CXL Institute Conversion Optimization Minidegree Review (4/12)

This is a fourth of a twelve-part (4/12) review of conversion optimization mini degree by CXL Institute. They offer multiple programs that help you get to an advanced level in digital marketing and offer industry-recognized certificates after program completion. In this review, I will revisit courses that I completed this week and those are: intro to neuromarketing, developing and testing an emotional content strategy as well as influence and interactive design.

Intro to Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is all about measuring customers’ physiological and neural signals when interacting with companies’ products to gain insight into customers’ motivation and preferences which can be used in many marketing areas: creative advertising, product development, pricing, etc. One of the key insights I have learned is that if you want to have big uplifts you need to focus on customers’ motivation.

Your hypotheses should be prioritized based on whether they respect the following requirements:

• Will the change in variation be perceived?
• Is it relevant / does it have value?
• Is it differentiating you from the competition?
• Does it follow well-researched psychological / persuasion principles?

If you want to motivate your visitors and turn them into customers you need to persuade them to take action. There are four variables that will help you with this: gravity, nudge, angle and friction. These variables are part of the persuasion slide.

1. Gravity

Gravity is something that you do not have control of. It refers to customers’ initial motivation, needs, wants, and goals. You need to create an offer that fits their wants and needs.

2. Nudge

As your prospect sits at the top of the slide, they are on a small flat surface. They aren’t going to move unless they move their momentum forward or someone pushes them from behind. Nudge is like a little push, usually, it is a call to action or an email. Its purpose is to push them to take action.

3. Angle

An angle is determined by the strength of the motivation you provide. There are conscious motivators and non-conscious motivators. Conscious motivators are usually: price, features, delivery, quality, service, etc. While non-conscious motivators are: status, signaling, fantasy, social approval, risk aversion. When trying to motivate your customers you should use both motivators.

Conscious motivators are expensive and affect your profit margin, while non-conscious motivators are the opposite, changing the page layout, copy, scarcity, hidden text (give a little bit of description and let them decide if they want to learn more), social proof, etc…

4. Friction

Friction refers to barriers that cause confusion, imply work or obligation like unnecessary form fields which require users to provide information that is not needed to deliver a product or service, poor user interface and user experience design, long payment processes, unclear product descriptions, captchas as well as difficulty in reading which results in difficulty in deciding, etc.

Conclusion — align with gravity, then give them that nudge and maximize the angle of the slide and remember that non-conscious always costs less and finally you want to minimize the friction and it’s always the cheapest solution.

Developing and testing an emotional content strategy

When developing content for your website, landing page or offer you must understand what your customers are looking at emotionally and how to trigger those emotions with content. There is a four-step process when developing an emotional content strategy.

1. Emotional competitor analysis

In the beginning, you should research your top competitors that are targeting your audience. You should analyze things such as:

• Message
• Image
• Emotional triggers
• Colors

2. Emotional SWOT test

You must identify what are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that are related to your product or service from the customers’ point of view.

3. Emotional content strategy

Take the weaknesses and threats and understand how you can address them. We want customers to feel unique and exclusive and we want to let them feel that we are smart and simple.

And the last phase is to test everything and see what works and what does not.

Influence and interactive design

This lesson was mostly focused on understanding a path every customer goes through. It consists of:

• Conscious awareness — get into the person’s head, they must be aware of what we are proposing and that is not going to happen if they do not know we exist or if they do not know what we offer.
• Learning — we want people to know what our offer is.
• Motivation
• Deciding — Not taken action yet, but it is on the radar
• Trust — We are actually worried about distrust, they don’t trust our infrastructure or that they will get the product.
• Acting — short term behavior, small purchase, or first-time purchase, we want to repeat this cycle and then maintain it in the long term.
• Maintaining
• Abandoning — at certain point people will leave you, instead of fearing it, just hardwire it into your marketing.

Design principles

• Direct attention by breaking patterns and controlling where users look and what they think about
• Educate your target audience with proper information at the right time
• Evoke emotion with the right triggers that fit your target audience profile like loss aversion, immediate physiological needs, affiliation, status, self-protection, etc. The reason why this comes after educating is just that the orthodox in the models out there. But in practice, this is normally the first thing you want to go for.
• Make the decision making easy with conscious and non-conscious triggers.
• Build your trust and credibility by showing your expertise and honesty (when you make a promise, do your best to deliver on your promise). Customers want to avoid bad outcomes.
• Create a path with the least amount of friction and increase user experience.
• When re-engaging customers look at their motivation and ability. If their motivation is low, leave them and if they are motivated, try to improve your user interface and customer experience.

My thoughts

It is week four and I have currently completed 28% or 9/32 courses. Thank you for reading about my experience with CXL Institute. In the next part, I will cover google analytics for beginners and landing page optimization courses.