People and Psychology Review
CXL’s People and Psychology program covers a large amount of useful material for garnering more conversions on your website, and one of my favorite was a big long list of persuasion techniques they share. For each one of these, they provide you with scientific examples and A-B tests to prove that the principle works. It has been overall super valuable and note-worthy. I’ve gone on to apply most all of the lessons taught in CXL, and from this brief course have found a lot of value and increased confidence in my marketing.
Further, CXL includes the TL;DR digital persuasion/ conversion tips that you can read and immediately apply in bullet-points. I was particularly shocked when this list mentioned the Facial Distraction effect which points out that putting faces on sites that are meant to convert will only distract the user. They point out that a large part of our brain is involved in processing faces, and if you invoke that thinking you can distract the user from the intended action. Even so, some websites report that having faces whose gaze is looking directly at the CTA boosts conversions by up to 30%. What about self-generation? This is the idea that we tend to feel something is more valuable after we create it. Much more intuitive than the Facial Distraction law I think, CXL provides examples of how IKEA does this dance by making their customers build their own furniture, giving it more intrinsic value to them. So let’s say you wanted someone to buy a product from your website. According to this, you might ask them: “What color do you want?”, “Do you want 2 more?”, etc. And when you want to prove to your customer that you’re the best product in the market, don’t just say that.. Let them think through it on their own. In that way, they’ve created the perception themselves and therefore see it as more valuable.
It’s not all brief tricks for digital persuasion though. The course gave me a fundamental understanding of how marketers should visualize and consider the customer brain as a whole. They go in-depth with the Fogg Behavior Model, Cinaldi’s 7 Principles of Persuasion, and how to appeal to the “old brain”. And we are emotional beings! All these principles tell me that we make decisions emotionally. CXL provides an example of a study performed on a select group of people with damage to their brain. They were normal in most all aspects, except for one crucial one. They had no emotions. One shocking discovery was found when working with these patients, and that was that all of them had no ability to make decisions. Even trivial ones like what to eat or wear were completely undoable for these people. They could rationally justify what they should be doing, but due to their lack of emotions were never able to make decisions for themselves. So consider that as much rationality you put into your landing page, that isn’t going to encourage a decision. It’s the big images, the inspiring visuals, the pretty colors, and the emotional appeal of your offer that will increase conversions.
One of my favorite parts of this course had been the elaboration on “how people view websites”. It’s incredibly insightful and provides a ton of eye tracking examples showing what people really do when they go to your website. They show that most of the time, people don’t look beyond the first two or three results on Google, and that when reading large blocks of text on you website they may skim through one or two lines and then jump down to the bottom. Did you know people tend to look to the top left of your webpage before they do anything else? The top left is “priority 1” aka the initial and most important thing that we look at as we enter a website. And hey, it makes sense considering we read from left to right (so this one might have been entirely obvious). It’s very intuitive. Further, there’s explanation into the effectiveness of increasing your image size, or decreasing it. CXL presents a ton of small tweaks like this that one may think to be trivial, but are the keys to bringing an already successful store or form from good to great. Further, the eye tracking studies demonstrated that people are more enticed to look at “normal” people instead of models. This one was counter-intuitive to me, but I guess it makes some sense? We relate to “normal” people more, and for this reason they’re probably better used to reach your “normal” customer. (Unless of course you’re marketing to models.) I was surprised to see that this course had no mention of smiling faces and their effects on conversions, because I intuitively believe that if you put a smiling face on a page, it will generally increase your user’s experience. Am I wrong? Maybe I’ll have to put that bias aside.
What about biases? We get invested in ideas. That’s our nature isn’t it? CXL says NO to that; they present a long list of biases and how to avoid them. One of them is our tenacity to become emotionally invested in the outcome of our actions or ideas. For example, maybe I want to try out a new button or form on my website and test my conversions. I really think it’ll work, and after doing so I see a marginal (but still present) increase in conversions. This will confirm my initial hope that the idea would work (confirmation bias), but in actuality showed very little improvement and could be accounted for by natural variation. The issue may have been somewhere deeper, yet my emotional investing into that single idea restricts me from solving the bigger issues. So yes, CXL makes a very informative course. I’ve worked on the tip of the ice burg thus far, and I can’t wait to progress deeper into the course and learn more. There’s entirely too much information in here, and most all their lessons are easily implementable and actionable in your specific use case. It’s been great.
