How everyday behavioral science can boost your business

Let's dive into the world of behavioral sciences and understand why it's imperative for you and your business.

The cost of a miss

How do you get to the end of a design cycle not knowing whether you're going to improve things or worsen them? What happens when you find out that a campaign hasn't performed as you expected and you're not going to be hitting your goals?

Well, you'll be pressed for time, and you'll have to make up the additional leads and sales that you were supposed to generate. Your helicopter executives start descending because they sense there's a problem. And your relationships with agencies and teams begin to strain.

But guess what? The data you gain from behavioral science can help you improve these relationships and manage your team.

Anyone can use behavioral science in the service of their customers and prospects without a problem. If you want to guarantee the results of a campaign, all it takes is a bit of behavioral science in the design process and after launch.

So we're going to walk you through designing a landing page and, in the process, show you some of the places you can plug in behavioral science so you have the data that ensures that it's going to be a successful campaign.

The jobs of a landing page 

Every digital campaign has a landing page experience, and every landing page has two jobs:

• The first job of a landing page is to keep up the promise that was made in the ad, email, social media post, or the link on the site that brought people to this page.

• The second job of a landing page is to get the visitor to make a choice. It should be very clear on your landing page that you're asking them to do something.

So when you're thinking about this promise statement, it's highly recommended that you do a bit of research with the data that's been lying around. Reach out to your paid search agency or the team in your company that's doing paid search, or look at the reports and understand which words, which offers, and what language are most successful in getting people to click.

This is your first sign that the language you're using is working and drawing people. You can't really optimize for clicks because they don't tell you who's going to buy, but this is your first clue as to which words are going to work on your landing page.

You could also do this with your own email. Take a look at the subject lines you've used in the past six months and rank them based on their clickthrough rates. This way, you get to zero down on the copywriting persuasion value proposition taglines that your audience is interested in and the words that persuade people to increase conversion rates.

You'll also notice that the emails that top your list will mostly be the ones that start with a number. It's a proven fact that starting your email subject line with a number is a great way to increase clicks.

The right copy 

There comes a point when you can't research further on what works for your copy and what doesn't. This is where your copywriters come into the picture.

Your copywriters will want to see your marketing studies, talk to your customers, and interact with your sales people to make sure they're in line with your requirements. It's their job to nag you for every other detail, and if they don't, they're probably not the best copywriters.  

Without copywriters, it can get overwhelming to do research and narrow in on what's right for your copy. For example, there might be eight different headlines, all of which keep the promise in your landing page ad. However, you're going to have very different conversion rates for all of these. So you should be able to find a way to work through these ideas to understand which copy is going to work.

The right image 

Images are powerful elements of any landing page, but sadly most marketers don't spend enough time on them. Typically, the designer comes in with a wireframe, you fill in the copy, and if there are extra blocks, you go to an online stock photo site, pick out some images, and drop them there.

Images are really helpful in advancing your value proposition, so you've got to start taking them seriously. A handshake taken from a stock site might denote agreement, but is it really advancing your value proposition? There's a weight attached to every image, so check if it really belongs on your landing pages or anywhere on your website.

When you're in doubt about an image, do the caption test. If you can't write a caption that makes sense for an image, you probably don't need it on your landing page.

Also, leverage your designer's knowledge of placement, color, and font to get the visitors to focus on the crucial aspects of your page.

Launch and iterate 

Once you're done designing your page, you need to launch it and begin to iterate. You know it's going to come out well because you've done the research with a positive conversion rate.

Now, on every landing page you should have analytics so you understand exactly how many people are coming, how many people are starting to fill out the form, how many people are completing the form, and how many are eventually completing the purchase process. That will give your baseline statistics.

You'll also need heatmap software that can tell you how far people are scrolling and what they're clicking on. Plus, if you can get session recording software on board, that would be a game-changer. And the best part is that you don't need a PhD in data science to understand all this.  

Ask your customers 

"What almost kept you from buying our product?" – well, rephrased versions of this is what you'd typically want to ask on your Thank You page.

Here's a real-life example of a company that released a new pro version of their device. It plugs into your car and connects your phone to your computer. It allows you to do things like track the route, monitor the speed limit, and receive crash alerts. Everyone was buying the lite version, even though the pro version was so much better. Clearly the problem here was communication.

So here's how they dealt with this problem. Every time someone bought the lite version, they simply asked what made them buy this version instead of pro. They got a ton of responses because the people who visit the Thank You page are people who like you. They have chosen you, and that means you could have a much higher completion rate than anywhere else on the website.

These were the responses:

"I don't need crash alert."

"I don't know what vehicle tracking means."

"I don't know what streaming apps mean."

You can see that the company here wasn't doing a good job communicating with their customers. However, when they carried out an A/B test and optimized their website content accordingly, they saw a 13-percent increase in the conversion rate and more people ended up buying their pro devices.

These are a few ways of adding behavioral science to your marketing diet. Investing in behavioral data is cheaper than not investing in behavioral data. Implement these techniques in your marketing strategies and let us know how it helped your business. 

Conversion Capsule from ZohoPageSense aims to bring you conversion rate optimization best practices from CRO experts around the world. In this blog, we've converted Brian Massey's session from "The Optimization Summit" we hosted, as digestible takeaways for you.

Brian Massey is the Founder and Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and the author of Your Customer Creation Equation. His rare combination of interests, experience, and neuroses were developed over the last 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, international speaker, and writer.