How To Use The Persuasion Slide-CXL Institute Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree (Review)
Do potential customers reach your website, landing page, or app but fail to take action?
Does your e-commerce site have too many abandoned shopping carts?
Do you struggle to combine both rational/logical and emotional/non-conscious elements into your marketing?
If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, or if you are simply looking for a way to be more persuasive and convert better, you need The Persuasion Slide.
This article is the 4th one in my series reviewing & sharing what I’ve learned from CXL Institute’s Digital psychology and persuasion MiniDegree
What is the Persuasion Slide?
In the book, the “Persuasion Slide — A New Way to Market to Your Customer’s Conscious Needs and Unconscious Mind: Use Psychology and Behavior Research to Influence and Persuade” by Roger Dooley, he describes the persuasion process with the analogy of an ordinary playground slide.
In short, it’s a simple model for persuasion that encompasses a variety of conscious and non-conscious factors. It provides a practical way to identify and discuss the very real components of persuasion and to be reminded of some influences that could otherwise be overlooked.
In this post, I’ll share Mr Dooley’s idea is that a nudge is used to capture your audience’s attention, followed by a combination of gravity and angle to propel them through any friction to get to the final destination.
The Persuasion Slide: 4 Factors for Guiding Your Prospects to a Purchase
We often refer to this thought process and any related behaviours as the consumer “purchase decision.” As marketers, our aim should be to guide our prospects through this process towards the “destination” of making a purchase.
The effectiveness of this, however, depends heavily on our ability to understand people’s needs while shopping and persuading them.
There are four different components for guiding your prospects to purchase:
Gravity — your customer’s initial motivation.
Nudge — a trigger to get the customer moving.
Angle — the conscious and non-conscious motivation you provide.
Friction — the real and perceived difficulty of the desired action.
Let’s break down the different components of the Persuasion Slide and see how this model can be used in.
Gravity — What Makes The Slide Work?
The first step in the persuasion slide is increasing Gravity, or the inherent motivation the user has to engage with your site or buy your product.
It represents their needs, their wants, their goals, this is what they are bringing to you, not what you are trying to create in them. This is why they sought you out in the first place, or why they’re reading your stuff, or why they signed up to get more information and so on. “Roger Doley”.
So, when you are asking people to do something for you, you are fighting gravity
Just as a slide won’t work if it’s sloped uphill, your offer won’t work if it’s pointed in the wrong direction.
If you are trying to generate leads from a website, it’s tempting to say, “Complete this simple form.”
In fact, the customer has no interest in your form or the possible spam that may follow if she gives up her email address. “Lose weight fast! or “Make winning sales pitches,” on the other hand, will resonate with customers who are thinking about those topics.
What Motivates Your Customer?
It’s crucial to note that researching the target audience is what a marketer needs to determine the customers’ prevailing gravity. It is so we can place our offer to suit their wants and needs rather than attempting to make a demand.
As I mentioned before, gravity is something that you cant create, firstly you must understand it. The starting point can be rough, and these 5 questions can help you:
1. Why does a potential customer want or need your product? Write down the top few reasons.
2. Are there deeper psychological reasons? For example, if you listed “lose weight” in the last question, could deeper reasons include, “be more attractive,” “connect with attractive people,” or “improve career opportunities?”
3. Do you use “buyer personas” or “buyer stories?” If so, with those in mind, review the above questions. Revise your answers if necessary.
4. List, in order of your guess at priority, the top few “conscious motivations” that your customers bring with them — business pain points, practical needs, etc.
5. List, in order of your guess at priority, the top few non-conscious motivations your customers come to you with. These are motivations they would likely not recognize or acknowledge as important if asked directly
According to Dooley, there are two types of motivation: the Conscious and the Non-Conscious.
The Conscious motivators:
-Benefits, features, price, value proposition which the marketers aim
-For conscious motivators, use rewards to motivator your audience
The Non-conscious motivators:
- Authority, reciprocity, status, and more that interest your customer’s emotions
Nudge
When you are at the top of a slide, you are on a little horizontal ledge. You won’t budge from that ledge unless you propel yourself forward a little bit, or someone gives you a shove from behind.
With clear expression, good visuals, and impactful language, your message in the trial should highlight the most important takeaways, in effect saying, “Listen to this,” and “Remember this.” It isn’t a one-time nudge, but a constant nudge.
This is the nudge and it begins with getting the customers attention and it can take many forms:
- an email
- a phone call
- a very visible call to action,
- an alarm
- a popup ad
Answer these few questions, to help you create a successful nudge:
1.How do you intend to get the customer’s attention in this particular phase of your persuasion process? If you are an email marketer, the primary nudge will be an email. If you drive traffic to landing pages, the nudge on the landing page will likely be a call-to-action of some kind.
2. List a few ways you could make the nudge more attention-getting (e.g., larger, better location, different colour, added graphic, etc.).
3. List several ways your nudge either motivates or could motivate the customer to act. (For example, a big red “Subscribe” button may get the customer’s attention but adds no motivation. “Free paleo recipes!” offers something the visitor may be looking for. Or, an emotional image could connect with a non-conscious motivator.)
4. Looking over the motivators in the preceding question, which matches up with one or more customer motivators from the “Gravity” section for a powerful combination? Your nudge should include, in most cases, a single, strong motivator. Save your bullet points for your longer-form content. Is the nudge touching a non-conscious motivation you identified earlier?
The Right Angle
Now the angle of the slide, that’s what gets the kid to the bottom is the motivation that you provide both conscious and non-conscious. Now we all know that if a slide has a sufficient angle that it’ll work, the child will slide down smoothly and arrive at the bottom. “Roger Dooley”
This step involves using motivation (conscious or non-conscious) to create the angle of the slide, without the motivation or a steep angle, no movement could occur.
Dooley points out that this angle should include both conscious and non-conscious motivators, such as:
Conscious motivators:
- the product benefits
- the product features
- gifts and discounts
- specifications in some cases
- price
Or non-conscious:
- emotional appeals
- appeals based on psychology
- appeals based on cognitive biases
Make sure you check this article on how to increase conversion with cognitive biases.
The final element-Friction
When you reduce friction, when you make it easy,people will do more of it . “Jeff Bezos”
It’s either the slide lacks friction, or there was too much of it.
In the Persuasion Slide model, friction represents difficulty, frustration, or challenge, and other real or perceived problems.
There's either Perceived friction which are things like:
- number of fields in a form
- the steps in a checkout process
- instructions
- confusion in any part of your conversion process
or another kind of friction that is imaginary friction, or perceived friction, and you may not be aware of that, your users and customers may not be aware of it, and it has to do with cognitive fluency, which is the ease or difficulty with which our minds process information.
Yeah, imaginary friction is hard to comprehend, but here are few things to check:
1. Fonts — Are your fonts as simple as possible?
- particularly those used in instructions, call to action
- Italics, bolds, tiny letters, fancier font designs, etc. are harder to read
2. Colors, Shading, etc.
- The most fluent type/background combination is black type on a white background
- Reverse type (e.g., white type on a black background) is less fluent, as are less contrasty colour combinations.
- Don’t forget that a significant number of your users may be at least partially colour blind
3. Language
- Is your choice of words and your sentence structure as simple as possible?
I’m sure you will find more than a few useful information on how to build your persuasion slide, but these are the crucial steps:
1. Gain users motivation by applying conscious and non-conscious motivators
2. Choose the right nudge, it has to be detected by the customer and it should begin the motivation process
3. Create the right angle, by implementing benefits, price, discounts, cognitive biases, and Cialdini’s six big persuasion factors (liking, reciprocity, authority, etc.)
4. Make it user friendly by reducing friction, people will do more of it
That's all folks!
Keep an eye out on the next article for more significant insights.
