Persuasion Economics 7: The Persuasion Slide

Your website is a salesperson, understand the biases that you can use and utilise them appropriately.

This is week seven of my Digital Psychology training by CXL and I’m learning about the Persuasion slide. How to go through the slide effectively without friction in marketing to your target audience.

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…

The Persuasion Slide

If you played during your childhood, you must have gone through a sliding game, where the child enters a kind of house, then slides down through a slider happily and repeats the process all over again. In this part of the world where I’m from, you’ll most likely know it as “Jangolover.”

And there was this joy the children felt whenever they went through this slider. It was fun, so they most likely repeated the process over and again until they got tired or got called.

In this section of Persuasion Economics, we would talk about how you can use the principles of the slider the children used to trigger similar emotions in your target audience.

1. Gravity

Gravity is the initial motivation, the needs, the wants and the goals…Gravity is the force that compels people to take the action you require of them.

For instance, as with the child, gravity here is the force that compels them to play, they see other kids laughing and having fun and are compelled to go through the slider as well.

When you are asking someone to do something for you, you are fighting against gravity. Focus your messaging on how what you have to offer lines up with your customer’s wants, goals and needs.

B2B Gravity

Conscious Stated

• Price
• Features
• Delivery
• Quality
• Service

Non-Conscious Stated

• Job security
• Promotion
• Boss Approval
• Relationship
• Risk Aversion

You need both the conscious and non-conscious factor to make a sale.

2. Nudge

Nudge has to do with how you get your customer’s attention. It could take several forms such as an email, a phone call, a very visible call to action, an alarm, a popup ad, a sign up, a search ad, etc. For the child going through the slider, the nudge is that fun climbing up the ladder at first before the child slides down through.

If you provide a nudge without motivation, it would be ineffective.

3. Angle

The angle of the slide is what gets the kid to the bottom of the slide. This is the bigger motivation you provide to the audience, both conscious and non-conscious.

Conscious motivation like the product features and benefits — gifts, discounts, specifications, price.

Non-conscious motivation like emotional appeals — appeals based on psychology and cognitive biases. In retail, sales are a huge motivation.

The problem with conscious motivations such as discount and gifts is that it is too expensive. But non-conscious motivations are free of cost or less expensive.

4. Friction

Friction refers to the difficulty (or not) required to taking the action you require of your target audience. In the case of a child sliding, perhaps, her dress got stuck in the slider and experiences difficulty sliding down smoothly.

There are two types of friction. Real or perceived friction.

Real Friction

Real friction are real difficulties experienced by your target audience. When your audience gets to ask, “What am I supposed to do here?” then, they have experienced friction.

Some examples are the number of forms in a field, the steps in the checkout process, instructions that people have to read, confusion in any part of your conversion process.

When you reduce friction by making it easy to do, people will do more of it. — Jeff Bezos.

Sources of Real Friction

• Disabled autocomplete
• Security — Offering no security.
• Password — Requesting too difficult a password and providing no explanations whatsoever on how to go about creating a password.
• Quick auto logouts — Automatic logouts after being away for like 15 minutes.
• Captchas — Giving people captchas that are extremely difficult.

Look at your user experience, pretend that you are a naive user and go through the entire process. Was it very easy or difficult to follow through?

Don’t focus motivation on doing (X), rather, focus motivation on making (X) easier to do. — BJ Fogg.

Imaginary/Perceived Friction

Cognitive Fluency. This is a subtle kind of friction that people may not even be well aware of but subconsciously causes friction to the target audience.

Sources of Perceived Friction

• Difficult to say words — Difficulty in reading unconsciously translates to indecision.
• Difficult to read font
• Long text

If it’s not motivation, (trying to get them to do what you want), then it’s friction and you should try as much as possible to eliminate or reduce it.

Build Your Slide

1. Align with gravity — Address your customer’s basic needs and motivations.
2. Give a nudge — Think of the conscious and non-conscious factors.
3. Maximise the angle — Remember that non-conscious always cost less.
4. Minimise friction — Both real and perceived.

How Can I Brand This?

• Provide an initial motivation before asking for something. If you’re going to ask for emails, give something first. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and figure out what they want beforehand and deliver it.
• Think about the conscious and non-conscious factors that could cause the customer to take any action and infuse it in your messaging.
• Infuse conscious benefits such as giving a discount for a period of time, or giving a gift for buying something.
• Infuse non-conscious benefits such as appealing to their emotions, trigger thoughts in their head by making them picture the benefit of using your product.
• Reduce friction. Minimize perceived friction by having a very easy user experience, easy to read fonts, nice contrast type, short text per paragraph.
• If you think the form is too long, then it is, and it should be made short. If the information is not necessary, remove it. Give lots of options if possible, make it super easy to fill so they don’t have to rack their brains.

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.