If you've seen our previous video on persuasion, emotion and trust, we call it PET,

you know that there's a long list of methods we can use

to motivate customers and increase their conversion.

So it's natural to think that more persuasion methods is good.

Lots of persuasion methods will result in lots of conversion.

But it's not true.

Using lots of methods results in persuasion clutter.

Kaptein and Duplinsky in 2011 researched using more methods and found that adding social proof,

a weak method in that case, to advice from an authority figure resulted

in less persuasion than the authority figure alone.

So the mastery of persuasion requires a more sophisticated approach.

Step one, we need to understand the emotional battle that goes inside our customer's heads.

We use in-depth Gestalt interview methods

to understand the customer's drives, blocks, beliefs and feelings.

Step two, we collect the insights from a bunch of customers so you have a good picture

of the things that usually matter and you have a sense of the big, strong issues.

And you understand things like that getting vaccinated is driven by fear of getting sick,

which is very much driven by fear of embarrassment

and guilt in getting other people sick.

Step three, we pick the emotional things that are most likely to work.

It's no surprise they're often related to fear, food or sex and protecting our kids.

Our lower brains are tuned to survival and passing on your DNA,

which is how we survive bazillions of generations to get here now.

So maybe we can focus on fear of being sick

and how awful you would feel if you got your kids sick.

This drive or block, it becomes the theme.

Step four, now comes the tricky part, we have to make a frame

and a meme that will support the theme.

It's a central point of the whole persuasion effort.

And it can be the central point of your application campaign, or even a company,

like the FedEx message: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

Or for a vaccination, maybe: “Flu, not the best holiday gift.”

Step five is about taking that message and selecting specific methods

of influence that it will support it.

So if we're using "Flu, not the best holiday gift", you might select testimonials with people

like the target customers telling their stories about how they lost holidays.

Or you might use scarcity, making people feel that the supply might run out

and they can only protect their family if they move quickly.

And finally in step six, we want to look at the flow of the customers moving

through your digital interaction.

In fact, the entire interaction.

Your customers, they, they sort of march through your website or sometimes march

through several sites as, as they reach a point of certainty and become ready to buy.

We have to have a strategy that pulls people through that interaction.

A home page needs to capture attention and draw the customer in.

You might use optimal level of dissonance,

using curiosity to get people off the home page and into the site.

Then, get the customer engaged.

You can engage by making fun interactions, perhaps using the methods

of game designers to make things fun.

It's called gamification.

Or perhaps making the content exciting, which usually means fear, food or sex.

Then, getting to that magic point of certainty when the actual sale happens.

We must always remember that this is an emotional event.

When people have brain damage to their orbital frontal cortex, they can't make decisions

because the orbital frontal lobes connect the emotional part of the brain to the logical part.

So this is the point where we use emotional triggers to close the sale,

not just any triggers, but ones that align with the theme and frame and meme.

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If you'd like to download and print a copy of this drawing or download a white paper on PET research,

please go to humanfactors.com/persuasion.asp.