My 8th week in the CXL Institute Mini Degree of Conversion Rate Optimization CRO — A Review

So I started with Peep Laja’s course on “People and Psychology”. This is the 5th course of the “Foundations” section in the Conversion Optimization Mini Degree from CXL Institute.

In the course intro, Peep has talked about understanding the human mind is important if we want to persuade someone to buy from us. Indeed, human psychology is at the heart of any sales-oriented function.

He does acknowledge in the intro that he doesn’t intend to teach us everything about human behavior; it is a very complex issue that scientists know little about. What we do know about are some powerful principles like urgency and social proof. And there’s enough proof that psychological principles of persuasion work.

He also cautions us even before we start the lesson that we should not force-fit these principles. We should see them sparingly for full effect, and choose principles that are a good fit for each particular case — don’t force it. Considering these persuasive techniques as the only tool is not going to take either our marketing skills or our product any further.

Lesson 1: Robert Cialdini’s 7 Principles of Persuasion

He begins by laying the groundwork around persuasion principles by Robert Cialdini and providing a context of Cialdini’s past work. I knew about these principles so I didn’t have to spend much time understanding this particular lesson.

Of course, the content of the lesson was a good revision for me. If you are new to this and you don’t know much about the very basics of persuasion, I urge to you watch this lesson very closely after you buy the course from CXL. These are powerful psychological principles. Because they are based on natural human tendencies, they are hard to go against.

What I liked about this course: This is a 6-min video lecture by Peep himself. So when I started, I was kind of relieved that I didn’t have to go through a wall of text.

What I didn’t like about this course: Even after the video, you will have to read through the wall of text. Peep seems to prefer talking less on the video and communicate more through his writing. Unfortunately, for us students that means having to read through big blog-like walls of text that are good but also annoying at the same time. I think it’s best to think of his lessons as really long blogs with a short introduction video.

This video does not mention Cialdini’s newest principle “Unity” at all. And that’s probably because it’s an old video recording. You will have to scroll down to the very end of Peep’s text blog to make sure you don’t miss the various ways to apply Unity as a persuasion principle.

Lesson 2: Fogg Behavior Model

I heard that they (Dr. B.J. Fogg and his IP team) are very strict about public usage of their model. They see it as a brand in itself, which is why I have given only very-top-level information here without any actual details of the model. All credit for all content in this section goes to Dr. B.J. Fogg. For more details on this, please visit the Fogg Behavior Model website.

Once again, Peep introduces this concept with some visuals. Design impacts behavior. If you know how to impact behavior, you can design for behavior.

The Fogg Behavior Model suggests that if we want to get our users to take action, we must provide them with an easy action to take. For example, we can auto-fill certain fields of a long-form so the user doesn’t have to use his motivation too much to submit the form. If the form is too long and the user has to fill all of that on his own, they will need a lot of motivation, or the value you provide needs to be very high.

I think this is an old model and can be a little confusing, especially if you refer to this after understanding what Momoko Price taught us in her Sales Page Copywriting course. According to my opinion, the terminology, not the core concepts, needs to be updated.

In Fogg’s model, the word “motivation” is used in the place of the word “desire”, which I see as a combination of motivation and value. Peep talks about “increasing motivation,” but I learned in Momoko Price’s Sales Page Copywriting course that we cannot change user motivation, but we can increase the perceived value of our product/offer.

So, my conclusion is that to ask people to do hard things such as spend lots of money on our product/offer, we must increase their desire by increasing the perception of the value we offer (since we cannot change the motivation).

So, when the desire to do an action is high, you can inspire people to do even the hardest actions when you provide them with a trigger at the right time.

It is important to understand that this model just gives an explanation/overview of what matters for persuasion. It’s not complete in and of itself and it doesn’t describe what to do in certain situations. If I were conducting a class on persuasion, I would put this model under the heading “Theory of Persuasion.”

When it comes to details of the course, I cannot give away all the details as it is the IP (Intellectual Property) of CXL and Dr. Fogg.

Here are some highlights of what you will learn in this course:

• What is motivation and how to optimize for motivation (i.e. desire)
• What is the ability and how to make things easy for people to do
• What are triggers and how to use triggers to optimize conversion for products/offers of different value? This section answers the question of “How to persuade someone to buy a high-ticket product”.
• How to optimize the timing of the trigger
• What are two types of triggers? (I actually understood this to be a continuum and not just two types).

Towards the end, Peep also gives an overview of the 15 different behavior types as described in the Fogg Behavior Model.

Basically, the 15 behavior types are grouped in 3 ways:

• The dot (a one-time event)
• The span (the one-time event that happens over a period of time)
• The arrow (a repeating event)