CXL Week 2
Last week I wrote about my first week of CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion mini-degree program, this week I’ll be writing about my second week. I covered a lot of material this week, and am excited to share some of the most interesting lessons discussed. At the end of this article I’ve included the link to this amazing mini-degree offered by CXL, and encourage you to go check it out if you are interested in learning about the topics I discuss here in a much more in-depth, study-driven, and cohesive way.
Repitition: The more a visitor on your site sees something (recurring elements, images, colors, etc, the more they will like your brand. This makes pretty good intuitive sense and that’s why I enjoy it a lot. For example, if you are operating an e-commerce brand and you’re hosting a special store-wide promotion, you may want to apply this principle by having a banner ad displayed on every page your user visits, even on the homepage you might display it. By doing this kind of repitition people start to become familiar with that banner, they start to like the promotion and your brand more, and become more inclined to purchase with this sale. Another side that CXL reveals is that by using the repitition of elements you also make it easier for people to remember whatever it is you repeated to them. One thing that this made me think of was this statistic about sales which said that most customers don’t take action until the second or third contact (they might decline the first time). I see this principle as the same in e-commerce sales and all websites in general for that matter, and CXL reinforces the idea that we should always be serving the same thing to customers a few times to make sure that they’re able to take action on it after seeing it a few times.
Cognitive Load: Sometimes we put too much on pages, and ask our customers to do simply too many things. Form fields, questions, buttons, live chats, yada yada. CXL reminds us that we should never overload our customer’s minds. If the content we’re serving doesn’t encourage people to buy our product, hear our message, or learn the thing we want them to learn, we ought to just leave it out. Too many unnecessary elements will lead to cognitive overload and ultimately scare people off.
F-Reading Pattern: One of the most interesting aspects I discovered in this weeks reading was to consider the F-reading pattern. This basically says that when people read, they typically follow a similiar “F” shaped pattern. We might read the first line fully, some of the second, and then just skip all the way down to the bottom seeking some interesting piece of text. The more copy I read, the more accurate this model seems. If I don’t feel like I’ll be interested in reading something based on the first couple sentences, I’ll more than likely skip the whole text entirely. CXL advises that we should make sure to make our text interesting by adding things like bold, italics, quotations, TM, C, colors, capitals, etc, to make sure that when people read our copy, they find something that hooks their eye and encourages them to read further. The F reading pattern is a result of people not finding anything interesting within the first couple lines, and if we can prove to them that there is infact points of interest throughout the text with the afformentioned text styles, we might just hold their attention a little while longer. CXL goes even further with this, providing a couple of other reading patterns and going in-depth with the studies done around this subject. I really appreciate all the studies they include.
Decision Making: Before anyone can take an action on your site, they must obviously choose to do so. CXL frames this in an intuitive way and says that “For someone to take the time to do anything, the perceived reward must be greater than the cost.” This sounds blatantly obvious when reading it, but this encouraged me to ask myself if people who visit my website feel like their percieved reward is worth the sacrifice they’re making (money) (or time). In some cases, I found very quickly that I wasn’t sure, which prompted me to analyze and tweak my offer to make the reward higher than the cost. And in almost all cases with the laws I find in CXL, I can do the exact same thing. Every lesson gives you fairly specific advice for what you can immediately tweak based on what they’re showing you.
Consciousness in Decision making: I think we’d all like to think the decisions we make when it comes to our purchase decisions are conscious, rational, though-out choices that we feel confident in making. While this may be the case in some instances, the neuromarketers at CXL beg to differ. Most of the decisions and purchases we make are actually unconscious and emotional. A common thread throughout a lot of the lessons is that through neuromarketing, we are trying to get people to make emotional and unconscious decisions. CXL provides many methods to achieve this.
Anyway, I could go on and on with all the topics covered in this week of CXL. Going at my own pace I blew through a ton of material, and feel very confident in a lot of new principles that I’ve had a blast applying to my own store. Through CXL, I’ve even identified instances in my life where I’m pushed into predictable purchase patterns, and can now actively note these instances and clone them. Thus far, I can say I highly reccomend CXL’s digital persuasion and psycology mini-degree, and look forward to giving my week 3 article next week. Until then, here’s CXL’s Digital Psycology and Persuasion minidegree:
