Digital Psychology & Persuasion Course Review

For the next 12 weeks, I will be diving into the fields of neuromarketing, persuasion, and applied behavioral psychology with you. I’ll explain every principle in detail and add real-world examples so that you will have a complete understanding of each.

My goal is to help you incorporate behavioral psychology into your digital marketing strategies to achieve profit-producing conversions.

My background and interests are in macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and ethical marketing. Recently, I received a scholarship to CXL Institute’s mini degree program in Digital Psychology & Persuasion. Their course is where I will be pulling this blog material from.

Today’s lesson:

Track One: Psychology Foundations

This unit will help you answer the following questions:

• How can we capture and hold the attention of viewers on your website?
• How capable are we of making truly rational decisions?
• To what extent do first impressions, visuals, and emotions affect our ability to learn information?

With the advancement of the internet and technology, digital marketing (especially within the field of social marketing) has become exponentially better at targeting us than the old methods of television and newspaper advertising.

This can be a false illusion for many people who are new to marketing because they believe that having new tools will help them solve all their marketing problems. While new software might make them more efficient at marketing within certain channels, it will ultimately change as new tools become more specialized.

This is why it is important to avoid chasing after the newest software and instead learn marketing and influence from the source, which is the human brain. Our brain has retained the same level of processing for millions of years. Understanding how we are influenced will help you optimize your digital strategy from the top down.

So, where do psychology and persuasion stand in the hierarchy of conversions?

Hierarchy of conversions:

Here is a refresher of the hierarchy of conversions:

(Source: https://cxl.com/institute/lesson/hierarchy-of-conversions/)

Take a website, for example.

Functionality:

• The website has to work.
• It has to have no technical errors, meaning it will work on multiple browsers.
• Optimized for speed
• Free of bugs (Button functions, and 401 pages, etc)

Accessibility:

• Is the website usable on any devices: laptop, tablet, or phone?
• Is it easy to use for people with disabilities?
• Is it easy to use for people with different technical skill levels?

Usability:

• How hard is it to use this website?
• Is it user-friendly?
• Is it fast enough?
• Can people figure out how to use it without thinking about it?
• Can they understand the language?
• Can people buy the way they want?
• Is it obvious or do they have to “figure it out”?
• Make sure you perform usability tests.

Intuitiveness:

• Does this website follow the concept of cognitive fluences?
• Does the sales process on the site match the thought sequence of the user?
• Does it minimize friction as the user navigates through the checkout process?
• Does the site match the user’s thought sequence?
• Does the site anticipate customer questions and answer any common questions in the flow process?

Persuasiveness:

• Does it Improve the user’s motivation for the desired action?
• Do users understand if what you offer fills their needs or solves their problems?
• Does your website join the conversation in their mind?
• Remove doubts?
• Enable a frictionless checkout?
• Improving persuasion on your site is mostly done by writing better copy (targeted at every persona), using better product images, and/or having a better design.
• It will not work unless all the bottom layers have been completed.

Warning: There are many persuasion techniques, and it is not recommended for you to try them all at the same time. Only use a technique if it fits your particular case. Do not force a technique just because you have seen it work somewhere else, as this will backfire. For example, do not fake urgency. (“Only 25 copies of this pdf guide left!”) Your reputation is more important than any short-term gain.

Cialdini’s 7 Principles of Persuasion

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. People are also much more likely to do something if they have publicly stated that they would do it.
3. Social Proof: We trust things that are popular or endorsed by others who we trust.
4. Authority: We are more likely to take action if told to do so by a trustworthy figure.
5. Liking: We are more likely to believe, trust, or buy from people we already like.
6. Scarcity: We are more drawn to things that are exclusive and hard to come by.

There are two elements of scarcity

Quality (Only 10 Nintendo Switches left!*When there really is only 10 switches left)

Time (Sign up by the end of the months to get 1 month off your new lease)

7. Unity: We are just like you. Or Seth Godin’s idea of “People like us buy things like these” A shared identity can bring instant connection with people.

Fogg Behavior Model

The Fogg Behavior Model created by Dr.BJ Fogg explains that three elements must come together at the same time for a behavior to occur.

Behavior — Motivation x Ability x Trigger.

(Source: Persuasive Tech Lab)

Motivation:

There are 3 core motivations, broken down by their opposites:

• Motivation: #1: Pleasure and Pain
• Motivator #2: Hope and Fear
• Motivator #3: Social Acceptance and Rejection

Ability:

Ability is more important than motivation. Before affecting behaviors, you will need to master the ability to simplify the desired behavior to the most basic actions. The more complicated steps the user has to go through, the more motivation the user needs to have.

Trigger:

The trigger is the final act that nudges the user into the desired behavior. Without the trigger, the behavior will not happen, even if both the user’s motivation and ability are high.

When building a website, be very conscious about where to place your triggers (call to action, links, buttons). You want to reduce as much user friction as possible while increasing motivation for the desired behavior.

CXL’s course best describes how triggers will affect people:

• If you trigger people at the right time, they will thank you.
• If you trigger when they lack ability, they’ll get frustrated.
• If you trigger people when they don’t have the motivation (e.g. asking people to shop for a Christmas present in September), you’re annoying people.

It is very difficult to motivate people to do something they don’t want to already do. The smart way is to tap into an existing desire that people already have. BJ Fogg, the social scientist who created the motivation chart proposed two types of triggers: hot and cold. Hot triggers like a website button saying “Free download now”) are actions that can be taken imminently. Cold triggers like billboard messages are actions that have to be taken at a later time. The most effective design is when you put hot triggers in front of highly motivated people.

Understanding behavior types

Now, we understand that if we want users to act on the desired behavior, we first have to understand the target behavior. It has to be specific and measurable. Dr. BJ Fogg concluded there are 15 ways behavior can be influenced by using different behavioral economics principles and psychological nudges.

• Dot — It happens just once (e.g. they visit your website and download the free ebook)
• Span — It happens over a period of time, like for 7 days (e.g. they sign up and complete your 7-day course)
• Path — It happens over and over, from now on. (e.g. they join your paid membership group and start to socialize with other members there.)

There are 5 subtypes for each three:

(Image source)

Focus on optimizing for green and blue dot behaviors. In marketing, this would be the top of the funnel, where you are trying to get customers to commit on a small act like giving you their email address for a free sample.

Desired behavior happens when motivation, ability, and trigger converge

If you want to influence the user acting on the desired behavior, you need to:

• Align your desired behavior to the users’ intended motivation.
• Channel the right motivators.
• Understand the types of motivation and which works best on the user.
• Make the desired action as easy and accessible as possible.
• Focus on simplification and getting it in fewer than 3 steps.
• Arrange hot triggers on the path of motivated people.

Lessons from Neuromarketing

There are three things that our brain is concerned with.

• Food
• Fight or Flight
• Fornication

(CXL Institute)

We have three different layers of the brain that helps us make decisions.

• The new brain — Thinking
• The middle brain — Feeling
• The old brain — Decides

People often mistake that we are a group of sophisticated thinking species when in reality most of our decisions are driven by our primal motivations (The old brain).

The old brain can be activated by 6 stimuli:

1. Self-centered (We tend to only focus on things that relate to us)
2. Contrast (Our system I brain is very good at quick comparisons)
3. Tangible (Our brain understands tangible objects better than theoretical ideas)
4. First and last (We tend to remember the first and the last thing in an event)
5. Visual (We are very visual creatures, “Seeing is believing”)
6. Emotion (We are more emotionally driven than we let out to be)

The Formula To Increase Sales:

Selling probability = Pain x Claim x Gain x (Old Brain)

First: Address the pain points of your customers.

Second: Differentiate your claims.

Third: Show proof of claims.

Deliver to the Old Brain

Start your marketing message with a head turner. The famous Ogilvy once said, “If you’re selling fire extinguishers, start with fire.”

You want your first interaction with the user to be clear and memorable.You can accomplish this by using large images that describe what your product and services are.

You also want to be focused on the ideal customer’s benefit. Remember to use your empathy to understand what your customer wants. What you are selling isn’t as important as what your ideal customers want.

Actions that help the decision-making process:

1. Focusing exclusively on the customer. Like Jeff Bezos said, “Be obsessed about the customer experience.”
2. Contrast your value proposition with your competitors. Stand out from the sea of competition.
3. Simple and tangible message about what you are delivering to the customer.
4. Address the customer’s pain point and differentiate your sales proposition.
5. Use visuals. Videos will help you get your point across faster than images.
6. Deploy empathy. Understanding the customer is the key to best serving the customer.

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For the people who are interested in taking this course, here is some information that will help you:

The total time to complete the mini-degree is 48 hours and 29 minutes.

If you have 2–4 hrs/week available for learning, it might take you around 4 months.

If you can do 10–15 hrs/week, you can complete it within a month.

Keep in mind that it might take most people longer to complete the course, so scheduling consistency into your routine is the best method to help you complete this degree on time.

I have broken down the structure of the course and the content that my blog material will cover.

There are three tracks: Psychology Foundations, Neuromarketing & Persuasion Models, and Applied Behavioral Psychology.

Psychology Foundations (~ 7 Hours)
People & psychology (2:30 minutes)
Attention Basics (1:20 minutes)
Decision Making and Emotions (2:40 minutes)
Learning and Memory (40 minutes)

Neuromarketing & persuasion models (~24 hours)
Intro to Neuromarketing (2 hours)
Applied neuromarketing (unknown)
Nonconscious Motivation (2 hours)
Cognitive Biases (1:45 minutes)
Building Trust (1 hour)
Building Habits and Loyalty (1:30)
Influence and interactive design (35 minutes)

Applied behavioral psychology (~12 hours)
Psychology of Products (40 minutes)
Psychology of Websites (2:30 minutes)
Psychology of Communication (40 minutes)
Psychology of Pricing (40 minutes)
Social Proof (20 minutes)
Principles of Persuasive Design (33 minutes)
Developing & Testing an Emotional Content Strategy (25 minutes)
Heuristic Analysis frameworks for conversion optimization audits
Psychological backfiring (15 minutes)
Product messaging (unknown)

You must finish all three tracks. There is also a certification exam at the end of the course, and the requirement to pass is a 90% or higher score on a 56 question exam. This means you must answer at least 51 questions correctly while only missing 5 questions or less.