Do you get emotional thinking about your landing page’s conversion and bounce rates?
Do you worry about the emotional state of your landing page visitors?
Well, Talia Wolf, founder and chief optimizer at GetUplift, has the research proving the answer to the second question must be “yes.” Especially if your answer to the first question was also “yes.”
Talia and the Conversioner team are experts in using emotional targeting as an optimization strategy. I recently had the chance to speak with her about building emotional targeting into landing pages.
Below is a taste of what you’ll learn from Talia during this podcast.
Defining Our Terms
Our podcast starts out with my asking Talia to define some terms for us. There’s a lot of buzz now around terms like “neuromarketing,” and “behavioral targeting,” She digs into all these terms, and points to what makes emotional targeting so effective.
Talia: They’re [these terms] all subsets in the end of finding the right way to direct a good message and a quick message to a user who is online and get them to convert, not just by using their actual online behavior but also using their emotional triggers and their subconscious.
She also explains that behavioral targeting, that is monitoring behaviors of your landing page visitors, tells you what they’re doing but not why they’re doing it. And the why is the critical distinction that makes emotional targeting actionable in a way behavioral targeting is not.
[tweetthis]Behavioral targeting tells what they’re doing but not WHY they’re doing it. Enter emotional targeting.[/tweetthis]
Talia: When you’re doing behavioral targeting, basically what you usually do is you take your landing page, you duplicate, and you change the color of a button, for example. You have red versus blue. You run the tests, and then the blue button wins. Yay, it’s fantastic. But what the hell, sorry, does that mean?
Why did blue win? And more importantly, what can I do next to increase conversions? How am I going to scale from this? The thing about emotional targeting is not thinking about each specific element, but it’s thinking about the whole page as a whole, about the whole experience.
[tweetthis]You run the tests, and then the blue button wins. Yay! But what the hell, sorry, does that mean?[/tweetthis]
You Have Three Seconds to Spark an Emotional Connection
We’ve all read that you have three seconds to convert a landing page visitor. Talia shares details on how she’s seen the truth of this in Conversioner’s own testing with clients’ pages. However I wanted clarification. Nobody clicks your call-to-action within three seconds of landing on your page, right? So what really needs to happen in those three seconds?
Talia: It might take time to go through your landing page, but the experience that the person gets in those three seconds and how they feel towards your product, whether it’s, “Okay, I feel safe. This product is going to help me feel safe,” or “This product is going to make me feel love. This product is going to make me feel more popular,” or whatever they’re looking for.
Those three seconds, when a user basically lands on your landing page, can actually change the entire experience a customer goes through, and that’s why it’s so important to incorporate emotional triggers in your landing pages.
You can hear Talia go into greater depth on issues like the importance of loading times and the perils of approaching your landing page as a collection of elements when you listen to the podcast.
Guess What? People Are Emotionally Complex
Being a content writer, I wanted to get a few tips on incorporating emotions into persuasive copy. There have to be just a few go-to emotional drivers that work time and again to convert landing page visitors. I wanted an emotional trigger swipe file, as it were. No such luck.
Talia: [Conversioner has] identified 223 different emotional triggers. We discover new ones all the time. There are a few popular ones. But in the end, it’s not about the emotional trigger, but it’s all about your unique selling propositions. It’s about identifying who your customer is, firstly, and then understanding what they’re looking for emotionally.
[tweetthis]It’s about identifying who your customer is, and then understanding what they’re looking for emotionally[/tweetthis]
Good content always seems to come back to understanding your audience! But aren’t people, even within the same definable group, going to have different emotional priorities? Can a landing page build off of more than one emotional trigger? Talia explains it’s even more complex than sorting among varying emotional triggers within the same cohort.
Talia: There are many different emotional triggers. Some people are looking to feel two things or three things from buying a product, and some people can’t even identify what they want to feel from a product. They want to get a set of things out of a product or a service, and they all work together.
Listen to the podcast to hear Talia really digs into A/B testing and why creating hypotheses of which triggers may resonate and testing against that is a required practice. She also explains why you’re probably focusing your A/B testing in the wrong places.
Why B2B Companies Are Making Some of the Worst Mistakes
I asked Talia about research showing that ads with purely emotional content sparked greater impact than ads that appealed to reason, even better than those that combined reason and emotion. Does the same hold true for B2B companies, where people have to show measurable value resulting from their buying decisions?
Talia: Usually B2B companies have a real big issue. That’s my major business I get from B2B companies saying, “It’s B2B. There is no emotion.” They’re just buying something for their company or whatever. Actually we found, again, there is no real difference because at the end, it’s not the company buying something. It’s a person who’s sitting behind the screen and buying something for their company.
Your main message should be to the person who is purchasing your product. I don’t think there is any difference between B2B and B2C. B2B should do much more emotional marketing than they’re doing right now.
[tweetthis]It’s not a company buying something. It’s a person. B2B should do much more emotional marketing.[/tweetthis]
We closed out our talk discussing the resistance of some B2B marketers to recognizing the emotional component in their buyers’ journeys, as well as the idea that marketing with emotional triggers is a hot trend that will pass.
Talia: Emotional targeting has been done throughout years and years, actually since the ’50s. It’s bringing the offline world to the online world, which I love because it’s usually the opposite. It’s quite nice to see how the emotional world works.
Listen to the podcast to find out why Talia thinks the trend to automation is what first moved marketing away from emotions, but how the combination of online tracking capabilities with offline emotional insights is a “trend” worth keeping.
Show Notes
- Brian Eisenberg – “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark”
Elisa Silverman is a B2B content writer with a background in law and technology, who’s spent a career helping diverse groups of people communicate well with each other.
Also published on Medium.
