A conversion is a decision made by a customer in your favor. Every business wants more conversions which means every business wants customers to make positive decisions on their site including conversions, filling a form, etc, and avoid negative decisions e-g closing their site. Let’s explore my journey through CXL’s Digital Psychology & Persuasion mini-degree.
An adult makes about 35,000 decisions each day, so you need to understand the science behind decision-making and apply that science to get more people to perform certain actions on your site.
Influencers of Decision Making:
An adult makes a lot of decisions every day and most of the time these decisions are fueled by emotions rather than rationality.
Processes that influence decision making are
Cognitive Biases:
Cognitive biases are biased thinking errors that influence your decisions. These biases can be divided into four categories
Belief Biases: When a person is over-dependent on their prior knowledge about a certain product and it influences their decision-making process.
Omission Biases: Some people tend to skip over the information that can be a bit risky and affects their decision-making process. Now if that piece of information was supposed to help them make a decision, they will not perform the desired action.
Confirmation Bias: People tend to observe what they expect to observe. If something new comes in they are most likely to ignore it.
Memories:
If someone has converted on your store in the past and had an amazing experience, It is most likely that they tend to decide in your favor because of their memory of a smooth experience. Same way if someone has had a bad experience with your product in the past, they are most likely not going to convert.
Reason:
We as human beings always try to be rational about our decisions, That’s why when we want something, we are looking for a reason. We are creating different scenarios about the usage of your product. The old brain which is responsible for decision making doesn’t want to think. That’s why you should give them the scenarios where your product can be used. That’s why marketers use Case Studies and Use case scenarios on their website, to facilitate the decision-making process.
Emotion:
Emotions are the most important influencer in decision-making. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio experimented with people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions were generated. He discovered that those people acted normal and could easily perform everyday tasks but when it came to decision making, they struggled a lot.
We can conclude from this experiment that without emotional support, decision-making is not possible. What marketers can do is attract people to their product and use an emotional message to convert those people.
This advertisement is considered to be the most successful campaign of all time because it uses emotions to attract customer’s attention to their product.
Our brain is processing two things in real-time and those two things are Learning and Memory. We are continuously learning new things and are storing those in our minds as memories. Both of these processes are crucial in decision making and as marketers, who want people to fill that specific form or buy that amazing Christmas gift from our website. We need to investigate more into this.
What goes behind Learning?
Experiencing new things, collecting new knowledge, associating that knowledge with certain things, all of these processes can be referred to as Learning. There are three learning processes
Classical conditioning:
According to CXL classical conditioning is defined as an association that is formed between a previously neutral stimulus and a stimulus that naturally evokes a response.
In layman’s terms, when we associate certain stimuli to certain events e-g Road is closed because the train is coming in. Now the arrival of the train is a natural stimulus and you know that road will be closed. Now, most of the time when the road is closed there is a traffic jam, Now human brain will associate traffic jam to the arrival of the train.
Another classic example will be Pavlov’s Experiment. Where he would ring a bell to feed his dogs. The smell of the food is a natural indication of food for dogs but now that the dogs always hear a bell along with the smell of food they learn that the ringing of bells is also a call to the food.
Operant Conditioning:
Most marketers use this process very often without even knowing about this, and they already know it works miracles. This process is attempting to modify the behavior using positive or negative reinforcement. Marketers at Uber will give you a discount code after more than fifteen rides a month, what that will do is you’ll want to shoot for that reward next month too. This is called positive reinforcement, now Uber has provided you positive reinforcement and you have provided them with a lot of conversions.
Observational Learning:
In the 1970s when there was no ban on smoking advertisements, you would have seen ads for cigarettes where a person was doing all sorts of cool stuff. Climbing rocks, driving nice cars, getting all the girls; just by smoking cigarettes. Those commercials were always very successful because people wanted to imitate those successful people because now it doesn’t look that dangerous. This is called observational learning.
According to Bandura, there are four processes crucial for observational learning.
- Attention: The observer should be paying attention to the behavior of the imitator.
- Retention: The observer should form a memory of the behavior of the imitator.
- Reproduction: The observer should have the motor and physical skills to imitate the behavior.
- Motivation: The perceived rewards should outweigh the consequences.
Memory:
You can test a lot of different things on your website, but without the understanding of how users store the information and how that information is retre=ieved, you will be wasting most of your time. Memory can serve as a major trigger in decision making and the following are the major processes involved in the process of memory
Encoding:
The change of information into the usable form.
Storage:
The second process is the storage of the information. There are three different kinds of memory storage processes. Some memories are brief, they just need to be stored for a matter of seconds. Then there are short-term memories, they are a bit longer and can last around 30 to 40 seconds and we can store about 3 to 4 of these at the same time. Then comes the information that is stored for days, months, and even years. These memories are stored outside our awareness and are fetched to the awareness when they are needed.
Retrieval:
Retrieval is the transfer of memories from the storage to our awareness, where we need them.