Emotional Content Strategy & Designing to Influence

Round #7 of the review of conversion rate optimization training at CXL and this week, I’m combining the emotional content strategy with the design strategy since they are closely intertwined and aimed at influencing user behavior for conversion.

Emotional Content Strategy

In the first part, Talia Wolf makes a compelling case for keeping emotions at the forefront of any exercise to analyze and optimize web performance.

Emotional Content Strategy is based on the idea of emotionally targeting your audience. It gives you the tools and framework to conduct meaningful tests so that you understand your customers better, what their emotional triggers are, and what their decision-making is.

As humans, we are not rational but highly emotional beings. We all love to have a sense of belonging — whether it is to a group, affiliation, or community, feel the need to be loved, or feel better about ourselves. Though we don’t know how much emotions influence our decisions, clever brands do know it and they have been making use of this for ages. The reason for that is that, and brands know it, we don’t normally buy a product, we buy an emotional value to make ourselves feel better.

It is best illustrated in the Nike Ad where Nike is not selling its product; in fact, if you see the Ad, there isn’t one word about the brand or the product. It is all about connecting to people on an emotional level. This is what marketing is all about.

While considering the emotional aspect in the online world, there exists a huge gap still since almost everything is about the features and pricing, but rarely about the customer itself. Add to that, the fact that people’s diminishing attention span means that we have very little time, probably a few seconds to catch the attention of the visitors and this can only be done through emotional triggers.

This becomes even more pronounced when it comes to the mobile web. The level of distraction a mobile is put through is enormous and the attention span is even less. So for all practical purposes, we have a couple of seconds to convey the message to the user and convince him to stay.

Google says mobile web traffic is more than 50% and there are studies that project mobile web traffic to grow close to 500% in the next 5 years.

So how to go about doing it? Let’s see a simple framework of 4 steps that we can use.

1. Emotional Competitor Analysis: Here the focus is on the emotional side in order to understand where the market is emotionally and also to understand where we fit in. Next, pick the top 10–15 competitors and see what they are doing in terms of their messaging, choice of color, imagery, and finally the emotional triggers they use. Once we do that we have a good source of reference either to match that or build on that
2. Emotional SWOT: Here we are going to do an analysis of ourselves and the market on Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, all from an emotional angle. We can do this either by making an assessment of our own or taking feedback through, surveys, web polls or through brainstorming sessions, internally or with our customers.
3. Emotion Content Strategy: Based on the SWOT analysis, we next come up with content ideas to address the findings, especially the weaknesses and threats. We have to keep in mind that the content needs to be rooted in emotional triggers, and there are hundreds of them to choose from, and craft a story around that. Ideally, we are better served to have a few triggers and not restrict ourselves to a single trigger for a web page or a landing page.
4. Testing: With all the information that we have equipped ourselves with, it is time to test those. It is very important that we have a strategic approach and follows a framework to test the hypotheses to make them actionable and measurable as shown below.

Image Courtesy: Talia Wolf on CXL.com

We make the choice of color based on our personal preference, which isn’t ideal since colors do symbolize certain emotions and it is well advised to use them as per the emotional requirement of the product or the content.

Conversion optimization is getting to know our customers, what their emotional triggers are, and then use that knowledge to deliver a better experience. Keeping our customers as the primary focus and thinking about what they want should be the first and foremost aim in any optimization endeavor.

Design to Influence Decision-making

In this class, Dr. Brian Cugelman curates design strategies that will help keep customers engaged with our product or service. He also teaches how to identify desired outcomes and achieve each one with a unique design strategy. In summary, we learn (through design) how to,

• Direct Attention
• Educate Customers
• Evoke Emotion
• Support Decision Making
• Build Trust & Credibility
• Creating a Path

Direct Attention: Use design principles to attract the attention of the target audience and get them to focus on the things that we’re putting forward. One of the really effective principles to do that is, pre-attentive processing — which essentially says that to make something stand out from the crowd, it should break the pattern and this can be in terms of size, color, order, and so on.

Educate Customers: It is important that we give the customers all the information that they need to make a decision. When it comes to the question of features versus benefits, the jury is still out on what should be the focus, but the answer is that there is no hard and fast rule on which option we need to take and both directions have specific use cases and strong proponents.

A cool line to remember is that features tell while benefits sell

Evoke Emotion: This is the most important factor in influencing a user’s decision and mostly we do not have control over it and all that we can do is to reinforce those motivations once they land on our site.

So things like the before and after scenarios of using our product and thereby emphasizing the original motivation are vital. Brian presents the hierarchy of motivation rooted in evolutionary psychology, which is sort of a variation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Enable Decision-Making: You need to cater to both users who make decisions based on rational judgment or those who go by emotions and impulses. So to balance this out, we need to make sure that there is enough information for users to make an informed choice, and at the same, appeal to their emotions and ‘biases’.

The effectiveness of rational v emotional content is still largely debatable, though Brian says the maturity of the web users is now at a level where rational decision-making still holds the edge. Obviously, this shouldn’t deter us from using time-tested emotional triggers and user biases (e.g. anchor pricing, social signals, offers, and incentives) that influence decision making.

Build Trust & Credibility: This is often a differentiator between brands that do well and those that don’t. People put a lot of stress on trust while making online purchases and it can be led by impulse and so decisions related to trust can be made instantly. This is the reason first impressions matter and superficial things like design do make a difference.

Credibility is built through either our expertise in the field and through our honesty and integrity. Though we may be able to trick our way through a few customers, it will eventually catch up with us in the long run. People are smart and never underestimate that.

Creating a Path: By this time, we have done the hard yards by attracting attention, appealing to the emotion, educating the customers, helping them make decisions and addressing their anxieties, and earning trust. So all you need to do is to have a clean and simple path which the users can take to complete the purchase journey.

So for all the marketing and design that we do, if the path to purchase isn’t simple or fully functional, it all comes back to naught.

Finally, we need to address a common problem of user abandonment. Though the degree may vary between brands, no one is immune from it and the reasons are manifold ranging from better competitive products, distrust in our products to being less motivated or unskilled to achieve what they want.

This is where Re-engagement comes into play and broadly there are 2 areas that you can address — Motivation and Ability. The level of control you have over those 2 is also very different.

While you can attempt to re-ignite the motivation by reinforcing the reasons that they came to us in the first place, mostly it is a tough situation and beyond a point, it makes sense to give up on such people.

Ability on the other hand is much easier and effective to tackle since people want to do what we are offering, but they just need some help doing it.

It is difficult to understand if people abandon due to motivation or ability, but it is very important to know that since the way you deal with those is completely different. So we need to identify why people drop out and find the right way to engage them.

I feel I’ve had an overdose of neuro stuff in the last few modules but fascinating nonetheless. This concludes the foundational part of the course and will now move on to Conversion Research.

Ciao!