Persuasion Economics 10: Applied Neuromarketing

Your A/B test should be run to measure the amount of change in the behaviour of the customer. If the customer changed behaviour because of a little change in the website, design or packaging of the product, then you can call it a successful test.

90% of experiments fail because the change never reached the customers mind. — Andre Marys

This is my tenth week in my Digital Psychology training by CXL and I’m learning about how to apply the principles of Neuromarketing, which means marketing to the brain.

As usual, I would be sharing my take home from these learnings as well as tips from my experience as a Copywriter and Mindset Coach.

Each piece of content would contain my thoughts and/or learning from CXL’s teaching and a personal “How Can I Brand This” section, where I would share tips on how you can use the information for your brand success.

Enjoy…

Brain Fundamentals

To market to the brain, here are some brain fundamentals you must master.

Control The Attention

Customer experience leads to growth. Customer experience is something that happens in the mind of your customer. You only have 50 milliseconds to create the feeling of relevance.

Limbic Map

This is a collection of values or motivations allocated in a certain way that is important to human behaviour.

Answer These 3 Questions

1. Do you know what is relevant to your customer?
2. Is the message understood?
3. Why? Why not?

Why Communication Fails

100%

What you should say

20%

What you actually say

5%

What customers perceive

1%

What their interpretation is

How to Control Attention

To control attention, you must ensure that your message arrives. If your message does not reach the mind of your customers, it won’t have any effect. You cannot actually control attention, but you can manage what leads to attention. Here are a few tips to getting started…

7 Principles of Attention

1. Contrast
2. Space
3. People/Faces
4. Movement
5. Breaking rules
6. Directional cues
7. Person’s name or their own face

Analyse the Perception Architecture of Your Website

• What is the most important thing your customers need to know.
• What has the biggest importance (graphically)?
• How could you change that?

Emotional Resonance

• Resonance is really fragile
• Common personas are not precise enough.

Developing Better Customer Personas

1. Eliminate conflicting values and focus on one core value.
2. Set a clear value type. Create one-word or term to describe that person.
3. Remove unneeded information.
4. Deduce specific information about your product or service.

PTO — Performer, traditionalist, open-minded.

Principles of Human Evaluation

1. As experts, we look at websites from a very analytical and rational perspective. But most people evaluate what they perceive very quick with unconscious heuristics.

Cognitive load is reducing emotional activity. If you want to sell anything on an emotional level, eliminate the cognitive load, everything that is too complex.

1. Credibility Based Webdesign — You don’t need an FMRI scanner to find out which website is trustworthy and which is not.

• Order and harmony leads to cognitive ease.
• More cognitive ease = Higher processual fluency = More trust.
• Trust is something emotional. If you need to understand something first, you can’t trust it.

Research From BJ Fogg

46.1% — Web design (colour, form, etc)

28.5% — Information architecture

25.1% — Information focus (clarity)

15.5% — Key visual

14.8% — Useful information

1. Measure emotional perception

• EEG Solutions — Measure the brain areas of your consumers cognitively with a headset.
• Facial recognition
• Galvanic skin response — Police officers use this when interrogating an offending person, they measure their body language to detect if they are lying or not.

For a better result, combine all 3 methods together. One method done alone will not be as effective.

Association Test

Present your website for 5 seconds

• Free Association (What words come to your mind?)
• Targeted Association — You present certain words and say something like, “Would you say this website is luxury, calm, etc., and people could say yes or no.)

3 Key KPIs That Define Optimizers Success

1. Agility: Amounts of experiments per year. How many optimization sprints are you able to deliver? How much time do you need?
2. Success Rate: Amount of successful experiments. How many experiments deliver a significant uplift.
3. Cummulated Uplift: Business impact, ROI, How much uplift did you create in total? How big was the business impact?

Prioritize high impact over low effort.

The Basic Optimization Process

• Explore when you’re a design thinking person.
• Improve customer experience
• Create personas that are emotionally focused
• Creating a relevant experience is the foundation to apply persuasion principles.
• Try to connect behaviour with your analytics data.
• Do much more user research
• Ask yourself — Is it visible? Is it relevant?

5 Things You Can Do Right Now

1. Focus on the core values of your personas by eliminating waste and getting to the point.
2. Use your personas to challenge and optimize the way you prioritize your hypothesis.
3. Create emotionally focused landing pages that resonate with your audience.
4. Use the principles of human perception to focus attention to the right spot.
5. Stop optimizing your templates and start working on customer behaviour.

How Can I Brand This?

• Before running an A/B test, ensure that the change is to test if there is a change in the customer behaviour.
• On your website, use more of people’s faces.
• People like their names, so you could infuse that in your email marketing.
• From BJ Fogg’s research, your website should be structured with more visuals and graphical illustrations and fewer texts.

That’s it on this week’s learning on Persuasion Economics. These are my personal take home from the learning sessions at CXL on Digital Psychology and Persuasion. I hope you got value or learnt something new. If you did, please leave a comment and let me know what stood out for you.

A huge thank you to CXL for the learning opportunity. You can check out their website if you want to learn how to take your Digital Marketing game to the next level. There are several digital courses that can help you become badass at marketing.