Review [CRO Minidegree Week 4] — Everything You Need To Know About Social Proof and Cognitive Biases

It’s the end of my first month with CXL’s Conversion Optimisation Minidgree. In the course of a month, I’ve learned a variety of tactics that can be used to increase conversion rates on ads, landing pages, and websites. Last week, I discussed the key persuasion principles that guide the entire product messaging and content writing process.

The purpose of this post is to describe how our brain is triggered to alertness and to take action, as well as how we and our users are influenced by biases when making decisions. As marketers, we need to carefully consider these insights as we work on our websites, which this course beautifully covered in its mini degree content.

I’d like to focus on a few pointers on how you can display social proof on your website. When done right it can help reassure the right customer about going ahead with your solution which can help with making a stronger case for your product, service or solution offering.

Let’s start with what’s social proof

Social Proof is based on the principle of normative social influence, which states that people conform to be liked by, similar to, or accepted by the influencer (or society). And Social Proof should always be tailored to your ideal customer’s circumstance or situation.

Examples of social proof include:

Case Studies

If you’re a B2B agency or a service business, case studies offer an in-depth analysis and data-driven analysis of how your solution benefits an existing customer. Case studies are ideally structured by painting a thorough before, during and after picture.

AWS, for example, segments their case studies on the industries they work with, such as, manufacturing, financial services, fitness, and more. (see below).

Testimonial

Customer recommendations that are simple, short, and to the point. Almost everyone can benefit from these. It works just as well for a free eBook as it does for a sign-up page for a $19/month software package.

Don’t forget to include their picture, name, company, role — to legitimise your testimonials. Before you use them to help give credibility to your products or services, make sure they are credible and appear to be so just like in the example here with Kissmetrics.

Data

Think — number of customers served, the number of invitations left. When you combine this type of social proof with another you’re suggesting, “X people have not only bought our product, but they are also loving it.”

Among other impressive numbers, like blog readers and social followers, Buffer uses the “X customers served” style social proof to encourage conversions.

Logos and Icons

It’s tricky to talk about logos and icons since they’re considered social proof, but in reality, they don’t provide much of the social aspect.

To do it right you need to give your audience context. ‘What did Forbes say about you?’, ‘What are your reviewers saying?’, ‘How are you associated with Facebook?’ Think about using book and movie landing pages as models, which often include excerpts from reviews instead of just a publication’s name or logo.

Everything You Need To Know About Cognitive Bias

In order to sell something we need to:

1. Identify the pain points of our customers

2. Provide proofs and tangible evidence to distinguish our claims

3. Provide value and benefits to them

4. Trigger the old brain of our customers

This leads to the following formula:

Selling probability = P x C x G x (Old Brain)³

(P=Pain, C=Claim, G=Gain)

Here’s a crash course on our old brain:

1. Our Old Brain is concerned with our survival, it is the decision-maker.
2. A difference can trigger and lead to a spontaneous decision in our brain. This is why Before/After ads are so effective.
3. People don’t read online, they scan so it’s important to make your message to the point, simple, and tangible.
4. Images are processed faster than sound and audio. Our optical nerve is directly connected to our old brain, which works 25x faster than our auditory nerve.
5. To reach our old brain, emotional stimuli are needed.

There is one universal truth: We’re all biased. Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways, that usually lead us to wrong conclusions. People don’t notice their own biases. We think everyone else has them, and we’re able to call them out when we feel that way, but cannot recognise them in ourselves. Each one of us has a “bias blind spot”.

Some of the common biases among people are:

False-Consensus Bias: To assume everyone has the same opinions as you. And deriving conclusions on your false perception of you representing everyone. We tend to overestimate the degree to which people agree with us.

Examples include:

I will not send an email every two days to my leads! That is spamming! Everybody will unsubscribe.

Everybody loves pages with very short copy

Nobody will read a 1500-word article

The chances of someone feeling the same way will be very low. This should be taken into account when creating a product, website or any other piece of content. As a business person or marketer, you create things that others can use. Not for yourself! So, why walk into it with your experiences?

The Curse of Knowledge

Experience and time allow everyone to learn. Once learned, it cannot be unlearned. Therefore, it may be hard to judge things from your perspective as someone who does not have the same amount of information.

Therefore, it’s best to take the opinion of someone with no knowledge of your field. If you add a button somewhere on your site, you know where it is, so you might believe that it is easy for the user to find the button, but in reality, it is not.

Therefore, getting feedback from different people is essential for optimising your website. What does that mean?

1. Studying website analytics
2. Qualitative research on user behaviour
3. User testing with people from your target group

Confirmation Bias

People tend to believe things that confirm their beliefs. This could be applied to any situation.

To avoid this it’s key to:

• Form a hypothesis
• Prove your hypothesis by selecting data that fits your own narrative

You will always find some pieces of data that work while ignoring others that do not.

Anchoring

The anchoring bias refers to our tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered AKA the ‘anchor’ when making decisions. As a result, we draw a boundary based on our first impressions, not progressing past them.

The temptation is always there whenever we are trying to pick between various pricing options or shopping in a discounted price. Our eyes first fixate on the larger price, then we become “anchored” and the smaller price appears to be an excellent bargain.

This could also apply to your business website.

A web designer could indicate that the copy needs work. It’s likely that you would focus on things like headlines and colours or where an asset like a form is located instead of the actual copy which communicates how your solution solves a problem.

Recency Bias

Believing the past was better than the present.

For example, you might think that a new version of medicine in the market, is better more effective than the old one, or newly published book gives better information than the old one.

There are other psychological factors that could influence customer decisions besides biases, and we may wish to consider them when creating content.

Congruence Bias

Congruence bias is the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, instead of testing possible alternative hypotheses.

For example, you have a landing page that seeks out information on leads in exchange for a free ebook and on that page, you have a form.

If no one fills out the form you might assure that it’s because the copy isn’t up to the mark, so you change it. And it still doesn’t work and you keep improving the copy in the hopes that it would improve your conversion rate, however, if it weren’t for your bias, you’d consider having a signup form right under the fold of your landing page instead of the bottom of the page.

When you’re trying to optimise your website it may benefit you to be aware of your own biases first before progressing with testing various hypotheses. Both marketers and business owners should be aware of their tendencies.

If you’re interested in exploring Cognitive Biases further, click here.