Marketers should tell stories. That’s the best way to engage our customers. But too often, we create content that’s not a story—there’s no protagonist, no drama.
But the “stories” on their websites weren’t so much stories as statements of feeling or timelines or sequences of events. Those all have their place, but they’re not stories, and they typically don’t grab people in the way stories do.
Here’s some fascinating behavioral research:
Through the experiments, the researchers homed in on a hypothesis: People appear wired to incur a significant physical cost to eliminate a mental burden.
In particular, Dr. Rosenbaum said, people are seeking ways to limit the burden to their “working memory,” a critical but highly limited mental resource that people use to perform immediate tasks. By picking up the bucket earlier, the subjects were eliminating the need to remember to do it later. In essence, they were freeing their brains to focus on other potential tasks.
Savvy marketers will use this knowledge to help their customers relieve mental burdens.
Courtney Seiter describes the human psychology behind eight effective headline formulas. Understanding why the formulas work is far more important than blindly copying the formulas.
To boost response to online forms, Anthony at UX Movement suggests indicating which fields are optional rather than which are required:
Marking required fields enable [sic] users to do the bare minimum to complete your form. They’re going to put more importance on required fields and fill those out first while ignoring the optional ones. Why would they spend time on optional fields if they can fill out what’s required and move on? However, if you use voluntary over-disclosure to your advantage and mark optional fields only, users won’t feel the need to take shortcuts.
Worth a test.
A/B testing is a powerful way to improve your online marketing.
But more important than any improvement you might get from testing is what you learn from your testing that you can apply in the future. That means the process behind your test is critical.
You should take these three basic steps before running any test:
For example, you might want to strengthen your e-mail newsletter or your donation page.
You don’t run a test just to see what happens. You’re trying to improve something. What is that something?
So if you’re optimizing your newsletter, what’s the goal of the newsletter? To drive someone to your website, perhaps? Or what’s the goal of your donation form? To capture the most gifts or to capture the most revenue?
You will then measure your test results based on this goal.
This step is critical. With a clear hypothesis—“more links in my newsletter will drive more traffic to the site,” for example, or “less clutter on the donation page will lead to more gifts”—you have a testable proposition. Your test will either confirm or reject your hypothesis, and you can apply that lesson in the future.