Nailed It! — Week 12 Final Review

CXL Institute Digital Psychology and Persuasion minidegree — recommend ten out of ten. Completing this course and receiving the certificate has given me the confidence that I needed to begin construction on my personnel website.

Without the scholarship opportunity that I received, I would have never had the ability or motivation I desperately needed. To give a completely honest review I must say some lessons/instructors were quite boring and I found it hard to engage at times. However, the quality of the course overall was outstanding. I am so grateful for being given the chance to learn about how to build a persuasive website with optimal conversion rates.

During this final week of the course, I learned more about social proof, emotional targeting, and psychological backfires. Talia Wolf brought it all together and I was able to make sense of the entire process. I am going to do a quick review of the above-mentioned subjects that wrapped up the course.

Social Proof

Any third party, unbiased proof outside of a claim your company would make. Social proof has an impact dynamic that never loses its effect or goes away. How to generate and display is an art in itself. Case studies, testimonials, interviews, freshness, and avoiding negative social proof can be a challenge. Here are some professional tips and insights.

Writing Case Studies & Testimonials

Believable and compelling content-

1. Specificity

2. Relatability to audience

3. Ability to support an actual claim: before, during, and after

• Allow customers to self-select
• Establish empathy
• Can act as an interesting point

Conducting Customer Interview

1. Who should I interview?

• Is willing and able to share their experience
• Reflects your target market
• Have time

2. What should I ask them?

• Start with softball questions
• Use open-ended questions
• Before during and after

3. During the interview?

• Keep it improvisational, conversational, and unscripted
• Ask for a backstory
• What can you achieve now that you couldn’t before
• Don’t be afraid to ask more than once to get the quote that you want

Where to Include Social Proof

• Alleviate friction and overcome the objection
• Get them past a pain point
• Overcome pricing objections
• Support a specific claim
• Don’t use video only
• Don’t make it an obstacle
• Keep customers time in mind

Negative Social Proof

• Not scrubbing out negative reviews makes it more human and believable
• Authenticity
• Allows for self-selection

Common Mistakes in Including Social Proof

• Not choosing an ideal customer
• Displaying the proof in a way that’s not credible (failing to link to websites or online profiles & not including headshots).
• Not using it to support a specific claim

How to Keep Social Proof Fresh

• 24/7
• Appetites for social proof may change
• Hand them the proof they seek to rationalize their decisions
• Have a system in place for collecting social proof
• New mediums?
• video (powerful) scrub them
• visual impact (sheer volume)
• audio-only
• Run tests and experiments

Developing & Testing an Emotional Content Strategy

Talia Wolf’s four-step framework explores the emotional triggers and behavioral principles that influence your customer’s decision-making process.

Talia’s 4 step process includes:

1. Emotional Competitor Analysis
2. Emotional SWOT
3. Building an Emotional Content Strategy
4. Testing

What is Emotional Targeting?

Emotional targeting is using emotional triggers and consumer psychology and incorporating them into powerful marketing campaigns.

Step 1: Emotional Competitor Analysis

• Address underlining and complex questions
• How similar to our competitors do we want to be?
• Which emotional targeting approaches should we be looking for in our competitors
• How do we recognize them?
• Is it better to take an emotional risk to stand out?

Step 2: Emotional SWOT Test

SWOT identifies a competitor’s emotional appeals and draws insights about the overall industry.

1. Strengths
2. Weaknesses
3. Opportunities
4. Threats

Step 3: Emotional Content Strategy

Developing a strategy based on the results of the SWOT test by identifying which emotional content and triggers to apply.

1. Answers the SWOT:

What are the biggest issues that people have and how can we address them within our emotional content?

2. Tackle the weaknesses and the threats

Over 223 emotional triggers, you can use within your landing page- don’t just use one.

Step 4: Testing

Metrics to consider and analyze

• Emotions
• Elements
• Words
• Visuals
• Colors

Psychological Backfiring

1. Target Behavior

The positive outcome you’re hoping for.

1. Unexpected Benefits

Any positive outcome that was not intentionally sought.

1. Backfiring

Includes a variety of negative outcomes, including the reverse of the target behavior and side effects of the target behavior.

1. Dark Patterns

Any outcome that benefits the experimenter at the expense of the audience (unethical manipulation).

How to Reduce the Risk of Backfiring

1. Be aware of what can go wrong.

For best results, take a risk management approach when creating sites and running tests.

1. Test your psychology.

Don’t implement psychological tactics blindly.

1. Consider the long-term impact.

If you do successfully modify the behavior of your audience, how will that impact similar groups?

Consider the people just outside your target audience. If you change the behavior of your target audience, that might influence the way adjacent audiences behave.

1. Understand the complexity of backfires.

Psychology can work with one part of your audience and backfire with another part.

Only remove or change it when you find that it backfires holistically.

1. Remember the 12 backfires and where they fall within the likelihood-severity matrix.
2. Audit your site for psychological backfires.
3. Before launching a test, audit it for the risk of psychological backfires. Do what you can to reduce those risks.
4. Launch an A/B test, limiting the risk of widespread backfires.
5. Determine whether the treatment increased conversions or not.
6. Using qualitative research, look for evidence of backfires.
7. Record all of the backfires and refer to them before running future tests.
8. If you still have control of the backfire(s) and it’s causing an overall negative outcome, remove it.

Final Thoughts

I appreciate the scholarship opportunity I was awarded by CXL Institute and would recommend their courses to my friends. Varying from historical psychologist theories and models to modern real-world strategies, I feel I now have the knowledge and ability to build a website that delights and converts prospects into paying customers.