A Big List of Persuasion Techniques for Marketing — Part 1

I will be reviewing the CXL mini degree of Conversion rate optimisation. Today we will be covering the course of People & Psychology. In this course, we learn about how people are affected and influenced while they are making a decision.

People are irrational. People are cute. People are bad. People are good. People are all kinds of things — and science hasn’t figured us out yet.

You can spend years in universities studying human behaviour. This course is not aiming to compete with those programs but will teach you some of the more important concepts that you need to be aware of.

What is also important to keep in mind is that while the internet and technology have changed at a rapid pace, the human brain has been pretty much the same for millions of years. And probably will continue to be.

When to use psychology in CRO

Remember conversion hierarchy?

The aspects of the pyramid mean different things depending on the main goal of a website. Therefore, I am here to tell you what they mean for you specifically as an attorney looking to attract more clients.

Persuasion is the tip of the pyramid — we’ll have to make sure everything else, the fundamentals, have been taken care of before we move on to applying persuasion techniques.

That doesn’t mean that we should hold back from using them. Some of the principles — like social proof and urgency — can be very effective. Some principles should also inform our design and copywriting.

Don’t go overboard with these techniques. If you try to apply all at once, they won’t work as well. Use sparingly for full effect, and choose principles that are a good fit for your particular case — don’t force it. If there’s no way to create urgency without faking it (“only 50 copies of this pdf file left!”), just don’t do it. An obvious attempt at manipulation will backfire.

When people talk about persuasions, Cialdini is the first name that comes up. His 7 principles of persuasion –

1. Reciprocity
2. Commitment/Consistency
3. Social Proof
4. Authority
5. Liking
6. Scarcity
7. Unity

– are well-known and widely used.

Keep in mind that Cialdini’s book Influence mainly talks about these principles from the perspective of how to not get taken advantage of when someone tries to use this on you. We focus on how you can use them to boost conversions.

Cialdini’s principles of persuasion are not the only ones — far from it. There are tons of triggers and buttons in our brains that you can push to receive the same, powerful outcome: persuasion.

What follows is a huge list of persuasion techniques.

Focusing effect

Most commercial choices have way too many aspects for a normal human being to take them all into account. Therefore, we tend to only focus on a few of them, excluding those that are less conspicuous. Those that have noticeable differences, for example. This way we place too much importance on one aspect, causing an error in accurately predicting how happy we will be with each option.

Context-Dependent Memory

Do you recognize the following situation? You enter your basement/garage, but instantly forget why you went there. You walk back, and as soon as you enter the kitchen you go “Oh, I remember, I went to get the juicer!” That’s cue-dependent forgetting and remembering; we tend to forget things that are out of context and to recall information more easily when the original contextual cues are present (the cues that were also present when we learned it).

Self-generation affect effect

The self-generation affect effect (or the ‘not invented here — bias’ as people like Dan Ariely phrase it) is the cognitive version of the physical labour-love effect (also termed the IKEA effect). Not only does physical effort increase liking, but it also works just as well for cognitive effort… We tend to like ideas and information better when they’ve been generated by our mind (instead of ideas that we read or hear from someone else). Even if people invest just a small amount of cognitive energy in an idea or solution, they like it much more. Not only do we like our ideas better, but we remember them better too, see self-generation memory effect).

Affect Heuristic

The way we feel influences our decisions and their outcomes made at that moment. When we’re happy, for example, we’re more likely to try new things. But if we’re worried, we make more conservative choices. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that our emotional response to a website, app, or Facebook page alters our judgment.

Because of this dependence on our emotional state, we make different decisions based on the same set of facts. Overall, this affect heuristic is involved in nearly every decision we make.

Facial distraction

When we (subconsciously) notice faces in our surroundings, we tend to first scan those faces (as shown in the picture), before looking at anything else. Moreover, we cognitively process those faces thoroughly. Facial recognition is distinct from object recognition in terms of visual processing. There are distinctly separate parts of our brain involved (the so-called Fusiform Face Areas), and — more importantly — our brain puts a lot of complex processing into analyzing faces.

Attentional Bias

The Attentional Bias is our tendency to pay more attention to emotionally dominant stimuli and to neglect other seemingly irrelevant data when making decisions. So the more something touches us, the more attention we pay to it.

Classic examples of dominant emotions are i.e. pain, fear, and sex. Research studying the Attentional Bias effect often involves ‘Dot Probe’ studies. In these studies, a test subject has to look at the centre of a screen, where two pictures with different emotions are shortly shown.

Fear Appeals

A fear appeal is a persuasive message that scares someone with the intent to motivate him to act against the threat. But since we don’t like threats, we tend to deny them or use other defence mechanisms to lower our fear. Therefore, fear appeal -or ‘fear evoked persuasion’- is a technique that should be used rather delicately.

Multiple variables have been found to influence the effectiveness of fear appeals, such as perceived severity, individual characteristics, and more importantly, susceptibility. Also, the intensity of the fear: Weak fear appeals may not attract enough attention, yet strong fear appeals may cause an individual to avoid or ignore a message by employing defence mechanisms.

Forer effect

The Forer Effect is our tendency to highly rate the accuracy of descriptions of our personality that supposedly are tailored ‘specifically to us’. In actuality, they’re vague, mostly positive, and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.

Because the message is positive but also slightly vague, we inject our meaning into it, and thus the statement seems personally relevant (beware that the self-serving bias has been shown to cancel out the Forer effect).