CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree — Week 4 Review
Perception is reality.
I absolutely loved this week’s lessons on Applied Neuromarketing. I was even able to receive an office CXL Institute Certificate of Completion from the five lessons taught by André Morys.
Now, I must admit. Some of this stuff is a bit over my head, mostly because I don’t have any real A/B testing experience so I am not really sure what it is like to come up with a hypothesis, create a test, run that test, analyze the results, and then make adjustments based on those results to see if there is an uplift.
It really is something I want to bring to the Spirituality industry I work in. Things tend to be more magic than metrics — and a whole lot of downloads, intuitive hits, and feelings.
I can only imagine what someone like André would say about that.
Before we dive into some of my biggest takeaways from this week, I want to remind you that you can read my three previous reviews by clicking the links below.
CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree — Week 1 Review
CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree — Week 2 Review
CXL Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree — Week 3 Review
And if you are interested in checking out this training program for yourself (I highly recommend it), then visit the CXL Institute.
On to the good stuff.
Lesson1: Brain Fundamentals
Let’s talk about disruption, shall we? I work with a lot of spiritual coaches who want to be different, who want to stand out, but they have no interest in being disruptive.
And that stinks. I love disruptive messages and unconventional business models and people doing impossible things. I need to find different clients.
What creates disruption? Well, it has a lot to do with how customers react.
Think about Uber’s disruptive growth. It was because their customer experience was so completely different than hailing a taxi. You could do it from your phone. You knew exactly how much it would cost. You could leave reviews. You were riding in someone’s personal car so it didn’t feel so weird. It was so easy to book and pay for a ride — that’s what disrupted the industry.
Connect your business model with how the human brain works. Keep it simple, avoid forcing it to make too many decisions, and make the options clear.
One of my favorite business quotes:
“People may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” — Carl W. Buehner
I was introduced to a new concept (okay, almost all of this is new to me) — implicit codes or the power of values and motivations in the way our brain processes signals and how it matches these signals with what we really believe. Implicit measures are a range of techniques that aim to capture people’s underlying associations, motivations, beliefs, and attitudes.
The example used was a 5-second test for a website home page. It’s amazing how much you can assume just from your own biases. Fascinating stuff.
Lesson 2: Control the Attention
Two BIG things to know: Everything needs to be relevant — AND — You only have 50 milliseconds to create that feeling of relevance.
How do you do that?
- Content
- Value proposition
- Implicit codes
- Emotional relevance = resonance
Introducing my new best friend — the limbic map.
A great way to determine relevance is the 5-second test. Questions to the 5-second test should answer:
- Do you know what is relevant to your customers?
- Is the message understood?
- Why? Why not?
Everything people perceive in a five-second test is focused on that implicit code or how it should be (their assumptions). It’s not enough time to read anything or starting thinking on a rational level.
Why is that important? If you understand why most communication fails, it’s about you want to say something, you’re 100% sure about what you want to say, but customers only perceive 20% of it. Maybe they perceive some things wrong or their interpretation of the things that they see is completely different to what you wanted to say.
100% what you want to say
20% what customers perceive
5% what their interpretation is
Sidenote: The one thing I remember about PR 101 from 20 years ago is this: Perception is reality. Whatever your customer perceives is real to them and therefore, real to you.
How do you control attention?
If there is no place where the eye can come to rest, you actually can’t control attention.
If everything has the same intensity or the same contrast, there is no way to control attention.
7 Principles of Attention
- Contrast
- Space
- People/faces
- Movement
- Breaking rules
- Directional cues
- Person’s name/their own face
Lesson 3: Emotional Resonance
Great Customer Experiences are based on the principle of emotional resonance.
Usually, resonance means it might be a very small thing that is important to people, but if you trigger this small thing in your target audience, it will generate a big effect, so it’s a big lever for your optimization.
By controlling attention, you’re controlling what people perceive, and what they think about you, and this is important to create our ROI.
Most Personas don’t help. Most definitions of target audiences and even personas don’t help the optimizers to improve customer experience because the most important information is missing.
Instead, you need to connect their values to the limbic map above to create an Emotionally Resonated Persona.
Implicit Emotional Motivation — “I want a bank that really cares about me as a human being. I don’t want complicated bureaucratic systems. I need to talk to real people. It should be that easy.”
Emotional Objection — “They just want my money and they don’t care. It will be just another complicated computer interface for people that only care about money.”
Lesson 4: You only have 50 ms
Optimizers talk a lot about factors like trust, usability, or relevance, but most of this is anticipated a long time before a customer really starts using the website.
Principles of human evaluation — As experts, we look at websites from a very rational and analytical perspective. But most evaluate what they perceive very quickly with unconscious heuristics.
Your customers perceive a lot of stories you never told. They have interpretations of everything — your colors, logo, why you are using that picture or font, etc. Yes, they are judging you.
Cognitive load is reducing emotional activity. If you want to sell anything, on an emotional level, eliminate cognitive load — anything too complex. Stick with one clear header and a hero shot image.
Lesson 5: Implement Core Principles In Your Process
Disrupt or die!
3 KPIs that define an optimizer’s success:
- Agility: Amount of experiments per year (n)
How many optimization sprints are you able to deliver?
How much time do you need? - Success Rate: Amount of successful experiments (%)
How many experiments deliver a significant uplift? - Cumulated uplift: Business impact ($)
How much uplift did you create in total?
How big was the business impact?
This Growth Canvas chart seems important. I got a bit lost and will go back and watch this section again.
Wrapping up, here are five things I am going to do right now to begin implementing these lessons into my work:
- Focus on the core values of client personas by eliminating waste and getting to the point (use that limbic map to connect values to description)
- Use your personas to challenge and optimize the way you prioritize your hypotheses.
- Create emotionally focused landing pages that resonate with your audience (this is priority #1)
- Use the principles of human perception to focus attention on the right spot.
- Stop optimizing your templates and start working on customer behavior.
I hope you found a few nuggets that sparked your curiosity. Thanks for reading. See you next week.
