A Big List of Persuasion Techniques for Marketing — Part 2

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.

Let’s continue with part 2 of the big list of persuasion techniques for marketing.

Gaze Cueing

When we’re confronted with faces, we can’t help but intensely process the eyes and their highly expressive surrounding region. Eyes reveal otherwise secret and complex mental states such as emotions, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Research indicates that eye contact accounts for roughly 55% of the information in a face-to-face conversation!

Eyes also have the irresistible power to attract and direct our attention. The perceived gaze direction of a face shifts our visual attention as a powerful magnet in the same direction.

Online persuasion tips:

• When using faces on your website, direct their look towards the most important element(s) on your page.

More such tips and tricks are covered in depth in the course feel free to explore them at cxl.com.

Cognitive dissonance

When there’s a mismatch between our beliefs and behaviour, we experience what Leon Festinger calls ‘cognitive dissonance’. By nature, we humans are strongly motivated to reduce this dissonance.

We can’t rewind time to change our behaviour, but we can change our beliefs and cognitions to align with that behaviour. To reduce dissonance, we simply alter our beliefs, which we do a lot.

There are 3 ways to do so:

• we lower the importance of the dissonant elements,
• we add new consonant beliefs to create a consistent belief system, or
• we change an existing cognition.

Cognitive Dissonance is strongly related to ‘self-consistency and is sometimes referred to as “adaptive preference formation”.

Ancient Greek fabulist Aesop used a great example of cognitive dissonance in his fable “The Fox and the Grapes”.

Online persuasion tips:

Integrate cognitive dissonance in your business and sales strategies in such a way that your customers have to internalize buying and using your product.

• Play hard to get.
• Be expensive.

The tips are amazing and help to gauge an idea on how to implement these persuasion tricks on your project or product page to increase your conversion rate.

Choice-supportive bias

We have a tendency to remember our choices as being better than they actually were. We over-attribute positive features to the options we choose. On the other hand, we do the opposite for options that we did not choose: We attribute negative features to the non-chosen options.

Online persuasion tips:

In order to get your customers to attribute positive features to you (and negative ones to others):

• Test by asking your users why they visit your website or use your app.
• Ask them why they bought and use your product.
• Show previously visited pages and bought items!

Ambiguity Aversion

People tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is known (over an option for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown).

The ambiguity effect is relevant when a decision is affected by a lack of information, or “ambiguity”. The effect implies that we tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is highest. We’re simply reluctant to accept offers that are risky or uncertain.

Two remarks:

• Over an initial range, women require no further compensation for the introduction of ambiguity whereas men do.
• Curiosity increases attention, thus is induced by mild doses of uncertainty.

Online persuasion tips:

• Be specific in your offer and communication style (instead of offering vague information).
• Be specific about what happens when people click on a call to action.

Belonging & Conformity

Belongingness is our innate need to form and maintain strong, stable, interpersonal relationships. More than we’re often consciously aware of, we want to be part of a peer group, community, and society in general.

Once we feel like we belong to a group, we’ll conform to it and internalize the group’s values and norms. We typically conform to both injunctive norms of our groups (implied approved behavior by the group), and to descriptive norms (common behavior among group members). We may even behave adversely towards groups that we don’t want to be associated with.

Your brand, products, and/or services are social objects that inherently form and play a role within social groups. Therefore, belongingness and conformity have multiple strong, persuasive effects that are relevant to you and available for you to take full advantage of. Does your prospect want to belong and conform to your group?

Online persuasion tips:

• Support the forming of groups, connections, and dialogues among your customers and prospects (be it on your own platforms or on previously existing ones).
• Find and nourish the influencers within the more important social groups (e.g. on Facebook or niche platforms).

Paradox of choice

If we’re offered just one option, our choice is to either go for it or not. However, if we’re offered two choices, we automatically start choosing between these two, forgetting about the “or not” option existing silently in the background. Not choosing at all becomes a much less obvious option. Therefore, offering more than one option is usually more persuasive.

On the other hand, if we’re offered too many choices we tend not to make a choice at all. Too many choices are simply too difficult for our simple ratio.

That’s the paradox of choice.

Online persuasion tips:

• Prevent providing only one call to action. Instead, add a link or another CTA as a secondary choice.
• If you have only one product or service, try to create one or two variations of it (like a black or white iPhone).

So that ends this list of persuasion techniques by CXL in the course that I am doing. The course is called Conversion Optimisation and is a brilliant course for marketers who are looking to expand their knowledge & apply new strategies.