As you package your message into a creative art form, you attempt to elicit thoughts, feelings, emotions and behavior. But how do you influence your customers’ behaviors? It starts with understanding how your audience’s brain processes information and ends with post-purchase advocacy. 

Depending on the stage in the customer journey, you might want to elicit different thoughts and behaviors. This article uncovers how to develop creative assets that trigger different activities in various brain regions while aligning with your business strategy. 

Connecting creative work to the customer journey with brain science

In an interview, Tony Crisp, an innovative brand strategist and founder of CRISPx Brand Agency, described a methodology he pioneered to connect creative work to the customer journey using brain science, simplified into four distinct stages: 

• Seek.
• Choose.
• Use.
• Fix. 

Crisp maps each stage to a primary neurotransmitter that he wants his creative team the trigger as part of the framework.

“There are certain neurotransmitters that motivate mammals to move,” explained Crisp, “and the DOSE framework provides my creative team with guidance” at different stages in the customer journey, as shown below. 

Dig deeper: Optimization science: Technology and brain science can drive performance

Seek stage: Dopamine

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that drives your customer’s behavior in the pursuit of goals. Are your marketing efforts aligned with your customer’s goals? As the catalyst for the golden rule of content marketing, you can get your customer to take action by triggering a dopaminergic surge at the right time.  

Critically, your customers generate the largest dopaminergic spikes when anticipating rewards, not obtaining them. As a result, you want to entice your audience to take action by creating an elevated sense of anticipation. When your audience anticipates value for merely clicking a button, you can easily get them to click, share or call. 

If your audience anticipates that clicking on a link in your marketing e-mail will deliver an informative white paper with rewarding content, you’re likely to drive up your clickthrough rate. Similarly, if your PPC ad offers details about the solution your audience seeks, you’re likely to increase ad conversions.

During the “seek” stage, prospective customers search for a solution to a problem. As a result, Crisp advises his creative team to develop assets and experiences that trigger the release of dopamine to facilitate goal-directed behavior. Why is this important? When you help customers attain their goals, you can guide their behavior right into your shopping cart. 

Choose stage: Oxytocin 

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that facilitates pair bonding. Your pituitary gland releases oxytocin when you cuddle with your partner or hold your child. It makes you feel connected to another person and influence your decision-making process — which includes decisions related to products and services. 

In a classic study from 2013, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, explored the link between oxytocin and decision-making when exposed to marketing content. 

As part of the study, participants were administered oxytocin before watching public service advertisements. The participants who received oxytocin demonstrated a significant change in behavior: they “donated to 57% more causes, donated 56% more money and reported 17% greater concern for those in the ads” than those who took a placebo. 

Researchers concluded that advertisements involving emotional content related to a connection with another person are particularly potent. A video promoting skin lotion, for example, is more likely to trigger the release of oxytocin if it shows another person applying the lotion to someone instead of simply showing the bottle itself. 

Customers in the “choose” stage are likelier to select your brand if they trust it, according to Crisp. The neuroeconomist Paul Zak revealed that the “amount of oxytocin recipients produced predicted how trustworthy — that is, how likely to share the money — they would be,” per a 2017 Harvard Business Review article. 

The issue, then, is how do you get potential customers to trust your brand over competing offerings before purchase? When marketing to potential customers in this stage, Crisp asks his team to consider what creative assets are most likely to trigger the release of oxytocin to develop trust between an offering and his client’s brand. 

Use stage: Serotonin

Serotonin is a multifaceted neurotransmitter that plays a role in everything from mood and cognition to appetite and digestion. The implications of serotonin in marketing are complex and not fully understood.

Though in an infantile stage, research suggests serotonin plays a role in mood and consumer decisions. Accordingly, customers “in positive mood states,” for example, are more likely “to evaluate “advertisements, brands and consumer goods more positively”  

Researchers from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg and the California Institute of Technology sought to understand serotonin’s role in product choice. They found that depleted serotonin levels correlated to choice deferral. 

As a result, the researchers concluded that marketers who “incorporate the compromise effect with the intent to promote the choice of an intermediate compromise option might be less effective when the target population’s serotonin levels are lowered,” which might occur among older consumers or in winter months, for example. 

According to Crisp, serotonin is important in purchasing and consumption processes. As a result, the DOSE methodology focuses on increasing serotonin levels during the “use” stage. How do you ensure your customer’s satisfaction after using your product and service? 

Fix stage: Endorphins

Endorphins are naturally occurring peptides that inhibit or reduce physical or psychological pain. As for the latter, endorphins can reduce stress and can improve mood. How does the concept of pain connect to the customer journey? 

Crisp suggests poor experiences can induce pain during the “use” stage. What happens if your customer has a problem using your product and service? How skilled is your customer support team at alleviating customer pain? 

In the DOSE methodology, customers only enter this stage when problems occur during the “use” stage. How do you make your customer feel good enough to use your product? Do you need to address the problem as part of your overall business strategy, or must you deliver your resolution in a nicely packaged message?

Regardless of the scope of what you must resolve, Crisp suggests that marketers must determine how to mitigate pain, particularly psychological pain. And that can happen by linking your resolution to the release of endorphins. 

Dig deeper: How marketers can use cognitive biases to influence customer decisions

Looking at the customer journey from a scientific perspective

As you incorporate marketing science into the customer journey, you’re not limited to any framework or methodology. Instead, view DOSE as an overarching approach that guides your team’s creative thinking. 

The DOSE framework is part tactical and part philosophical at Crisp’s company. It’s tactical in offering specific actions corresponding to the customer journey. At the same time, it’s philosophical because it provides an overall marketing approach. 

Perhaps most importantly, however, DOSE ensures that marketing and design teams understand the critical link between art and science. Depending on your goals, you might want to trigger a variety of neurotransmitters and hormones that activate various brain circuits at every stage of the customer journey. As such, it’s up to you to decide to what extent you follow a given methodology. 

Regardless if you use the DOSE methodology or a different framework for connecting creative work to brain activity, one thing is certain: You can give your brand a competitive advantage with a healthy dose of marketing science. 

The post How to map marketing science to the customer journey appeared first on MarTech.

As a marketing executive, you must elevate your entire team’s performance. But cracking the whip, as the idiom goes, is an anachronistic form of team management. Instead, you need to understand your team. And your team needs to feel that you understand them. 

Given the breadth of your responsibilities, do you really need to be concerned with feelings? Definitely. If you’re concerned about delivering results, you better be concerned with how your team feels. People are complex. And this complexity is amplified when you try to get everyone to row in the same direction.

Do you ever feel like you’re attempting to navigate the strait between Scylla and Charybdis? By leveraging the happiness rating technique, however, you can align divergent individual qualities into a cohesive team that conquers the unimaginable. And it starts with a simple question. 

Dig deeper: How to be charismatic: Marketing with charm, heart and personality

Happiness = productivity and performance 

According to Aristotle, “Happiness is mostly thought to be [the ultimate end], for this we always choose for its own sake  and never with a view to anything further.” Do you hold happiness in the same regard? 

Happy employees are typically more productive employees. As a result, I ask one simple question during one-on-one meetings with direct reports: 

“What’s your happiness rating? It’s on a scale from 1-10 — and there are no right or wrong answers.” 

Yes, you might not get an accurate answer… at least on your first attempt. By now, you might think that your direct reports will likely provide responses based on what they believe you want to hear. 

You might be right. But this isn’t about hearing, it’s about listening. And your job doesn’t stop with asking a question. As you listen, you’re collecting information. This is important because you will need this information to connect with your team on a deeper level as you cultivate a high-performance culture. 

As such, you need to go below the surface and learn about how each person really feels. After all, feelings and emotions are anything but surface-deep. In fact, you might discover that your rational employees are highly irrational. But that’s okay because so are you! 

Discussions about the irrationality of humans have circulated among intellectual circles throughout history. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, for example, believed that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will” and that it “never oppose(s) passion in the direction of the will.” More recently, however, António Damásio, neuroscientist and author of “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,” argues that there’s an intricate interplay between emotions and reason. 

According to Damásio, your emotions facilitate your decision-making process. It’s part of his somatic marker hypotheses. And it might help you understand your team. Damásio writes that “feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.” 

Once you understand that emotions, feelings and reason are all intricately connected, you can see the importance of taking a feelings-focused approach to leadership. 

Dig deeper: 20 ways to make your marketing team more productive

How to connect feelings to performance 

The 11 steps below can help you connect feelings and emotions to performance and productivity. 

1. Ask to rate happiness from 1-10

Can happiness be accurately quantified? Probably not. But that’s not the point. 

You want to learn about what matters to each team member. As you do this, you’re also going to build trust, develop connections and set the stage for high performance. 

2. Ask why 

Once you get a score, you want to ask the “why” behind the number. In other words, you want to draw out a more complete response. 

Ask what feelings contributed to the score. The numeral value is simply an anchor point for a deeper conversation.

3. Validate feelings 

Validating feelings might be the most important step in the process. When your direct reports talk about their feelings, you must validate them. 

As such, avoid giving advice or minimizing what they’re feeling. Rather, use statements such as “I understand why you feel that way” or “I can see how frustrating that can be.” 

Even if the frustration is part of the job (e.g., pulling reports, etc.), you need to acknowledge that it’s a frustrating aspect of the role. You might be surprised about the shift in mood that follows. 

4. Invite lower scores

Depending on the corporate culture, motivations, personality traits and a variety of other factors, your direct reports might provide answers that don’t truly reflect how they feel. 

Exert effort to make each person feel comfortable providing an accurate response (to the extent that self-reports can be accurate). This includes informing each person that it’s acceptable to have any score. 

As a leader, let your direct reports know that your intention is to ensure they’re happy and that you can help address any concerns — even if it’s about you.

5. Seek improvement from high scores

If you get a high score (i.e., an 8 or 9), your direct report is simply informing you that there’s room for improvement. A nine might sound good, but this isn’t about your subjective valuation of a number. As a result, you need to follow up with another question: 

“What can we do to bring this number to a 10”? 

Even if you get a 10, you still want to ask if there’s anything to do to improve happiness — and you might discover that a 10 is far from perfect. 

6. Address minor grievances 

During this process, you might discover that your employees might be happy, but they’re frustrated with a few minor things. Make sure to discuss each grievance the moment it’s brought forth. 

This is important because identifying minor issues early can help ensure they don’t metastasize into a larger problem. Plus, your team will feel good that you’re concerned about seemingly trivial aspects of the job.

7. Create a cadence 

As a marketing leader, you probably hold recurring one-on-one meetings for each team member. During each regularly scheduled meeting, you should ask the happiness rating question. Remember, you’re only going to do this in private meetings within a predictable cadence. 

8. Use psychology to keep rating high 

After your best efforts, everyone on your team continues to insist that their high ratings are accurate. Now it’s time for you to introduce a psychological driver to cement that belief over a longer period of time. 

According to renowned psychologist and author Robert Cialdini, the commitment and consistency principles are useful in facilitating compliance due to “our nearly obsessive desire to be consistent with what we have already done.” If you get your team members to talk about why they love their job, they’ll likely strengthen this belief over time. 

9. Ask what motivates them

Motivations, which facilitate goal setting and provide the perceptual lens through which to view the external environment, are likely to differ dramatically among your team. 

Do you know what motivates your direct reports? Some people are driven by money and title while others only seek validation and appreciation. 

Ask your direct reports about their motivations, while ensuring they feel comfortable providing any answer. 

10. Ask what they need 

Ask each person what you can do to make life easier. If you want your team to perform at a higher level, you need to focus on the wants, needs and desires of every group member. Is there anything you can do to help your direct reports become happier? 

11. Seek change in yourself 

As you collect information from each person, take a moment to assess your own management style. If you’re fortunate, you’ll get a small critique. 

By understanding what you might be doing incorrectly, at least from their perspective, you can make changes to your management style or your messaging. 

Remember, your job isn’t to solve every problem. Instead, it’s to engage in a dialogue while validating the feelings of each person in the group. 

Messaging your team 

When you market to your customers, you create audience-specific messaging. And your team is no different. After capturing information in your one-on-one meetings, you might want to adapt your message based on what’s important to each person. 

You’re in a unique position to capture information from fluid one-on-one dialogues. Don’t you wish you had that level of exposure to your customers? Armed with insights regarding feelings and motivations, you can start to get everyone moving in the same direction with greater intensity.

As you validate feelings within the above framework, you’ll also notice that happiness ratings will increase. And when that happens, your team’s performance is on the precipice of a dramatic spike in performance. 

What about my team? Do my direct reports really tell me the truth? Who knows for sure? But one thing is certain, their performance is off the charts. 

Dig deeper: 8 easy ways to improve your marketing capabilities

The post 11 steps to boost marketing metrics with employee happiness appeared first on MarTech.

The utilitarian theory of economic behavior, postulated by 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, suggested that all economic decisions were rational. It was a rational thought at the time, but it failed to consider how the brain worked in real-world situations. 

People, including your customers, tend to make decisions that don’t always make sense, often succumbing to the biases lurking below the surface. As a marketer, you can yield more influence by understanding how your customers’ behaviors are influenced by cognitive biases and psychological processes that lead to better — and sometimes worse — decisions. 

In this article, let’s explore three cognitive biases you can use to shape how customers think about your product or service while interacting with your brand. 

Cognitive bias 1: The framing effect 

Did you know that your customers might choose your product or service based on how you frame your message? In 1981, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two pioneering psychologists who provided insights into behavioral economics, published “The Framing of Decisions and Psychology of Choice.”¹

In the article, the researchers presented findings from a study in which participants were given a choice about a life and death scenario.

In the hypothetical scenario, a fatal virus was headed to the U.S. — and it was expected to kill 600 people. The good news was that there were two treatments available. The bad news? Well, a potentially fatal disease was on the way.

Given the stakes, how did the researchers frame the different treatment options? The first treatment was framed around saving 200 lives whereas the second treatment was framed around a 1/3 probability that 600 people would be saved along with a 2/3 probability that everyone will perish. 

Which outcome do you prefer? If you’re like most people, you selected the treatment as the life-saving option, which is likely to result in 200 saved lives. But do you see something unusual about the treatment options? Regardless of which treatment you selected, 200 people are likely to survive and 400 are likely to perish (and only the first treatment, the one you selected, will certainly result in the death of 400 people). 

Despite offering “equal expected value” according to the researchers, participants overwhelmingly selected the first treatment (72% to 28%). The impact of the framing effect was starting to come into focus. 

Today the framing effect is alive and well. And marketers are making good use of it. In a world with COVID-19 concerns, household cleaning items are using the framing effect. In an industry with a projected global value of $46.9 billion by 2026, the Reckitt Benckiser Group, the maker of Lysol Disinfectant Max Cover Mist, claims that 

the disinfectant “kills 99.9% of viruses and bacteria.” Would you be more or less likely to buy the same product if it claimed to allow 1% of viruses to survive? 

The good times are not limited to cleaning products. Mission Foods, for example, found success by labeling its large flour tortillas as 95% fat-free. That certainly sounds a lot better than offering a tortilla that’s loaded with 5% fat. How about Haleon, the maker of Sensodyne toothpaste? Using a combination of three cognitive biases (social proof, authority, and the framing effect), Haleon claims that nine of 10 dentists recommend Sensodyne. That’s more appealing than a message claiming that only one of 10 dentists don’t like Sensodyne. 

How are you communicating your product or service? Remember, your customers unknowingly evaluate your value proposition based on how you frame it. And you don’t need to highlight statistics or numbers to do so. You can use the framing effect when you craft your message relative to what’s important to your audience — and then you can watch it take hold. 

Dig deeper: Using psychology and better data practices to get customers closer to purchase

Cognitive bias 2: The decoy effect 

The decoy is all around you — and you probably don’t even know it. What’s even more interesting is that it can guide your customer’s decision at the time of purchase. Known as asymmetrical domination, the decoy effect pertains to an intentionally placed offering intended to increase the probability of selecting an alternative option. 

The Economist, a British economic and world news publication used the decoy effect to drive sales to its preferred subscription tier. Consider the following offers: 

• Digital-Only Subscription: $59
• Digital and Print Subscription: $125 

To nudge buyers towards the higher price point, the marketers at the Economist added another option: 

• Print-Only Subscription: $125

Yes, the new option was priced the same as the digital and print version, but it didn’t include access to digital content. As you might imagine, the print-only option was never intended to solicit any real consideration. Instead, it was a decoy. 

Dan Ariely, a former professor of psychology and behavioral economics at MIT, learned about the pricing strategy at the Economist and wanted to learn how the decoy effect influenced behavior among his students. Using the same pricing tiers as the Economist, Ariely surveyed his students to select one of the subscription options. What happened? A whopping 84% selected the most expensive option for the $125 bundle, whereas only 16% selected the digital-only offering at $59. 

But did the decoy really play a big role in nudging students towards the $125 bundle? To find out, Ariely surveyed a second group of students. After eliminating the decoy, the percentage of students who selected the $125 bundle dropped from 84% to 32%. As such, Ariely discovered that participants became significantly more likely to choose the higher-priced option in the presence of a decoy. 

How can you create a decoy in your line of business? As you think about leveraging the decoy effect, you must keep in mind that you want the price of the decoy to be close enough to the preferred item while offering dramatically inferior features. In other words, you want the decoy to be significantly less feature-rich than the preferred option but only slightly more feature-rich than the least expensive option. 

Imagine that you work for a streaming service that’s considering a new pricing strategy for access to its content library. The audience to whom the service appeals enjoy consuming exclusive movies, documentaries and podcasts on the platform. And according to new survey data, customers are willing to pay around $10 per month for access to your content. But your business strategy requires you to nudge a percentage of your customers into a higher price tier. 

How could you use the decoy effect to increase the price your customers are willing to pay for a monthly membership? You can start by creating an introductory tier that aligns with the survey data and offer access to a limited library of movies at $9.99. Next, you want to focus on the desired price point, which is, say $14.99. At this price, your customers can access all movies, documentaries and podcasts. 

Knowing that most customers like to consume each type of content equally, you can create a decoy that offers access to all movies for $13.99. After all, this is the decoy. As you can see, the decoy offers an expanded version of the first offer but doesn’t provide access to the various types of content your audience wants. As a result, your customers start to perceive the $14.99 option as a value choice — even though it represents the highest price point. 

The goal is to use the decoy effect to nudge your customers towards a specific choice. Once the decoy is in place, your customers begin comparing the company-preferred option (the bundled option in the Economist example and the $14.99 option in the above scenario) against the decoy. And if you create a large enough gap in value while maintaining a small enough gap in price, you might find yourself with more high-paying customers. 

Cognitive bias 3: Frequency bias 

Frequency bias is something that can alter perception over time. When a person encounters something new, whether a new word, a slogan, an idea or a product, frequency bias posits that the person perceives the new thing to appear more frequently. It might seem like the new item is everywhere. Have you ever been introduced to a new product and noticed more of the same advertisements at every turn? 

According to Anina Rich, a Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, frequency bias is related to working memory-driven attentional capture — a process by which specific environmental stimuli attract your attention because it’s now occupying a space in your mind. Interestingly, the new word, phrase, idea, or product that’s occupying your mind is likely occupying it below the level of consciousness. As Rich puts it, “what you are thinking about unconsciously guides you to relevant information in the environment.”²

Frequency bias is particularly relevant in marketing within the context of a larger campaign. Do you have one marketing channel through which you can more easily capture your customer’s attention — and then carefully place your message in other areas that can draw upon this subconscious phenomenon? 

By understanding that people perceive repetitive information with greater frequency after initial exposure, you can be more diligent in how you build your multichannel marketing strategy. Specifically, you can develop a strategy in which you emphasize capturing attention across a highly engaged channel, thus setting the stage for your message appearing everywhere during the course of your campaign. 

Dig deeper: How anthropology can drive insights from your customer data

Conclusion 

Cognitive biases constantly pull the decision-making strings inside your customers’ heads. Do you see yourself as a marketing puppeteer? As you attempt to build a rational marketing strategy, you might want to remember that your customers don’t always make rational decisions. And that understanding must inform part of your marketing strategy. 

Footnotes

¹Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7455683

²Anina Rich, “What Is the Baader Meinhof Phenomenon?,“ https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/july-2020/What-is-the-Baader-Meinhof-Phenomenon

The post How marketers can use cognitive biases to influence customer decisions appeared first on MarTech.

As you evaluate your martech stack, you might realize that you need to do more than use the right technology — you need to optimize it. Optimization science is harnessing the full potential of customer-facing technology. It’s both a methodology and a mindset — and it’s about squeezing every ounce of value from your new solution. 

To optimize your technology solution’s impact, you need to think beyond features and functionality. Specifically, you need to think about how you want to leverage your new platform to influence customer associations, perceptions, and behaviors to align with your strategy. In other words, you need to take a holistic approach to technology deployment — and that encompasses your customer’s brain. 

Getting started with a few simple steps

The martech landscape is dotted with a cornucopia of solutions. According to Scott Brinker, VP of platform ecosystem at HubSpot, there are 9,932 martech solutions on the market — a 24% increase from 2020. With a seemingly overwhelming number of options from which to select, where do you even start? Also, how do you navigate the waters of social psychology within your organization while setting the stage for triggering behaviors among the potential customers who interact with your technology? 

To get started, let’s take a look at the following three steps:

• Selecting the right technology platform.
• Understanding integration constraints.
• Configuring for optimization. 

1. Selecting the right technology platform 

Yes, the first step might seem a little elementary; but such is the nature of initial steps. How many times did legacy thinking affect decisions at your place of work? How many times did existing relationships or power dynamics influence an important decision? Behavioral norms and social psychology often play an outsized role in technology deployment. As you evaluate your options, forget about the relationships and biases of your co-workers (and expunge your own biases to the extent that’s possible) — and select the technology that can deliver optimal results. 

Selecting the right technology involves foresight and a laser-like focus on your audience. After all, you’re deploying a system that allows your organization to interact with your customers to achieve tangible benefits. As you attempt to assess your technology options objectively, now is the time to start considering your customer’s brain.

2. Understanding integration constraints 

There are more questions to ask before you embark on your journey. Perhaps most obviously, how does the platform fit within your current martech stack? Do you see a sea of messy code over the horizon, or do you see a fluid integration in which data flows easily from one system to the next? 

Although you don’t want to be completely beholden to legacy systems, you do need to consider how your new marketing technology integrates with current, and quite possibly, future systems. Failure to look closely at integration at the beginning could end with an Odyssean voyage home, leaving you alone to fend off Scylla and Charybdis as you navigate the seas of cognitive dissonance. 

3. Configuring for optimization 

A good marketer will create a messaging strategy that focuses on benefits instead of features. Still, you need to harness the full set of features to reap the greatest number of benefits from your marketing technology. As a result, you likely need to configure your new platform to utilize various features. To get the most out of your technology solution, start thinking about the solution’s full capabilities early in the process. 

Imagine a scenario where your initial goal was to capture leads via chat online. You’re happy because you implemented a conversational chat platform that accomplishes the initial task perfectly. It even connects to your CRM and your analytics dashboard. Tragically, however, you didn’t dedicate anyone on your team to create automated conversation flows before your go-live date to qualify leads after-hours. That would be a colossal failure — no matter how good the technology. 

How does the brain respond to your technology?

You’ve selected the technology solution that works best for your organization. But how does it interact with your customer’s brain? The human brain processes an enormous amount of information—most of which occurs below the level of consciousness. When your customer looks at your system, for example, the eyes dart rapidly across the user interface, triggering a cascade of neurobiological activity that can affect everything from thoughts and emotions to desired behaviors such as downloading white papers and liking your social media posts. 

As your customer’s brain re-constructs the visual world in front of your technology, you have an incredible opportunity to shape the associations linked to your brand. And you can do this while influencing the behaviors you find most valuable to your organization. As such, you need to think beyond the framework of traditional deployments and start thinking about how to facilitate behaviors that align with your goals. 

Activating aesthetic appreciation in the brain 

Is the user interface aesthetically pleasing? Yes, it’s an odd question for a technology deployment; but your customer’s brain does odd things. If you’re looking to optimize your new system’s effectiveness, you need to think about how you create an aesthetic experience for your customer. This is important because the brain responds favorably to aesthetic experiences, as you can read here. 

According to Anjan Chatterjee, MD, a neurology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Oshin Vartanian, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, aesthetic appreciation emerges from an interplay among different systems in the brain, which encompass “sensory-motor, emotion-valuation and knowledge-meaning” areas. 

Known as the aesthetic triad, the involvement of large-scale systems underscores the magnitude of an aesthetic experience. And what’s most important for you to know is that your technology interface can trigger an aesthetic experience. 

Considering that an aesthetically pleasant experience can activate brain parts associated with perceptions, emotions and behaviors, you need to think about the user interface in terms of aesthetic appreciation. As such, let’s take a look at aesthetic considerations for a couple of marketing solutions, including: 

• Conversational chat technology.

• Email marketing software. 

Conversational chat technology 

Your new chat platform is everything you imagined. But is it everything your customer imagined? You already did the hard work, configuring the system to capture leads online when you’re offline (unlike the scenario discussed earlier). You even created thoughtful conversation workflows that underscore how well you get the nuances of automation and conversational chat. But how does the customer’s brain process the visual appearance of the chat window? 

Sure, it matches your brand colors. But does it create an aesthetic experience for your customer? What does your bot avatar look like? How do the shadows and lines affect subconscious associations? If you want to optimize the deployment of your chat platform, you need to think about every little visual cue that your customer’s brain might process — and then optimize accordingly. 

Email marketing software 

You feel confident that you selected the right email marketing platform. You’ve integrated it seamlessly with your tech stack and configured it to achieve your goals. You’re particularly pleased about how you can connect with your audience with robust automation sequences. But what does the email look like to the user? 

When deploying a new email marketing platform, ensure that you’re creating a truly aesthetic experience. Often, this involves using a visually appealing template or creating a custom design that connects your audience to your brand. Whether you need to outsource design work to an agency or leverage your in-house team, you need to go above and beyond to ensure your email looks good. 

Triggering dopamine spikes 

The brain likes aesthetically pleasing stimuli, but that’s only part of optimizing your solution. When it comes to influencing action, you need behavioral prompts spread strategically across all of your marketing channels — and that starts with dopamine. 

Dopamine facilitates goal-directed behavior. As I described in my previous article, the largest dopaminergic spikes occur during moments of anticipation of a reward. With this in mind, let’s take a moment to consider a scenario in which your consideration of the customer’s brain early in the process helped you make the right technology selection and configuration. 

Video hosting solution

You plan on launching a series of videos. The good news is that you already know what type of content your audience likes. You also know the behavior you want to trigger. You want each person to provide an email address to watch a video. But did you know that different platforms allow you to gate your content differently?

How do you use optimization science to ensure you capture as many emails as possible? If you’re looking to optimize your conversion rate, you need to trigger a dopamine spike right before asking for an email. How do you do that? You need to provide content that creates anticipation. 

Since you want to create anticipation before asking for an email address, you want to avoid gating the video before the user starts watching it (which is the traditional approach). Instead, select a solution that allows you to gate the content right before the moment the user is at the most elevated state of anticipation during the video. If you do this, you can elevate the amount of dopamine in each customer’s brain to exchange email addresses for content at a higher rate than you ever thought possible — while also playing on the concept of loss aversion, which you can read in one of my previous articles. 

Conclusion 

The above scenarios only represent a few considerations about which to think. After all, you can facilitate a variety of complex behaviors in your customer’s brain that extend far beyond what’s mentioned in this article. The key takeaway is to think about marketing technology adoption in terms of optimal effectiveness. As a marketing leader, you can launch your metrics into the stratosphere when you approach technology adoption with the customer’s mind. And that starts with an understanding of optimization science.

The post Optimization science: Technology and brain science can drive performance appeared first on MarTech.

Do you think your customers will respond positively to your next offering? You can turn to focus groups and try to get an idea of what people might like. Surveys can provide decent insights at times. And if you have a robust predictive analytics platform, you can assess behavioral data to identify patterns that might indicate future behavior among larger groups. But if you really want to understand how customers might respond to future offerings, you need to take a look at the brain. 

Sharpen your focus: Inside group dynamics 

Focus groups provide value, but they can be remarkably flawed. Do certain participants bend the truth to look good in the eyes of an attractive person in the group? Certainly. Do participants change their tune to dance to the trumpeting of a more dominant person? Naturally. Perhaps most surprisingly, however, group dynamics affect what people say – whether they believe what they’re saying or not. 

In 1951, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments to assess the influence of group behavior on individuals. During each experiment, a volunteer joined a group of several peers in a room. Unknown to the volunteer, everyone else in the group was part of the experiment. Each person viewed two cards – one card with a single straight line and a second card with three lines of different lengths. 

The task was simple. The volunteer simply had to say which two lines were the same length. There were no visual illusions. No tricks. The task was straightforward. Interestingly, 75% of real participants intentionally gave the wrong answer. Why? As each fake participant provided an incorrect answer, the real participant felt pressure to fit in with the group – and eventually gave way. 

Market researchers are aware of the biases associated with group dynamics. But even with the best safeguards in place, group responses don’t always reflect real-world experiences. As you explore different approaches to capturing customer sentiment to estimate behavior in the future, you might want to consider how your offering – or the creative work associated with your offering – will activate certain parts of the brain.

Using the brain to predict future behavior

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Michigan evaluated the brain’s response to different types of Kickstarter projects. The participants also rated the projects in terms of likability and the likelihood of success. Did brain activity predict behavior more accurately than self-reports? 

Even during individual tasks, people tend to make faulty predictions—but the brain doesn’t. As the researchers predicted, brain behavior “outperformed models that included self-reported ratings of liking…and individual choices of the laboratory sample.” In fact, activity in two areas of the brain associated with reward (nucleus accumbens) and value integration (medial orbitofrontal cortex), respectively, “predicted individual choices to fund on a trial-to-trial basis.”

But does this translate to a larger population? In other words, is it possible to take individual brain activity and predict behavior in the broader marketplace? Interestingly, the answer is yes. Brain activity from the study was predictive of behavior from a larger group of people outside the study. In fact, it was activity in the nucleus accumbens that “generalized to forecast market funding outcomes weeks later on the Internet.” 

Music downloads beat to the rhythm of the brain

What happens when you try to predict the success of a product or service several years into the future? Researchers at the Department of Economics and Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University conducted a study to predict the future success of music sales. Is it possible for brain activity to predict song popularity years (instead of weeks) in advance? 

In the study, participants listened to music from unknown artists in a scanner that measured brain activity. The participants also rated each song. The songs that generated activation in the nucleus accumbens turned into big hits a few years later (as measured in downloads and overall sales). While the brain predicted the popularity of songs, “subjective likability of the songs was not predictive of sales.” In other words, activation in a key area of the brain predicted the success of future sales better than direct feedback from participants. 

Your approach to prediction 

The brain’s response to marketing stimuli is more predictive of future behavior than responses from traditional sources. In fact, the brain is more reliable than the spoken or written word. At the same time, you can still extract valuable information from imperfect sources, like a classical scholar extracting meaningful insights from myth-driven epics such as the Iliad, Odyssey, or Aeneid.

As you integrate different sources of information to create a complete picture of your customers, you must always place an added emphasis on the brain. How is your customer’s brain going to respond to your creative work? How is the brain going to respond to your future offering? Once you’re able to answer these questions, you can feel confident that your offering will be among the 10% of product launches that actually succeed.

The post How using neuroscience can help capture customer sentiment and predict future behavior appeared first on MarTech.

• Anchoring Effect
• Goal Gradient 
• Social Proof
• Loss Aversion

Anchoring effect 

Navigate to your customer’s mind and drop anchor. With the anchoring effect, you’re able to influence customer behavior based on the order in which you introduce information. Since customers tend to attach more weight to the first piece of information in a sequence, they inadvertently alter their perception of value shortly thereafter. 

According to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the psychologists who introduced the phenomenon, “different starting points yield different estimates, which are biased towards the initial value.”(1) How do you apply this concept to a realworld situation? If you’re offering a specific product, you can minimize the resistance to purchase by introducing a higher-priced alternative before you present the lower priced item.

The bias works because your customer’s brain starts assigning value to the second option relative to the initial data point. In marketing, the key is to introduce the first item (or group of items) at a significantly higher price point; but with only a slightly better benefit than the second option. Anchored to the first price point, your customers now see the second item as too good to pass up.

Social proof

In 1984, Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, introduced the concept of social proof – and the marketing world has never been the same. In his seminal work, Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion, Cialdini highlights how people tend to “view a behavior as more correct” when others are engaging in the same behavior. In short, people seek validity from others – and once they see it, they’re more likely to take action. 

How valuable is social proof in marketing? According to the Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University, online reviews dramatically influence purchasing behavior. In fact, displaying positive reviews on your website can increase conversions by 270%!(2) Are you making good use of your reviews?

Depending on your business, you might need to adapt your approach to social proof. If you’re a local service provider, for example, you might focus on getting testimonials that sing your praises—and place them on your website. If you’re a technology company on the other hand, you might create case studies to showcase how others benefit from your product. Once you provide proof that other people like your business, your potential customers are more likely to give your company a try. 

Loss aversion

Do you like to win? Of course you do. But at what cost? When it comes to choosing between a gain or avoiding a loss, you’re likely to do more work to avoid the loss than seek the gain—no matter how much you like winning. In 1979, Tversky and Kahneman developed prospect theory, a behavioral model that introduced the concept of loss aversion. With loss aversion, people tend to place a greater emphasis on a loss compared to a gain of equal value. 

How can you leverage this principle to facilitate bottom-line success? Imagine you work for a SaaS company and you’re evaluating whether to offer a discount or provide a free trial to acquire new customers. By understanding the implications associated with loss aversion, you can see that you’re likely to achieve better outcomes by offering a free trial of your software, allowing your users to become dependent on your platform. After all, customers are more reluctant to give up what they have (or what they need) than to exert energy to acquire something new. 

Goal gradient

In 1932, behavioral psychologist Clark Hull observed that animals run faster as they approach a food source. The observation eventually led to the goal gradient hypothesis – a postulation with big implications for marketers and UX designers today. Do you want to shorten the buying cycle? Do you want to increase your form conversion rate on your website? 

In a study published by the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers observed a significant behavioral change among participants who had a coffee card to collect stamps. In this study, each stamp brought the cardholder closer to the goal of receiving a free cup of coffee. As the participants earned more stamps, they began to make purchases more frequently. In fact, the purchasing behavior was accelerated by 16%, shaving five days off the buying cycle. 

Using goal gradient as a psychological driver on your website can also do wonders for accelerating conversions. If you’re a B2B company with a complex quoting system, for example, you can create a progress bar to highlight that your prospective customer is one step closer to completing the purchase. After all, once you allow your customers to see the finish line, they’re likely to race across it to achieve their goals. 

Conclusion 

As you work to generate business in an uncertain economic environment, you can be certain that cognitive biases and psychological drivers continue to influence behavior. The key is to adapt each principle to fit your industry – and to drive behavioral change ethically. 

The post 4 cognitive biases and psychological drivers for influencing behavior appeared first on MarTech.

Emotion is strikingly complex, involving intricate biological processes that engage a variety of different regions in the brain. This complexity creates difficulty in aligning creative work to behavioral outcomes, often giving rise to misconceptions and false promises. The goal of this article, therefore, is to encourage you to think differently about the role emotion plays in marketing – and that starts with an understanding of emotions and feelings.

Understanding emotions and feelings 

How do you define emotion? How do your peers define emotion? Depending on whom you ask, you’re likely to get different answers. But don’t feel bad. Psychologists and neuroscientists often disagree, engaging in spirited debates and offering uncommon perspectives about a common word.

Since your peers might view emotion differently than you – and top researchers disagree on basic definitions – how should you approach emotion in marketing? In your line of work, think of emotion as a physiological response to external stimuli or internal processes, which occurs below the level of consciousness. It’s a response that starts in the brain – and has the potential to influence your audience’s thoughts, feelings and actions.

Does this mean that emotions and feelings are the same? No. Emotions and feelings are intricately linked, but fundamentally different. Emotions precede awareness; feelings, on the other hand, represent your conscious understanding of an emotional state. As Antonio Damasio, neurologist and professor at the University of Southern California put it, “an organism can possess feelings only when it can create a representation of the body’s functions and the related changes that occur in the brain.”

Emotion and reason: The key to effective decision-making 

The relationship between emotion and reason is another area that’s often misunderstood in marketing, thereby making it difficult to use emotional content to influence your audience’s rational choices. What comes to mind when you think about emotion and reason? If you think about diametrically opposed concepts, you’re not alone. But you’re also dead wrong. Consider one of Damasio’s patients, a man who had a tumor in his prefrontal cortex. After removing the tumor, the patient retained his mental acuity, demonstrating intelligence, humor and charm. But his life began to spiral downward quickly.

The removal of the tumor inadvertently impaired emotional processing – and it paralyzed his ability to make decisions. Regardless of the simplicity of the decision, time ticked away – and so did his life. When to schedule an appointment? That decision might take 30-minutes. What about deciding what to eat for lunch? Hours. Confronted with different decisions, the patient would drown in uncertainty, floundering upstream as he weighed the pros and cons of each decision, seemingly ad infinitum.

Emotional processing and rational decision-making are deeply intertwined, bringing a false dichotomy to the surface, the one between emotion and reason. Emotion helps the brain determine the relative value of competing inputs. According to Damasio, emotionless “reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options.” As a result, the patient’s “decision-making landscape (was) hopelessly flat,” thus illustrating the extent to which emotion plays a role in evaluating choices.

Creating an emotional response to drive behavior

Depending on your goals, you might want your audience to choose a particular product or service. In other cases, you might be focused on eliciting a behavioral response that leads your audience to click on a button, open an e-mail, or break out a credit card. In any of these cases, you want to approach emotional marketing as a process by which to trigger biological reactions to your creative assets. Do you want the heart rate to increase? Do you want the pupils to dilate? Do you want to trigger a hormone?

In 2013, researchers demonstrated that an increase in oxytocin – a hormone (and neurotransmitter) associated with empathy, trust, generosity and attachment – can increase donation in response to public service announcements. During the study, researchers found that participants with elevated oxytocin levels “donated to 57% more causes, donated 56% more money, and reported 17% greater concern for those in the ads.” In the second experiment of the study, researchers measured ACTH, a hormone that regulates cortisol. Correlating ATCH to attention, researchers predicted that an increase in both oxytocin and ACTH would lead to a greater increase in donations – and they were correct. Donations increased by 261%.

In 2014, a different study examined audience heart rates in response to TV commercials, discovering an increase in “cardiac activity during the observation of TV commercials that have been judged pleasant.” As a marketer, you’re in a unique position to use creativity to elicit an emotional response that’s beneficial to your business. The key is to get your audience’s brain to respond favorably to your work. As part of this approach, you might need to think about emotional marketing differently. After all, thinking about how to use emotion to drive outcomes is not only good thinking, it’s also good marketing.

The post Rethinking emotion in marketing to deepen engagement appeared first on MarTech.

The aesthetic experience starts the moment your audience looks at your ad. At this moment, your audience’s brain begins to process visual content quickly. In fact, the processing of visual information happens so quickly that your audience is unaware of what the eyes see, at least initially. Put more succinctly, the brain processes visual stimuli before consciousness is even possible.

When it comes to creating an aesthetic experience, the visual strength of your imagery is key for creating an immediate connection. According to Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, “the brain responds automatically to beauty.” In other words, beautiful imagery, whether in the form of a print ad or a social media post, is critical for creating positive associations with your brand automatically.

Inside the aesthetic experience

An aesthetic experience stirs activity in different regions in the brain, including areas associated with emotion, reward and decision-making. Importantly, the experience extends across multiple sensory modalities and happens to occur regardless of whether a person is viewing a painting, listening to music or admiring a perfectly constructed math equation. Remarkably, you can quantify the experience.

Researchers across multiple studies directed subjects to view artwork and state the extent to which each image was considered beautiful – all while measuring activity in the brain. As Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London, observes, activity in a key area of the brain, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, was “proportional to the declared intensity of the aesthetic experience.”

When it comes to viewing attractive faces, the experience becomes even more profound. In a 2019 study, Chatterjee demonstrated how an aesthetic experience can actually activate the motor parts of the brain to compel people to move physically towards attractive faces. In the study, a computer monitor displayed a number at the bottom of the screen and two numbers at the top. The task was simple. Click on the number that was closest to the number on the bottom.

Simple enough, right? But to see if attractiveness affects motor behavior, the researchers paired the top numbers with faces, one attractive and the other unattractive. Incredibly, researchers discovered the mouse would drift toward the attractive face – even if the number was incorrect. In other words, the aesthetic response to an attractive face was so powerful that it affected hand movement!

Marketing science takeaways

As you think about the look and feel of your marketing assets, you might want to consider these key takeaways:

• The brain responds to beauty automatically
• Using science to navigate office politics
• Creating visually appealing content

The brain responds to beauty automatically  

Given that your audience’s brain responds automatically to beauty on a subconscious level, one of your goals as a marketer should be to facilitate approach-behavior on a subconscious level. In other words, get your audience to become drawn toward your marketing asset. As a skilled marketer, however, you already know that’s only part of the story. Once you engage your audience’s brain on a subconscious level, you must present the appropriate message, which taps into individual preferences within a culture-appropriate framework. As such, you must create content that resonates with your audience since triggering aesthetic appreciation is only a starting point.

Using science to navigate office politics

In your role, you’re often presented with obstacles from less informed persons. Have you worked for a client – or reported to a CEO – who was uninterested in what your marketing content looked like? Are you told that your audience doesn’t care what your marketing collateral looks like? The problem is that your audience’s brain is attracted to aesthetically pleasing stimuli – whether they know it or not. Now you can make a science-based argument on why you must create good-looking marketing content.

Creating visually appealing content

The most important takeaway is to understand that visually appealing content matters. Since brain regions that are associated with emotion and reward become active when viewing aesthetically appealing content, it’s important to create marketing assets that tap into the circuitry that’s involved in the aesthetic experience. When you’re able to do that, you’ll find that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder but also in the neurobiology of the brain.

The post Neuroscience and beauty: Why visually appealing marketing assets matter appeared first on MarTech.

The aesthetic experience starts the moment your audience looks at your ad. Upon exposure to your ad, your audience’s brain begins to process visual content quickly. In fact, the processing of visual information happens so quickly that your audience is unaware of what the eyes see, at least initially. In other words, the brain processes visual stimuli before consciousness is even possible.

When it comes to creating an aesthetic experience, the visual strength of your imagery is key for creating an immediate connection with your audience. According to Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, “the brain responds automatically to beauty.” As such, beautiful imagery, whether in the form of a print ad or a social media post, is critical for creating positive associations with your brand automatically.

Inside the aesthetic experience

An aesthetic experience stirs activity in different regions in the brain, including areas associated with emotion, reward and decision-making. Importantly, the experience extends across multiple sensory modalities and happens to occur regardless of whether a person is viewing a painting, listening to music or admiring a perfectly constructed math equation. Remarkably, you can quantify the experience.

Researchers across multiple studies directed subjects to view artwork and state the extent to which each image was considered beautiful – all while measuring activity in the brain. As Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London, observes, activity in a key area of the brain, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, happens to be “proportional to the declared intensity of the aesthetic experience.”

When it comes to viewing attractive faces, the experience becomes even more profound. In a 2019 study, Chatterjee demonstrated how an aesthetic experience can actually activate the motor parts of the brain to compel people to move physically towards attractive faces. In the study, a computer monitor displayed a number at the bottom of the screen and two numbers at the top. The task was simple enough. Ask the person sitting in front of the computer to click on the number that was closest to the number on the bottom.

But to see if attractiveness affects motor behavior, the researchers paired the top numbers with faces, one attractive and the other unattractive. Incredibly, researchers discovered something remarkable. Prior to clicking on a number, the mouse would start to drift toward the attractive face – even if the number was incorrect. In other words, the aesthetic response to an attractive face was so powerful that it affected hand movement!

Marketing science takeaways

As you think about the look and feel of your marketing assets, you might want to consider these key takeaways:

• The brain responds to beauty automatically
• How to use science to navigate office politics
• Create visually appealing content

The brain responds to beauty automatically  

Given that your audience’s brain responds automatically to beauty, one of your goals as a marketer should be to facilitate approach-behavior on a subconscious level. In other words, get your audience to become drawn toward your marketing asset. As a skilled marketer, however, you already know that’s only part of the story. Once you engage your audience’s brain on a subconscious level, you must present the appropriate message, which taps into individual preferences within a culture-appropriate framework. As such, you must create content that resonates with your audience since triggering aesthetic appreciation is only a starting point.

Using science to navigate office politics

In your role, you’re often presented with obstacles from less informed persons. Have you worked for a client – or reported to a CEO – who was uninterested in what your marketing content looked like? Are you told that your audience only cares about the content, but not the visuals? The problem with this type of rationale is that your audience’s brain is attracted to aesthetically pleasing stimuli – whether they know it or not. Armed with this information, Now you can now make a science-based argument on why you must create good-looking marketing assets.

Creating visually appealing content

The most important takeaway is to understand that visually appealing content matters. Since brain regions that are associated with emotion and reward become active when viewing aesthetically appealing content, it’s important to create marketing assets that tap into the circuitry that’s involved in the aesthetic experience. When you’re able to do that, you’ll find that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder but also in the neurobiology of the brain.

The post Neuroscience and beauty: How to create an immediate connection with your audience appeared first on MarTech.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a central role in goal-directed behavior. Whether you’re eating your favorite food, purchasing a product that makes you happy, or engaging in a hedonistic conquest, dopamine drives your behavior forward. Put succinctly, dopamine helps you take action.

In your role, you want customers to engage in behavior that’s in alignment with your business objectives. What type of action do you want your customers to take? Do you want them to read a blog post, click a digital ad, open an email, or attend a webinar? If you said yes to any of these, you need to keep reading. 

Anticipation spikes dopamine

The key to creating marketing content that drives behavior in a direction that’s beneficial to your business is to tap into your customer’s complex reward circuitry – a system that’s fueled by dopamine. What comes to mind when you think of dopamine? If you’re like most people, you might associate dopamine with pleasure or reward. But there’s more to the story. 

The brain produces dopamine in response to rewarding experiences; however, the largest surge of dopamine doesn’t come from obtaining the reward – it comes from anticipation. If you want to drink a glass of wine, and you’ve experienced the reward of wine in the past, you might uncork the bottle, pour it into a glass and take a small sip. But the largest dopaminergic spike in your brain occurred before your first sip. 

Marketing science in action

In content marketing, you use information to connect with your audience. According to researchers at UC Berkley’s Haas School of Business, “information acts on the brain’s dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as money or food.” In other words, your marketing content, which is a form of information, can be leveraged to tap into your customer’s reward pathways. What does this mean for you? 

Commercials and videos

Imagine that you’re launching a series of commercials (or videos if you’re working with a smaller budget). As a neurotransmitter that facilitates goal-directed behavior, dopamine can motivate your audience to watch commercials with added interest – as long as you set the stage with the first commercial. If anticipation spikes dopamine, and dopamine drives behavior, you can develop anticipation between commercials to facilitate the desired behavioral response.

In 2006, Dos Equis launched the Most Interesting Man in the World campaign, which featured a grey-haired adventurer who impressed with charisma and fanciful exploits. The campaign tapped into your reward system through humor and storytelling. If you found the humor funny, for example, and you wanted to know how the next commercial would further define the Most Interesting Man in the World (while making you laugh), you were certain to pay close attention to each new commercial. The results? From 2008 to 2013, Dos Equis grew by 116% in the American market, thus turning it into “the fastest growing beer brand in the country.” 

How do you create a reward-driven campaign using commercials or videos? One tactical approach is to develop a cohesive narrative that plays like a movie over multiple commercials. By making sure each clip contains a reward along with a small cliff-hanger, you can get your audience to anticipate what the next commercial might reveal, thereby giving your brand access to one of the most valuable things in a competitive business environment—your audience’s attention. 

Email marketing 

Do you want people to open your marketing emails? Of course, you do. As you already know, the first step is to provide value. But that’s not enough. You need your audience to anticipate value. To do this, you need to make your inbox name become associated with rewarding content. 

How exactly does this work? If your emails contain rewards, such as insightful information, curious content, or humorous content, your name becomes a cue for the reward, thereby informing your audience that a reward is on the way. For your next campaign, therefore, determine what type of reward you plan on using – and be consistent to ensure your name becomes associated with the reward inside of the message. As soon as you’re able to create anticipation of what’s inside a message, you’ll not only see a spike in dopamine, but you’ll also see a spike in your open rates. 

Driving results 

When used correctly, marketing science can drive better results than traditional marketing. The key is to generate intrigue through value-based content that makes the reader anticipate the next communication – regardless if it’s an email, infographic, webinar, commercial or video. As you tackle your next marketing project, therefore, remember the golden rule of content marketing: get your audience to anticipate value. And once you do that, you’ll be able to influence goal-directed behavior that leads to a stronger bottom line. 

The post How dopamine fuels the golden rule of content marketing appeared first on MarTech.