Persuasion Economics 8: Influence & Interactive Design
Your website is a salesperson, understand the biases that you can use and utilise them appropriately.
This is week eight of my Digital Psychology training by CXL and I’m learning about Influence and Interactive design. How to gain influence by designing an interactive design.
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…
Influence and Interactive Design
To gain influence and build trust with your target audience, your design must have an interactive flow so as to communicate the value of your brand, and how you intend to help them achieve their objective.
Here are a few tips to help build influence in your website by designing an interactive design.
Direct Attention
Direct the attention of your audience systematically to where you want them to focus on.
Pre-attentive processing: The subconscious accumulation of information from one’s environment. This is used to control where users look on a page.
It’s a principle that states that when things break patterns, they instantly stand out to us. When things don’t break pattern, they fall within the line and become hidden.
In designing your website, be creative and try to stand out.
Put out something that is different from the norm. Let the action you want your audience to take stand out from all other texts or actions.
Educate Customers
One way to build influence is to educate your audience. Answer the questions of your target audience even before they ask.
Simulate the experience of the product as closely as possible for your target audience.
Features tell, but it’s the benefits that sell. Don’t just sell them on the benefits of your product or service, also give them the facts/features about the product.
Also make sure that the target audience at least have a basic cognitive understanding of what you’re offering, what it’s used for, how they could get it and how they could use it. You don’t want to assume they know and have them asking themselves, “How do I use this?”
Evoke Emotions
If you want to have any impact on a person, you have to give them a value proposition. What is the value add of this offer and how is it going to be of benefit to me?
For example, giving them an incentive like, if you do X, you get Y. If you drop your email address, you get a FREE ebook, template, etc.
Decision Making
Avoid the analysis paralysis syndrome. Distracting people from making a decision by either giving them too many options to make a decision or not enough options than they can find.
There are two types of decisions. The rational or perspective decision making and the irrational decision making.
Rational/Perspective Decison Making
This involves taking into consideration the cost to benefit analysis of the product or service before making a decison. They look at your offer, weigh the pros and cons, then come to a reasonable conclusion.
Irrational Decision Making
The irrational decision making has become more popular and is based on emotional decision making and heuristics.
This is when people make decisions based on how the offer makes them feel. They consider the core offering and the value or perceived value they feel they would get from the offer.
People are a little lazy, spell things out clearly for them to make the decision process easier for them.
Trust and Credibility
If there is one thing that could stop a person from taking action, it would be distrust. People tend to make trust or distrust judgements very quickly, under a fraction of a second.
And credibility is one of the keys to getting or building trust.
There are several dimensions to credibility and they are:
Expertise
Knowing your onion. Being sound in the field you are in.
Honesty
Having integrity and keeping your words. Doing what you say you would do.
Creating a Path
Creating a path has to do with ability. What paths are people going to take to get to the action you want them to take?
Make the path as seamless as possible.
Remove friction. Friction is when the energy required is greater than the motivation of the actual outcome.
Re-engaging Customers
To re-engaging customers, you should try to find out why the person has dropped out or stopped in the first place and do what it takes to re-engage them.
Here are some common examples why people abandon your product.
- Seduced by your competitors
- Shopping cart abandonment
- Unmotivated/disinterested
- Program non-compliance
- Lacking self-confidence
- Distrusting/Sceptical
- Unable/Unskilled
- Unsubscribing
- Too busy…and many other reasons.
To re-engage them, provide:
- Motivation
- Ability.
How Can I Brand This?
- Direct the attention of users to the ACTION you require of them. Let the story line, visuals, etc, point to the action they need to take.
- List out all the questions you think the user might have concerning your product or service, then carefully provide answers to all of them.
- Sell the benefits of the product, but also tell them the features.
- Evoke an emotion in their minds, how do you want to make them feel? Infuse it in your message.
- Build trust and credibility by showing that you are good at what you do.
- Keep to your word at all times. Don’t say you would do A and then do B.
- Make the path required to take action as seamless as possible.
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 which can help you become badass at marketing.
