You may think you are a rational person and make rational decisions but the truth is that your decisions are influenced by emotion. You simply aren’t as in control of your emotions or decisions as you think you are. None of us are!
Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.Dan Ariely
From Amazon to Coca-Cola – large companies (and Governments?) are fully aware of emotional persuasion and they use various psychology techniques to alter your emotional state in an effort to get you to react in the way they want you to.
In the following article by Shanelle Mullin, she explains how decisions are emotional, not logical. She explains the four main pillars of emotion (sadness, anxiety, awe and anger) and how multinational companies are using them to great effect to alter our emotional state to persuade us.
Why (and How) Emotional Persuasion Works
“Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist, conducted a famous study that demonstrates the impact emotions have on decision-making. He studied people with brain damage that prevented them from feeling emotions.
They all behaved in a normal way, except for one thing: they were unable to make decisions. The subjects could describe what they should be doing, logically speaking. Yet they all found it difficult to make even the simplest decisions (e.g. what to eat, what to wear).
There’s also a psychological theory called dual processing. Essentially, the theory states that within your brain are two systems: system one and system two. System one is automatic, unconscious, low effort and fast. System two is controlled, conscious, high effort and slow.
System one is our emotional processor while system two is our rational, logical processor.
Since system one is always on, you are more likely to instinctively make an emotional decision and rationalize it later.”
Related: Antonio Damasio’s quest to understand consciousness at Ted Talks
As the previous post clearly points out – large companies use their knowledge of emotional persuasion to great effect. When we speak about successful companies, you can not ignore the most successful eCommerce company in the world…
Amazon practice the art of persuasion to great effect and the following article by Neil Patel shows how we can learn from their persuasion techniques and use their methods on our own websites.
He mentions several lessons we can learn from Amazon including subtle techniques such as increasing perceived value (to make us excited), creating scarcity (to make us act urgently), using colours, subtle CTA changes and many other changes to increase loyalty and maximise order values.
15 Persuasion Lessons You can Learn From Amazon’s Upsell Strategy
“No-one’s better at the upsell than Amazon. Amazon also effectively uses the cross-sell, which is when you recommend your customer buys another product that complements their existing purchase, but usually from a different category, vendor or website. And they also use the pre-sell, which is bundling or reducing the price of higher priced products if you buy multiple products.” Read the full article here…
Amazon don’t just use persuasion techniques to increase sales, they also make design changes to improve the user experience and guide visitors through their sales funnel. CarlyStec published a great post that demonstrated how you can persuade and direct visitors using simple design changes.
Motion, Consistency, Repetition & More: 23 Design Principles to Boost Conversions
Persuasion — a meaningful push that actually makes a visitor want to take action.
If you would like to apply persuasion techniques on your site, here are some more great tips from Shanelle:
- Conduct qualitative research to better understand your audience. What’s their emotional range? What are they feeling when they arrive on your site?
- Select a font that helps encourage the emotion you’re looking to create or maintain.
- Choose the two or three colors that will create or maintain your emotion of choice. Use them consistently in your branding.
- Evaluate your current images. What emotions are they evoking? The answer is never “none”.
- Be aware of facial expressions, size, color, body language, etc. in your images.
- When possible, make an emotional appeal and present an emotional benefit.
- Repeat trigger words throughout your copy to inspire and maintain the right emotion(s).
- Craft a story with a protagonist and a beginning, a middle and an end.
Our brain is not rational, our brain is rationalizing.Bart Schutz
I hope you found this article informative and help you understand how seemingly small changes can alter your visitors perceptions and actions.
Discover How Emotional Persuasion & Design Principles Can Boost Conversions
clipping path
ReplyDeleteclipping path service
car photo editing services
Enjoyed reading the article above , really explains everything in
detail,the article is very interesting and effective.Thank you and good
luck for the upcoming articles