How To Keep Customers Repeatedly Engaging With Your Product Or Service — CXL Institute Digital Psychology & Persuasion Minidegree (Review)
This is part 7/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Institute CRO Minidegree, and today we’re going to talk about different design principles that you can apply on your websites or in your online advertising.
In this article, I’l show you the design model that merges 10 major practitioner and scientific frameworks and creates tactical design strategies to keep customers repeatedly engaging with your product or service.
How is this helpful?
Via this basic, design principle you will learn how to:
- Direct Attention
- Educate your Customers
- Evoke Emotion
- Remove Friction in Decision Making
- Build Trust & Credibility
For each stage, there are specific ways to design a sales page in order to make it easier for visitors to go through this process.
Lets have a look,
Directing attention by using pre-attentive processing method
Ever heard about pre-attentive processing?
It is the conscious experience of processing the visual environment.
This experience is automated and can take between 200–500 milliseconds to complete in the spatial memory.
Pre-attentive processing plays a significant role in human vision, and there are numerous theories how pre-attentive processing occurs within the visual system.
Can you recognize which element stands out, because it breaks the pattern?
You probably identified it pretty quickly.
So, pre-attentive processing is the principle that says:
when things break patterns, they instantly stand out to us, and if you want to control where people look on your page, just apply these principles.
A very common tactic, where pre-attentive processing principles are applied:
Call to Buttons — they are usually different color, bigger/smaller than the content, have some kind of a motion design applied, etc.
Next up is to educate the target audience,
Put your customers at ease
To begin with, not all of our customers prefer the same type of information, even preferences for media varies.
Our goal is to focus on questions like: What is the correct balance between focusing on benefits vs features? How technically informative or emotional should your sales pitch be? What kind of information (and how much) should we put on our landing pages?
We want to get our target audience to know what exactly it is that we’re offering, or at least have a basic concept in their mind that they feel they understand it.
From dr. Cugelmans valuable insights, we know the questions that every customer ask themselves: When our target audience lands on our page, they might be asking, “What is this exactly?”Where can I learn more?”What is the quality?”How can I kick the tires and test it out?
Having these in mind, we have 2 types of customers:
1) Customers that want to know the facts, the hard evidence, real proof, knowledge that is grounded in reality
2) Customers that go for more of the sales pitch, what the marketers are promising you? Value propositions.
Remember,
“Features tell, but it’s the benefits that sell.”
Rational vs irrational decision-making patterns
Prior to decision making, there’s an important step — evoking emotions.
The crucial thing is to avoid something called analysis paralysis.
That’s why we have to understand how people make decisions and create the content accordingly to our findings so that we don’t put them in there.
We might present packages where people are blocked because what they want is in different packages or they can’t even get what they want because of how we’ve structured our offering.
There are 2 main perspectives on it:
1) Rational perspective
People will do very rational, cost-benefit analyses. They’re going to look at our offering and weigh the pros and cons, and come to a reasoned conclusion.
2) Irrational perspective
People act on emotional impulses, wich they rationalize afterwards.
There are numerous factors such as: cognitive biases, there’s emotional decision-making, heuristics..
According to Dr Cugelman, the value proposition — the actual core offering, is really what drives our customers quite a lot.
Trust & Credibility
Here I will point out another perspective which explains the halo effect, the converse devil effect, and the resulting impacts of both.
There’s one thing that can stop our customer to take action, and that’s distrust.
We tend to make our trust and our distrust judgments very quickly, in under a fraction of a second.
Now, if things go well, we can get hit with the halo effect-where people will trust us instantly, and in that case, if we mess up a little bit or if there are some red flags, people might disregard them.
However, if we’re hit with the devil effect, people demonize us and it’s going to be a lot harder to win back that trust.
So, you do only have one chance to make a good first impression.
Dr. Brian Cugelman found the best model that describes what user trust is:
The truster is always placed at risk and we are in a power position. So we have to never abuse that power position.
It’s beneficial over time, to always demonstrate to people that we are honourable in our dealings.
Credibility is one of the keys to getting trust, and there are 2 main dimensions of credibility:
1) Expertise
It means we know what we’re talking about because we spend a significant time in the field.
And if people do business with us, they can be reasonably assured we’re going to get the outcomes, ’cause we know how to.
2) Honesty
That means we have integrity and ethics, and that we do what we say we’re going to do. When we make a promise to someone, we do our best to deliver on that promise.
A clear, free of fiction path to checkout
After our customer is educated, motivated, intent on buying, we need to focus on ability.
The kind of ability to minimize complications so that all your hard work motivating, educating, and establishing credibility doesn’t go to waste.
We need to make our checkout process as easier it’s possible, the least thing we want is to ask people for so much information that they maybe don’t have.
What happens, if we ask people to go on a complex path?
You probably know the answer,
Due to friction- the energy required is greater than the motivation of the actual outcome, they’re probably not going to get to the other end to get the thing they want.
If we want our customers to do anything with any level of complexity, we’re going to have to use the design principle to take a person through step one, step two, and step three.
It’s all about having very simple buying mechanisms, and also having excellent user experience.
Major reasons why customers might lose interest
How do we re-engage people?
Companies of all sizes, industries, and success levels experience loss of engagement from even the most active customers.
The important thing is that it doesn’t mean the game is over, because most companies treat it like a stigma and something to be embarrassed of.
Research has shown that people can drop out for many reasons, such as:
- They might be seduced by your competitors
- Shopping cart abandonment-they’re interested but they see actually by the end that it’s not really a great deal
- They’re not that motivated terms of like programs
- They might not have the self-confidence they can do it
- If there’s ever a scandal, or something bad has come out about the company
- We can be discredited and this can stop engagement almost instantly.
- People might and have the skills, or they might be too busy
As you can see, there are many reasons, so generally, there are two main areas that you have to look at when it comes to re-engagement.
The thing about motivation is that we might have have to try and re-engage them and remind them of some of the original reasons why they took a look at us, and engage with us in the first place — we might be able to notch things up a little bit.
On the other hand, there’s a point where you should give up on a person — where someone truly is not motivated at all like they really don’t care.
A customer that doesn’t want what we’re offering, they see no value in what we’re offering.
So, that’s where we lose people because of lack of ability — they weren’t able to do what we asked them to do, or we had so much friction involved.
The real challenge is to figure out why?
You’re not going to know if someone is leaving you because they’re not motivated, or they don’t have the skill.
In order to successfully re-engage that type of a customer, you need to qualify why someone has dropped out, and do what it takes to try and re-engage them, and giving them a sales pitches or offering them help, isn’t going to necessarily be the thing right thing.
That’s all, folks!
Another article review in my CXL Mini Degree journey.
p.s. Iv begin to apply all of these principles since day 1, and it really is effective — in terms of creating a well-structured webpage.
