CXL minidegree Digital Psychology and Persuasion Review Part 11

Time sure does fly. At one moment I had many weeks left from my journey of reviewing CXL’s minidegree Digital Psychology and Persuasion, but as of now, I am just one-week way from completing my journey. I must say these past eleven weeks had taught me many valuable lessons while equipping me with the appropriate skills any marketers or solopreneurs should have. To better support that statement, I chose to review the mini course Psychology of Websites to give you readers another exclusive sneak peek of what CXL’s minidegree can offer you.

In this post, you can expect to learn the following,

· a quick recap

· dual process theory

· value propositions

· how to leverage emotions to intuitively connect with your customers

Disclaimer as usual: Since the course that I am going to cover today has an exhaustive list of knowledge only a few of the key areas will be covered and I will provide an honest review of the entire course at the end of the post.

Recap

The four-step framework to build habits and high customer satisfaction around your product

· Engage your users

· Complete the action

· Keep them coming back

· Create investment

Engage your users

How apps such as Facebook and Instagram that have thousands of competitors could still manipulate the market?

Well, you could give them credit for their user design that is backed up by psychology. In fact, they are well adapted that they are making it so easy for their product users to act without any thoughts solely based on their design itself. In a nutshell, they always design their product based on the ways that the users can use the product for their own benefit.

Complete the action

You must understand that building a new habit is not easy. However, the accumulation of small behaviors can form a new habit. That is why customers should be exposed to tiny commitments before they are exposed to a big commitment. This is because when they are in a habit of committing the small actions previously they are more likely to commit to bigger commitments.

Keep them Coming Back

To apply this framework to your product, identify the rewards your users usually receive when a particular action is completed and how you could make the rewards more addictive for them.

Create investment

To make sure your users are more invested in your products, you should plan on how to build investment inducing user experience along with rewards for your product. Furthermore, listing the steps required for investment and rewards should help you to see the bigger picture.

Dual process theory and value propositions

According to the dual process theory, our brains are governed by two systems-which we will conveniently refer to them as system 1 and system 2. Just as its name suggests system 1 is our go-to system. It’s completely automatic, really quick and we really have no sense of a voluntary control over this type of thinking and decision making. Meanwhile, system two, which is a much more reflective system, is more suited for activities that needed careful attention and more effort mentally.

So you could directly say that system one is pretty low on logic, mostly driven by emotion, fast, unconscious, and skilled. This is really where our habits come from. For example, when you are taking your bath every morning, you’re probably not actively thinking about the entire process. You naturally do it by habit a totally involuntary process.

Meanwhile, system two is much more like robotic thinking and computerized thinking. Real life examples would be when we’re doing math problems or any work that demands high mental work. This system brings out the more self-aware, deductive reasoning we have that makes us uniquely human. But ultimately we spend most of our day in system one. Some researchers think as much as like 80% of our day is spent automatically in system one, like not really consciously thinking about what we’re doing. Our brain is more likely to stay in system 1 to conserve energy, as it is much more taxing to be analyzing every single decision you are going to make in a day.

That is why a website should be designed with these systems into consideration. The focus should be getting them to think less or to be more precise appeal to system 1. Your value proposition should be clear enough that your customers should respond to you on autopilot without much thinking.

To help you, here’s some question that can improve your value prop.

How clear your value prop is?

How will your visitors interpret it?

Does your value proposition clearly states,

-Who is the website for?

-What are the benefits for your website visitors?

-Why is it relevant for them?

Does your value proposition contain any jargon terms that can confuse your visitors?

Now that has been done, we need to understand how to create landing pages that address the emotional needs of customers.

Before we jump further here are the 4 step process that plays a vital role in creating a landing page that resonates with your potential customers emotionally. The 4 step process below has been exclusively developed by Talia Wolf who runs a CRO agency.

1.Emotional competitor analysis

2.Emotional SWOT

3.Emotional content strategy

4.Testing

Emotional competitor analysis

The first step of the process basically requires us to run an emotional audit on our competitors. Talia suggests us to choose roughly about 10 to 15 of our competitors for a better result. For this process, the parameters that we are going to use would be messaging, colors, image, and emotional triggers. Talia encourages us to gather as much as information we can.

The next process emotional SWOT requires us to gather information and find out what the customer thinks about you (your brand) and your industry generally. Your findings should be divided into two parts; one for your brand and another for your industry. For this process, Talia wants you to find out your brand’s strength and weakness emotionally along with the opportunities and threats that lies in your industry.

As for the third process you need to find the solution for the information you have gathered in the previous steps to proceed further. In a nutshell, you need to create a value proposition that emphasis your strong points and makes you stand out from your competitors with the information gathered.

Testing

This is no brainer. Although following the previous 3 steps can generate a better conversion rate, constantly testing your landing page can improve your conversion rate while gathering new data needed for future conversion-driven projects.

With all that been settled, I would like to give out my personal verdict on this week’s lesson. Has it achieved its aim to educate marketers on how to leverage emotions to intuitively connect with your customers? Yes, it does. The many frameworks that have been provided gave a lot of useful insights on how to leverage emotions for better conversion. In fact, much other valuable knowledge I had gained from this week is not covered in this post. So, I would like you as a reader to check it out yourself; to find out more about what you are missing out.

See you next week!