The Persuasion Slide

by Roger Dooley

  In our model, gravity represents the customer’s own motivation. Your customer comes to you with needs, wants, desires… these are all part of gravity.

  And, as in the real world, it’s a lot easier to work with gravity than fighting it.

  Persuading customers to do something they don’t want to do is like trying to push them the wrong way on a slide. With enough strength and effort, you can indeed overcome gravity and force them up the slanted surface. But, it’s hard work and far less enjoyable than letting gravity propel them from top to bottom.

  Align Your Message

  Instead of that uphill battle, we need to align our message with what the customer wants. Our persuasion task will be far easier if we can show how our offer will relieve customer pain points or make the customer happier or more successful.

  Figure 7 - Gravity is the fundamental force that makes slides work.

  In your persuasion efforts, you need to work with the customer’s needs and desires. Present a solution for a problem the customer is wrestling with. Show how your offer gets the customer closer to an important goal. Identify a customer pain point and offer relief. When you do this, it will be a speedy trip down the slide!

  That’s not to say you should sell only to customers who have already established a need for your product. A supermarket can put eggs on display, and shoppers who need eggs will buy them. That’s a fine model for food stores, but it won’t work well for the rest of us. We usually have to show the customer how our offering fits their needs or will help them in some way.

  Let’s look at a website selling exercise videos. The visitor likely has an interest in getting more fit, losing weight, or looking better – that’s why he’s looking at the website content. He almost certainly does not, however, have any inherent interest in buying videos. The messaging becomes critical if you want to work with gravity instead of against it:

  Fighting Gravity: “Buy all 10 exercise videos for $199!”

  Gravity Helping: “Get fit and feel great in 10 weeks, guaranteed! Just $199!”

  When your main pitch is something the customer has no predetermined need for or interest in, you are fighting gravity. Perhaps the customer was planning on joining a health club, or buying a personal training package.

  Expensive exercise videos don’t sound all that appealing in comparison, even if they are a better solution and cheaper in the long run. But, focusing on the customer’s needs and desires injects your solution into the mix.

  Here’s another example from a recipe site:

  Fighting Gravity: “Sign up for daily updates!”

  Gravity Helping: “Get one healthy and delicious recipe every day!”

  In this case, “sign up” sounds like a commitment, and “daily updates” suggests yet another item in an already crowded inbox. Phrasing the offer in terms of healthy eating and tasty food aligns the offer much more closely with the visitor’s own interests.

  When you express the offer in a way that matches the customer’s conscious goals or unconscious desires, the probability of conversion increases dramatically.

  If your products or services aren’t meeting a real customer need or moving her toward a desired goal, you’re in the wrong business. You’ll be trying to push your customer up the slide every time. Even if you can muscle your customer to the top occasionally you’ll end up questioning the value of the effort.

  You vs. We

  One good test to see if your headlines and content are aligned with gravity is to count the times words like “you” and “your” appear, and compare them to the frequency of words like “we” and “our.”

  Of course you want to establish trust and credibility, but in doing so there’s a tendency to get carried away with your story. The visitor cares a lot less about you and your story than his own pain points, needs, and aspirations.

  If you find that you are talking more about yourself than about your visitor or customer, you need to rework your content. Give visitors who want to learn more about you a link to, say, an “about us” or “product details” page.

  In short, to align with gravity, be sure that the page that is intended to convert is focused on the visitor, not you.

  Got Gravity?

  If you are confident that you can work with gravity instead of fighting it, let’s move on to build a better slide!

  [For notes, updates, contact info, and a free Persuasion Slide workbook visit persuasionslide.com]

  Chapter 5: The Nudge

  In playground slides, we don’t expect a giant push to propel us down the slide, we just want to be sure we get off the platform and onto the slippery part with enough momentum to keep on sliding.

  Figure 8 - The Nudge gets things moving forward

  Overcoming Inertia

  The nudge can be anything that draws the customer or visitor to the offer.

  When your favorite department store sends you an email advertising a sale, that’s a nudge. At that point, you are on the slide – if the content is compelling enough, you’ll gain momentum and click through to the website. The nudge has done its job.

  Web advertising can be a nudge if it reminds you of something you want, or a problem you are trying to solve. Clever marketers use techniques like retargeting – showing you an ad for a product that you viewed on their website – to make the nudge much more effective than a generic ad.

  Those retargeted ads, and emails that promote products you viewed (but didn’t buy) or even abandoned in your shopping cart, are a sort of secondary nudge. A customer stalled part of the way down the slide, and a nudge from an ad can get him moving again.

  In our blogging example, a nudge is usually a very visible suggestion that the visitor subscribe. Instead of relying on a highly motivated visitor to hunt down a subscription link, we want to put the idea in their head immediately.

  An example of effective nudging is my friend Chris Brogan’s. He includes a big block at the top of the page, and draws attention to it with his own photo.

  Figure 9 - Blog page at www.chrisbrogan.com

  And, in case that nudge isn’t enough to get your attention, after being on the site for a short time, Chris also shows you a lightbox popup that again invites you to subscribe:

  Figure 10 - www.chrisbrogan.com (lightbox popup)

  That’s two big nudges to every new visitor. (Regular visitors probably see the popup only occasionally.)

  Peep Laja’s ConversionXL site, like many conversion expert sites, has multiple nudges.

  The first is a full-page call to action. If you arrive at the site by direct link or search, you don’t see the blog content right away. Instead, you see this:

  Figure 11 - ConversionXL.com - home page

  Not only is this nudge hard to miss, it provides motivation by implying that you can avoid losing sales on your website by subscribing and getting the free conversion guide.

  Figure 12 - ConversionXL.com - sidebar

  The next nudge you are likely to see, if you proceed to the content, is a sidebar form that lets you subscribe. Subtle, perhaps, but if you read a post to the end, you’ll see another nudge to subscribe:

  Figure 13 ConversionXL.com - call to action below post

  This is a relevant nudge as a visitor who has just read a post (probably a long one, based on most of the site’s content) to the end is probably interested in more of the same kind of content.

  And what if the visitor doesn’t finish the post, or fails to respond to the below-post nudge? As soon as the visitor moves the mouse pointer outside the current window (as if to click the back button or a bookmark), an “exit-intent” popup appears:

  Figure 14 - ConversionXL.com - exit intent overlay popup

  This nudge also pushes the e-book as a path to getting the subscription. That’s a sensible approach, since if the visitor didn’t find the blog post engaging an offer of more of the same might not be very enticing.

  The Motivation Component of the Nudge

  While the nudge is mainly ab
out getting the target’s attention, it also has to include a motivational element. Getting attention but not providing any reason to keep moving leaves the customer at the top of the slide.

  In our examples of effective nudges, the attention-getter also provided some good reasons to take the desired.

  The next chapter will focus on motivation. The most successful slides will be those where the nudge and subsequent motivation flow smoothly and keep the customer moving.

  Two Nudge Extremes

  We’ve seen the two ends of the spectrum for blog subscription nudges. At one end, we have cat blogs with a subscription link that is so small only the most determined visitor is likely to find it.

  At the other end, we’ve got marketing blogs that devote so much page real estate to their nudges that it would be nearly impossible for the visitor to miss all of them.

  Then, the nudges often continue with popups that the visitor has to click to close in order to keep reading the page.

  To sum up, the nudge has to:

  • Get the audience’s attention

  • Motivate them to proceed to the next step.

  [For notes, updates, contact info, and a free Persuasion Slide workbook visit persuasionslide.com]

  Chapter 6: Making A Steeper Slide

  Once we’ve delivered the nudge, it’s now up to the angle of the slide to get the customer to the bottom. In human terms, we’re providing the motivation needed to keep on going.

  There are lots of ways to deliver motivation. Let’s look at a few possibilities.

  Initial Motivation

  Remember our discussion about working with gravity? The visitor should have some initial motivation. If she’s reading a blog about marketing, she is probably interested in information about how to create better, more effective marketing. If he’s browsing a site that sells golf shoes, he’s probably in the market for a new pair.

  Death of the Hard-Selling Salesman

  Years ago, door-to-door salesmen (they were, in fact, almost exclusively men) would knock on doors and convince people to buy things like a set of encyclopedias for hundreds of dollars.

  The customer began with no inclination to buy a costly set of reference books, and would likely have tried to turn away the salesman by saying they had no need for them.

  Despite the lack of initial customer interest, these salespeople were often successful after hours of intense selling. That, however, is not the kind of persuasive process that works today on the web, in print, or even in person.

  Go with Gravity

  Initial motivation is critically important, and in some cases is sufficient to complete the persuasive task. If a thirsty person arrives in a convenience store stocked with cold drinks, no additional motivation is needed.

  Of course, we know that most persuasive situations we encounter aren’t that easy. Most visitors to e-commerce sites leave without purchasing anything. Others start the purchasing process, but leave the site with items left in their shopping cart – the dreaded “abandoned cart” syndrome.

  Figure 15 - You create the angle of your slide with motivation.

  These potential buyers who fail to follow through are like a child who gets partway down a slide but simply doesn’t have enough momentum to get to the bottom.

  The good news is that while playground slides are immobile and unchanging, we can increase the slope of our persuasion slide by adding motivation.

  Conscious Motivation Boosters

  The most common way to encourage a person to do something is to offer logical reasons for doing so. When these reasons are relevant to the person’s interests, they are aligned with gravity.

  For example, take a newsletter publisher hoping to increase subscribers. She can take several approaches. One common technique is to emphasize the benefits the reader will get from subscribing.

  For example, she could promise:

  Weekly industry news updates.

  Money-saving tips in every post.

  Dynamic new sales strategies.

  One hilarious cat video every day.

  All of these fall into the “features and benefits” category of information, and are intended to be read and understood. If you are a VP of sales, learning about new sales techniques will help you with your job. If you like cat videos, then having a link to a new video appear in your inbox every day is a good thing.

  Figure 16 NeuroscienceMarketing.com/blog

  For instance, a popup I previously used on my own Neuromarketing blog offers conscious motivators like “fresh, actionable strategies,” the advantage of “selling to your customer’s brain,” and provides an upper limit on the number of emails per week to reassure subscribers they won’t be spammed.

  The inclusion of relevant conscious motivators increases the angle of the slide. The visitor probably begins with at least a little motivation – someone reading a marketing blog is, in most cases, looking for new ideas and insights on that topic.

  Just as making a slide steeper increases the force of gravity that acts on the child, these motivators amplify the visitor’s inclination to act by reinforcing the match between the offer and the visitor’s needs.

  If these conscious motivators don’t match the interests of the visitor, they may still serve a useful purpose by discouraging action by people whose interests aren’t a good match. A dissatisfied customer is worse than no customer at all.

  Gifts and Bribes

  A special category of conscious motivators is the use of “bribes” for taking the desired action.

  A website selling enterprise software might allow visitors to download a whitepaper on the topic at no charge if they provide their contact information. Office supply companies are known for offering free gifts – say, an inexpensive but useful messenger bag – if one places an order by a certain date.

  Discounts and free shipping offers are common bribes for e-commerce sites. These often have time limits to encourage quick action by customers. Offers like “Free shipping until midnight!” and “20% off all merchandise until July 4!” will usually increase response rates and conversion, albeit at a financial price.

  Survey firms are notorious bribers. Most people aren’t inclined to answer a lengthy list of questions about a topic, but at least some will do so if they are promised, say, a Starbucks or Amazon gift card.

  This can get expensive, of course, and there’s a danger of making the offer so attractive that people with no interest in providing accurate answers sign up only to earn the reward.

  Blog subscriptions are often promoted with gifts. Since most blogs aren’t big revenue generators, these gifts usually take the form of free downloads like e-books, access to private content, and other digital items.

  The incremental cost to the blog operator is zero if they have the content available, and throwing in an attractive and relevant free item will almost always increase the percent of visitors who sign up.

  Non-conscious Motivators

  What we have described up to this point is fairly straightforward – get potential customers’ attention, and tell them how what you have to offer will help them meet their goals.

  That’s where many marketers stop.

  The problem with using only conscious motivators is that resulting slide isn’t always steep enough.

  For every visitor that makes it to the bottom, there may be many more who don’t. How do we make the angle of the slide even steeper? One way is to add non-conscious motivators.

  The form that these non-conscious motivators can take varies greatly – they can be headlines, text, or even images. They are designed to enhance the appeal of the offer to the visitor’s emotions, biases, and sometimes “irrational” inclinations.

  Our brains use many shortcuts for decision-making, and are often attracted by factors our conscious minds pay little attention to. Building in one or more motivators that work at the non-conscious level further increases the chance of the visitor reaching the bottom of the slide.

  Entire books,
including my own Brainfluence, have been devoted to the topic of persuasion and influence using techniques based on social psychology and neuroscience. We won’t get into that level of detail here, but we can look at a few commonly used ones.

  Cialdini’s Six Principles

  One can’t talk about influence and persuasion without touching on psychologist Robert Cialdini’s six principles. He compiled these through his own research as well as that of others, and describes them in his bestselling Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. While they can operate at a conscious level, they all pack a non-conscious punch as well.

  Reciprocity. Do something for a person with no conditions or expectation of a return favor, and they are more likely to do something for you.

  Reciprocity not a quid-pro-quo exchange, but rather a situation where one person gives something or provides a favor to another person with no requirement in return.

  Most content sites like blogs and news sites do employ a form of reciprocity. They allow visitors to read both current and older content at no charge and without having to register.

  Figure 17 - GymJunkies.com doesn’t use reciprocity

  When prompted to subscribe, the visitor may feel she has received value already and may be more inclined to provide an email address. This reciprocity is fairly weak, in my opinion, because there’s an underlying expectation that blog and new content should be free. Still, the free access approach is better than, say, demanding that the visitor register to read the content like the example in Figure 10.