s instructors included Andre Morys one of the leading conversion specialists in Germany and Roger Dooley, a former engineer turned neuromarketing expert.
Andre Morys is the author of Conversion-Optimierung and Die Digitale Wachstumsstrategie. He notes that if you can read German, they would definitely be worth checking them out. Roger Dooley is also an accomplished author, writing bestsellers Friction and Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing.
Sidenote: these are in English.
It was interesting watching the approaches of the instructors. Both were fantastic in their delivery, however, I was keen enough to notice some differences in their overall philosophy. To me, Andre seems to approach things in a faster and more agile way. Preferring to stick to the frameworks he uses in order to get tests off quickly and efficiently. While Roger, true to his professional training seems to approach things in a very calm and calculated manner. This is good nor bad, I found both styles to be informative and fitting given the topics covered.
If you decide to take this course and have found yourself to resonate with either or both approaches you have these instructors to look forward too.
Design better Digital Experiences
How did UBER beat out the traditional cab model?
Andre suggests that it wasn’t the technology involved, pricing models or anything that you would traditionally think to be competitive advantages. He suggests that the main driver of growth for uber was actually the superb customer experience. The company just made the process of getting a ride from A -> B easy. And that is one of the main reasons for users joining a service. The company was able to reduce the cognitive load of users by taking away steps of the process. They no longer needed to make the effort to dial a number and talk to a (sometimes) rude dispatch associate, they had a fun little tracker on the map where you can actually see where your driver is. And when you were dropped off there was no exchange of funds reducing the time of arrival even further.
Although these all seem like minor adjustments that are all that is required to move and reduce friction enough to get people through the buyer’s journey.
Andre and Roger both agree that when looking at designing your digital experiences you should build on the fundamentals of scientific principles and create tests so that you can optimize for your specific audience.
Design Better Tests
According to Andre, whenever he works with clients that say they have their A/B tests set up correctly, 75% of the time they are far from optimized. The reason this is because most people that are designing these A/B tests are not following the correct neuroscience principles. When designing a test for an increase in conversion, traffic or what Andre refers to as “uplift” you should be trying to create a perceived change in order for your users to have a change in their behaviour. When he sees tests usually they are testing for very small things that may not affect the change in that person’s behaviour.
This is probably the biggest idea that I took away from this week. Moving towards the mind-frame that when you are conducting tests, they need to be large and in the customers face so that they can see the change and behave differently on your site.
Both Andre and Roger speak more about the inner workings of this approach and how major behavioural change and therefore major knowledge can be gained about your audience. This way as you continue to test and you continue to learn more about your audience, you can improve the product which will lead to better overall customer experience.
Design better marketing campaigns
Your customers experience begins from the very first moment that someone is introduced to your brand. Andre says that you have about 50ms to wow your customer before they begin to start forming unconscious opinions of you. This goes back to our evolution. We actually start forming opinions of someone as soon as we see their face. Even in the smallest changes in a persons face is enough for us to form some sort of opinion on them.
The same goes for your website. This is why with a proper understanding of neuromarketing core principals you can create a major “uplift” in your tests. Roger Dooley introduces the slide model to illustrate that without all 4 steps required to form/change human behaviour an action cannot take place.
The slide model is essentially a less academic version of BJ Fogg’s behaviour model. It consists of:
- The gravity — what is the customer’s motivation to be there?
- The Nudge — You need to get attention and begin to persuade
- The Angle — Motivation you provide both conscious and non-conscious
- The Friction — The difficulty of completing the behaviour, both real and perceived.
Using these principals, you’ll be able to design a campaign that nurtures customers across from the beginning to the end of your relationship.
Conclusion and closing remarks
Thoughtfully designing your marketing framework, is hard work. It’s a science, and not an exact science. Unfortunately, there is no “quick fix” to create a neuromarketing playbook. You’ll have to create one for yourself. Because everything that you do will have to be custom. You’ll have to design your tests. Create your audiences all for the benefit of your customer. And as we enter this new COVID world, where the doors of many small businesses are closing, you have to disrupt or die.
My takeaway from this week is that you must create the best possible customer experience. That is the only this that matters. You must obsess about your customers and make them feel inspired to want to work/buy from you. When a customer comes to you, they don’t see your features, they don’t see just the low cost -they see everything as a whole. No matter if they are conscious of it or not. The number one way to grow your business and outperform your competitors is to obsess about the experience of your customers
This was an eye-opening experience for me since I’ve been a longtime subscriber to the school of competitive strategy, where you can win by other methods in terms of technology, financing etc. but when you really look at the behemoths of the worlds. The Apples the Amazons etc, they are insanely obsessed with the customer experience and that is what propels them past the competition and makes them win.
I had another great learning experience this week. Again there have been some concepts and models presented to me that I haven’t seen before. It was a true learning experience that I would recommend. I would rate this week’s learnings to be a 5/5. I base this score off the uniqueness of the content alone. Not only have I not seen these concepts anywhere else, but they also tie in really well to the previous week’s lessons.
