Video: Online Persuasion @ Meet Magento Germany

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Video: Online Persuasion @ Meet Magento Germany

Written by Gui.do X Jansen,
October 2013
Written by a human, not by AI

Here's the video from me at Meet Magento in Leipzig, Germany last June. I presented my Online Persuasion session and the video was published this week at nr-apps.com.

In addition to all the fancy persuasion techniques I also added some additional thoughts about how to optimize your website...

A) Prioritize and get a decent basis, or you’ll waste money with persuasion. Improve your website in the following order:

  1. Technology: it should work. No errors.
  2. Functionality: it should offer the functionality your customer wants. The most screen estate should go to the most important tasks for the customer.
  3. Usability: If it works and does whát the customer wants, make it as easy as you can. Remove the bumps in the road.
  4. Persuasion: Now that it’s technically and functionally possible and easy to do, motivate your customers to act.

Now I don’t say that step 1 to 3 should be perfect in order to start with persuasion. But there is no use in persuading customers to do something that has technical, functional or usability issues, that only leads to frustration.

B) Your gut feeling sucks. So does your HIPPO. We have customers that either test a lot or really everything they change on their site. Their optimization teams are really skilled and experienced in A/B testing and are awesome ‘customer intelligence teams’ that are invaluable to their business. This is because they fail as much as they possibly can. And even with all that experience, predicting the success of an A/B test is just above chance. But they don’t need to predict, after a few weeks testing, they KNOW what works best. So guess how good the gut feeling of your marketer or the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) at your department is… 

C) The ‘golden egg’ of persuasion exists. But it’s not what you think it is.

People often look for a ‘golden egg’: something that will solve all their problems and sell their services like a madman. It does exist, but it’s different for every customer, every product, every brand and a plethora of external factors you have no control over. So the key is not to find one golden egg for every customer in every situation, they key is finding out what influences your customers behavior and adapt your communication accordingly. This means you should be testing what you do to see what works best for which customer segment and don’t forget to include external factors like weather conditions, competitor pricing or marketing actions or just the difference between a working day or the weekend. In the end, you’ll end up with a basket full of eggs. The color depends on your team and testing processes 

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