How to leverage common human psychological principles to improve conversions (Review)
In my short time on earth, I’ve found that publicly journaling about things I’m learning helps me retain knowledge and even promotes better understanding — at least it worked for me while I was learning to code :)
As a Frontend Developer and a Technical Content Consultant, I’ve always been curious about the psychology behind users’ engagement with digital properties (websites and apps). So, last week, I started a minidegree course on digital psychology and persuasion from the CXL Institute. And, just like when I was learning to code, I’ll be using this series to document my learnings each week.
So, let’s get right into it.
This week, I covered the course titled people and psychology. This course discussed a couple of psychological principles that generally influence human behavior. Understanding these principles can help you structure your digital offerings in such a way that makes it easier for people to perform desired behavior (conversion metrics).
Of all the principles discussed within the course, the ones that stood out to me are Eisenberg’s Conversion Hierarchy Principle and the Fogg’s Behaviour Model Principle.
The hierarchy of conversion
The conversion hierarchy states that a prospect can only move up to address the next need when the base needs are met by a digital property (website or app). It has five levels of needs that build upon each other.
In simpler words, say your desired behavior is to get landing page visitors to click on a ‘get a quote now’ button. No matter how persuasive your product offering is, the website has to be functional, accessible, usable, and intuitive before a user can proceed.
- Functional: Does your website behave as expected on the user’s device? Is it responsive? Are buttons clickable? Is it slow?
- Accessible: Is your website or app available to your target users?
- Usable: Can users figure out how to use your website/app without thinking too much about it?
- Intuitive: Does the experience match the existing knowledge of your target users? Does it follow common design patterns that the user is already accustomed to?
The conversion hierarchy particularly resonated with me because it confirmed a particular hypothesis I’ve always had about how website design can affect user engagement.
I once did a poll amongst my coworkers, asking them if site design and structure had any impact on whether or not they read through a blog post, after clicking on it from a Google search result. It turns out that elements like cluster (white space), font size, colors, e.t.c, affected whether or not they stayed back to read through or immediately left to another page.
Fogg’s behavior model
The next psychology principle that we can leverage to optimize conversions is the Fogg’s Behaviour Model. It states that desired behavior happens when there’s high motivation, peak ability, and a trigger.
B = motivation * ability * trigger
To put this principle to work for you, you need first to define your desired behavior. Do you want people to sign up?, buy a product?, or download an app?. Once you define your desired behavior, you can develop corresponding motivation, abilities, and triggers.
Motivations are desires, needs, or motives that cause people to seek out a particular product. When someone lands on your landing page, it means that they already have the basic motivation. However, you can heighten this motivation with persuasive copy.
Generally, there are three core human motivators, which you can tune your copy to:
- Pleasure/Pain: Use your sales copy to highlight how your product will bring pleasure to your prospects or how lack of it thereof could mean pain.
- Hope/Fear: Paint a picture of what life could look like for your prospect without/without your product. For example, people are motivated by hope when joining a dating website and are motivated by fear when they update settings in virus software.
- Social acceptance/ Rejection: Humans will do anything to be socially accepted. Tell them how the possession or lack of your product can affect how others perceive them.
The next element to achieve desired behavior is ability. Ability refers to how easy it is for your prospect to carry out the desired action. Focus on simplifying what it takes to complete an action. The more work is involved, the lesser the chance that the prospect will go through with it.
Ability can translate to a lot of things. It can be information. Does your prospect have all the information they need to make make a purchasing decision? It can be time. If you want them to sign up for your product, but it takes filling 10 fields to do so, do they have such patience?
The last element required to achieve desired behavior is Trigger. Without an appropriate trigger, a behavior will not occur even if both motivation and ability are high. A trigger is something that prompts you to take action, e.g., a call to action.
The bigger the desired behavior, the more sequential the trigger should be. For example, if you’re selling $50,000 cars, the first trigger should not be “buy now”. Triggers for such behavior should start with small steps and then build up momentum. This line of thought builds on top of the commitment principle from Caldini’s seven laws of persuasion.
The principle states that people are more likely to comply first with a small request, and then if you ask them for a small request, they’ll be able to do it. A typical example of this is web forms. Long forms should be into multiple small steps (multi-step form). Once people fill out the first part of the form and see there’s more to fill on the second page, they’re much more likely to do it since they already got started with it.
A typical example of triggers on websites is the scarcity effect most online marketplaces employ: “Flash Sale! 24 hours to save. Get this product for $10. Just one day to save, but a lifetime to learn for. Sale ends tonight.”
And that’s all from me this week. Next week I’ll focus more on persuasion techniques. Ciao!
