People & Psychology of CRO — Review

CRAFTING EFFECTIVE UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITIONS

Aaaand we’re BACK! Are you ready to feed your brain and fuel your brand with more conversion rate optimization information? Good, because we have a lot to cover from the course work in this week’s CXL Institute course. Grab a snack and let’s jump right in.

Jumping off from the last blog’s topic of Product Messaging, I explained what I learned about Value Propositions, and why it’s essential to your marketing strategy. If you’re now at the place of “well, how do I actually come up with a VP myself?” — then you’re reading the right blog.

Let’s discuss 7 prompts that will help you brainstorm a solid Unique Value Proposition (we’ll refer to this as UVP).

1. What are your product’s key features?

• Make a list of them! Write down the big things. This is what your prospective customers care the most about.

2. What are the unique features?

• Pinpoint some things that make what you sell stand out.

3. How will it impact?

• What are the customer pain points? Transition your thinking here from what your product can do, to how it can impact its users. What are they going through without it?

4. What are the desirable outcomes for each pain?

• Once you know the pain points, go through each on and identify a positive side to all of them. If you know what the pain is, try to discover what the most desirable outcome would be.

5. Rate the outcomes

• Now that you know what the most desirable outcome is, how do they rank? You can do this on a scale of how well they address frequent or severe pains. Is just an inconvenience, or is it an important matter?

6. What are the top-scored pains and outcomes?

• This is where you edit your top-scored pains and their outcomes as you mold your UVPs. The instructor suggests using a spreadsheet to keep track of your ratings.

7. Score the UVPs

• At this point, you’re ready to give everything a score. The best one is the one you’ll clearly want to run with.

A great tactic for coming up with a messaging flow and UVP is to use the information you already have.

UVP — Outcome/result your customer wants + unique quality of your product

Motivation — Pain points or problems, desirable outcomes, purchase prompts

Value — Unique benefits, how it works, delightful perks, dealbreaker needs

Anxiety — Address uncertainties, perceived risks

CTA — The call-to-action, identify the pay-off

And don’t forget! These messages can be found through message mining (AKA survey polls, online reviews, etc.)

I absolutely loved digging into the “Punching Up” Your Sales Page lesson. Momoko’s 7 Simple Rules of Effective Sales Copy Editing is certainly worth noting.

1. Be CLEAR

• This is the time to be explicit with your explanations. Don’t leave anything up to the reader’s imagination when you’re selling. What is the page selling? Is it obvious? If they don’t read it, they won’t see it.

2. Match the reader’s mindset

• “A well-researched, message-matched headline will often outperform an un-researched “persuasive trick” headline.” — Now that is interesting. If they’re asking a specific question, they’re going to want a specific answer.

3. Blow them away with value

• Make a list of specific, happy outcomes. Eliminate specific pain points so they don’t have to wonder about anything. You can enhance this information with solid data and positive testimonials.

4. Use quantifiable proof

• While this isn’t always possible, it will undoubtedly decrease users’ skepticism.

5. Don’t just use your words

• Paint the picture for your customers by replacing general nouns, adjectives, and weak verbs with specific, vivid ones. Make sure they can imagine it in their minds, smell it, taste it — whatever you’re selling — sell it.

6. Show & Tell

• And while you’re at it, do it without reservation. Be generous with your words and imagery.

7. Do the real work

• A good rule of them is to cut anything that’s not doing real work. If it’s not reflecting/matching motivation, then kill it. If it’s not clearly conveying value or proving a claim, say goodbye. If it’s not reducing anxiety or adding authentic specificity, kick it to the curb.

These are super helpful tips. I really enjoyed how they were presented, because oftentimes marketing experts can just lump everything together without a clear explanation. If we’re not being taught clearly, how can we expect to properly present it to our customers?

PEOPLE & PSYCHOLOGY

People. Brains. Thoughts. Why do we do the things we do? Why don’t we do the things we “should” do? I don’t think we will ever be able to fully understand the complexity of the human mind; however, in order to market accurately, we must attempt to gain some knowledge in how to do so. CXL’s lesson on the psychology of people is a perfect place to start.

We first began an overview of Robert Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion. You may have already read about this, or have heard about it in other forms. Either way, we’re going to run through it together, because this is going to be foundational for the next part of the blog.

1. Reciprocity

• People tend to pay back what they receive from others

2. Commitment/Consistency

• People tend to stick to what they’ve already decided to support

3. Social Proof

• We trust things that are popular or endorsed by people we trust

4. Authority

• We’re more likely to take action if told to do by figure we trust

5. Liking

• More likely to believe, trust, or buy from people we like

6. Scarcity

• More drawn to things that are exclusive or hard to come by

Next, let’s discuss the Fogg Behavior Model. What is an individual’s motivation, and what is their trigger?

Motivator #1: Pleasure/Pain

Motivator #2: Hope/Fear

Motivator #3: Social Acceptance/Rejection

Keep these 3 factors as track to follow as you plan your webpages. Once you know what your target audience’s 3 motivators are in detail, you can then play on their triggers. What is going to make them scoot toward your CTAs?

I really liked what he said about the triggers — “If you trigger people at the right time, they will thank you.” This is so true! You can really hit people at the right spot if you know what they need and how to tease them with it. BUT, you can always frustrate them if you trigger when they lack ability to obtain it. Don’t trigger people when they don’t have motivation (i.e. Christmas shopping for presents in the summer).

So remember:

First, we want to trigger with motivation.

Next, increase the ability of obtaining the item/service with an explanation of either familiarity or novelty.

Then, elevate the motivation of the subject with highlights and benefits of the action.

A quote I want to write down for you all to read is: “Desired behavior happens when motivation, ability, and trigger converge.”

• How true is that! We need to have all of these facets working together in order to transform motivation into action.

As far as my take-aways from the list of persuasion techniques CXL supplied in this lesson, there were several notable ones.

• “We can only pay attention to a few things.”
• Because of this, we must:
• Keep it short
• Keep it simple
• Three’s a charm
• Put the focus on only a few (max of 3) USP’s (unique selling proposition)
• Emphasize most unique USP so that becomes the customer’s focus
• Focus on best aspects AND what’s different than your competitors
• Emphasize the huge changes that happens immediately after they use your product/service

By putting your attention on the USP and making sure they stand out, you can certainly expect that to become the customer’s focus. We always want to highlight the things that are most important on our webpages. Fingers crossed that this technique will optimize our conversion rates! While we know at this point that we can’t force anyone to buy something, we can still elevate that item or service in their mind.

An interesting thing that the instructor suggested is that we can play on the emotions of our customers. Some of these ideas include:

• “Play hard to get.” Make people think about what you’re selling.
• Self-Generation Affect Effect. “If we figure it out ourselves, we like it better”
• Affect Heuristic — Our decisions can change based on emotions
• Facial Distraction — We look at and process faces/facial expressions and “Gaze Cueing” faster than any other type of illustration
• Attentional Bias — We tend to pay more attention to emotionally dominant stimuli and neglect other data when making decisions
• Fear Appeals — A message that scares someone with the intent to motivate him to act against the threat
• Reflection Effect — We have opposing “risk preferences” for uncertain choices (determined by whether the possible outcome is a gain or loss)
• Gaze Cueing — We automatically stare into the eyes of any face that we see, and even shift our gaze to look at what they have their focus set on
• Forer Effect — Our tendency to highly rate the accuracy of descriptions of our personality that are said to be “tailored to us”
• Cognitive Dissonance — When there’s a mismatch between our beliefs & behavior, we experience “cognitive dissonance” — we change our beliefs to align with that behavior in order to reduce dissonance
• Ambiguity Aversion — “We prefer options that are certain”
• Belonging & Conformity — “We prefer to behave in approval with our social groups”
• Paradox of Choice — We like having a specific number of options
• Autonomy — We prefer to be in situations that we have control over
• Visual Cueing — A signal that your brain extracts from what you see and directs your attention to something in your field perception
• Endowment Effect — We value what we own more
• Self-Efficiency — A person’s belief in their own competence
• Perceptual Incongruence — We pay more attention to the things we didn’t expect to see
• Commitment Bias/Labor-Love Effect — If we’ve invested more effort into it, we like it more
• Conceptual & Associative Priming — “Subtle cues subconsciously influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior”
• Repetition & Direct Priming — The more we repeat something, the easier we process, remember, and act on it
• Peak-end Rule — Our tendency to judge an experience (pleasant or unpleasant) almost entirely on how it was at the peak and ending
• Mimicry — We like others who mimic our behaviors
• Position Targeting — When choosing between competing products, we find it difficult to compare complex aspects
• Hyperbolic Discounting — When we consider a choice between 2 rewards, we tend to prefer the readily available one
• Equivalence Framing — “The way things are stated or portrayed highly influences our choices”
• Front Loading — We want to get to the conclusion first
• Present Focus Bias (or Immediate Effect) — We prefer things that promise rewards sooner rather than later
• Emphasis Framing — We call it ‘framing’ because we constantly interpret the meaning of the things and events we notice to makes of the world around us

Okay, okay… that’s a lot of terminology. I think it’s time to take a breather and digest this next bout of information. I can almost guarantee that you’ve learned something new from this CXL lesson, and you’re going to want to copy it down. Let’s check back in next week and pick up where we left off!