Use emotional design in CRO

Contributors

@paul-boag


Business Benefits

Increase revenue by creating a compelling site that draws in users.


Create a list of the critical emotional drivers for people’s desire to buy.

These include:

  • To overcome a problem.
  • To achieve a goal.
  • To improve myself.
  • To gain validation/acceptance.
  • To be the first.
  • To have fun.
  • To avoid remorse.
  • To get the purchase over with.
  • To feel special.
  • To stop feeling like you are missing out.

Brainstorm how you could position your product or service within the context of each of these buying motivators.

For example, a fitness app could be positioned as:

  • An opportunity to overcome the problem of being tired all the time.
  • A way of becoming more attractive and so validating you to others.
  • Fun.
  • A method of achieving a fitness goal.

Rank your ideas by their effectiveness to influence consumer behaviour.

Ideally, ask customers to rank your ideas in some form of survey. But if this is not possible, speak to customer facing staff and ask for their opinions.

Start to explore imagery and messaging that communicates the concept of your top-ranked ideas.

For example, to focus on your fitness app being a fun activity, use imagery of people laughing or joking together.

When designing web pages supporting your product, remember to accommodate the user’s emotional state.

People using your website will probably have a high cognitive load because their attention is divided, or they are busy. Reduce their cognitive load by:

  • Create a simple, clean interface with minimal clutter.
  • Make sure your navigation matches the users’ mental model and meets their layout expectations.
  • Write copy that addresses common questions and objections, such as delivery charges.

Use the emotional map to understand the various emotional states a consumer could be in before purchasing your product.

Here’s a walkthrough of the emotion map guidelines in the graph:

  • High energy emotional states are above the horizontal line or x-axis. Customers above this line to the right are excited and feel the anticipation of a reward.
  • Low energy emotional states are below the x-axis, lower left. Customers tend to feel unempowered, degraded, and in a depressive state.
  • To the right of the vertical line, or y-axis, are positive emotions.
  • To the left of the y-axis are negative emotions.

Customers in high-energy emotional states - above the horizontal line - are more likely to act. Customers to the left of the vertical are feeling negative emotions and those to the right, positive emotions.

Direct your marketing effort to those customers whose emotions are mostly in the upper right quadrant, as they are more likely to take action.

  • Customers in the upper left quadrant can be motivated too; however, the trick is to promise to remove or solve something negative in their life.
  • Try to avoid customers who fall in the bottom left quadrant. To get your low motivation, highly content customer to take action, you have to promise to give them something bad. This can be alienating.
  • To motivate customers in the bottom right, your marketing should promise to take away something good.

Seek out writers who are similar to your target audience, so you can market to your consumers’ personality.

Here are a few combinations of how you can do this:

  • Loss aversion: combine a negative message (something is wrong) with an optimistic or advocacy message (what the user can do about it).
  • Create mystery to arouse curiosity and trigger dopamine.
  • Use gratitude and compliments, followed by a request or call to action.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:15:35Z