[This is a transcript of Part 6 - Store Conversion on Steroids. Below is a link to the recording.]

Introduction

Kausambi: Let's get started. So I don't want to waste any more time talking to Talia. There's so much to learn and it's like one of my favorite topics. So at no delay, they're going to run right into it. We are going to talk about emotions and how it helps every business succeed. Right. And I'm a huge fan.

I'm an emotional person, like most of us, I guess, but I'm open about it. I'm openly emotional. And I think I'm very, very proud to be that. And sometimes it's, you tend to, uh, you know, when you're working over 10, 15, 17 years, step back and say, As far business. Right. And it's so empowering to see someone actually talks about how emotions and powers and powers convergence.

So I'm so happy to welcome you Italia to store conversions on steroids. And this is day six. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So let's dive right in. We took a little bit extra of your time. So we want to just get into it today. Tell us a bit about, for our audience. Of course, a bunch of them already know you.

We've got some of the questions, but, uh, what do you do and why is it important for e-commerce or anything? Β 

Talia: I'm the founder of GetUplift, which is a conversion optimization agency. And what we do is we help high growth brands, optimize their funnels and websites, um, to increase conversions. And the way that we do it is using emotional targeting, using emotional targetting. Using psychology, behavioral, psychology, and basically understanding how customers buy and what makes people buy and what we've been doing it for over a decade. Now we help, I mean, we've helped so many commerce brands over the years. We also do it with B2B and of a different types of companies. Um, but we've actually been lucky enough to work with some really amazing brands in the past two years, uh, within the calmness industry.

And we've had such an incredible impact, using emotion within an eCommerce business, it has not only helped us increase conversions and sales and revenue for our clients, but has aligned entire teams around who the customers really are - What pains are you solving? What people need to hear, read a feel, see in order to convert.

So it just has so much impact across the entire business on it. It's really cool to see, um, the long lasting results, as opposed to, I guess, minimal of a conversion optimization program where you're assembly testing a call to action button, or you're simply testing a different element on the page.

This process that we go through with our clients really has a huge impact, um, in the long run and lifetime value.

Case studies

Kausambi: Yeah, that's interesting to hear what I'm hearing is that there's of course CRO and then the whole, you know, experimentation and optimization process. But what I'm hearing is that if you take it from the lens of emotion and persuasion, you see bigger long-term impact.

Could you give us an example?

Talia: Yeah, for sure. Um, you know, walking, um, as an example, we walk with a company called Upright. Upright, sells a brilliant device that helps you fix your posture. Um, it's tiny and you put it on your back and it vibrates when you bend forward and remind you to sit up straight it's, um, based on biofeedback science, it, you know, it's backed by 500 clinics.

It's amazing. And when we first started working with Upright, a lot of their messaging was focused on how the product works, which is how I just explained. Oh, you lean forward. You get a vibration, you stand up. Um, And it was very much focused on the product itself. We did our research and we identified a couple of really amazing things.

Um, first we identified who the biggest customers are, who are the three types of customers that are coming to the website. And why? Because the whole idea of emotional targeting is understanding the why behind purchase. What are the emotions? What are the challenges, the, um, you know, different roadblocks that people are experiencing in their life right now that are leading them to find a solution online.

And we helped uncover those three top pains that lead people. To upgrade to website and what we also uncovered with the desired outcomes. How do people want to feel off to purchasing this solution? Not just the actual, um, you know, I guess, result of standing up and sitting up straight, but how do they want to feel about themselves?

Um, and what was incredible is that, and we're going to talk about this in a minute. We made some key substantial changes to their product pages. We changed (this is a bit of a giveaway) but we changed the description of the product on the product page and the headlines. So we changed messaging. We changed the product images, which all to get to in a minute.

And we also worked a lot on the type of social proof because social proof, testimonials, quotes, like everyone knows that works, but are you using the right one and the right ones? And then. Doing all that helped us increase their revenue so much and increased conversions by an amazing amount, but what's been even more incredible is that, that was just the start of the journey and what you usually see with regular conversion optimization tests, where you're just changing piece of a puzzle.

You're just changing an element and you're not thinking strategically. You will, might see an uplift, but it kind of drops off at some point, but using emotion has helped us back actually leveraging and speaking. The customer's language has helped us. Continuously increased conversions because as we work, we've optimized the category pages, the product pages, the home page, the emails that they're sending the reviews page, the customer pages, everything now speaks one language.

So when someone comes to the website and they're going through different pages and they're going down the rabbit hole, they can clearly see themselves, their challenges that they're facing and why Upright is the one to solve it for them. And that has helped align all of the teams. Now, when they think about creating landing pages, when they think about their PR, when they think about customer success, even when they're talking to customers that may have questions, or if they're trying, or if they're talking to other different people on online that even in China, They know who they're speaking to, and I know what to say, and I know what they care about.

Um, and that makes everything different. It makes the whole customer journey, a cohesive one that really speaks, you know to everyone and who to their customers.

Kausambi: Yeah. And that leads to the next question, which is the core of why we are meeting today right? Product, forget product page, but products.

Like how do you define your products? Explain your products, showcase your product, present your product. That's the core of any business, right? And usually it tends to be very feature heavy yet. It's like SAAS business e-commerce business. Irrelevant. We just jump into features all the time. Right. And how do I would love a little bit of a tear down and any examples that you can show on a framework, maybe how do you approach bringing in emotions and the customer perspective into actually defining your product?

Talia: Yeah. So what's interesting is that it's true. I think. Most of the websites I've ever seen, whether it's their call, missile, SAAS, a sword focused on themselves. Um, everything, everything is about pricing features, technology, but there's nothing about the actual customer, the person behind the screen. Um, the process that we go through the discovery process is really a qualitative one.

Um, so we have all data analysts that do the quantitative, which is basically looking at. In the data, Google analytics, Google tag manager, and all that good stuff to understand where the problem is. So identifying where our problem is, is pretty simple. The issue is usually identifying what changes you can make that will actually increase conversions.

And that's where qualitative research comes in. So we do a lot of customer based research customer, customer-first research. That means that we do visit us at base customer surveys. We do customer interviews, review mining, social listening, um, S competitor announced just so much work. But it's always, always based on listening to customers.

Now, the key here is not asking questions. Like how would you rate our website or how would you rate your experience? So how would you rate the product or did you like it or did you not? But asking meaningful questions that will really leave a mark and get us some meaningful answers. So I'll give you an example.

You could ask some people (which is what most brands do) Why did you buy a product? And what they will most likely say is you have the best pricing or you had this feature, or you had this type of element in your product. And that's why I bought it, but they're not going to say. The heavy stuff, the meaningful stuff of what actually led them.

And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for the actual intent. So instead of asking them that, one of the questions that we love to ask is if you could no longer use this. What would you miss the most? So if we took this away from you today, what's the one thing you would miss the most. That's the value.

That's the real value, because they're not going to say, oh, I'm really going to miss the fact that you can turn it. I'm really gonna miss the fact that it's blue. No, they don't care about that. They're going to tell you about, oh my gosh. Now I won't be able to look, you know, straight up. I won't be, I'll feel that everyone's looking at me or I'll still, you know, my mom will keep nagging me about my slouching.

Well, they'll mention the things that have had an impact on their life, or you could ask. What happened in your life or the day that led you to search for this solution? So what was going on? What happened? It's so much better than saying, so why did you choose us? Because that is just leading them to answer.

Uninteresting questions and what we do with that information. So once we've done visitor surveys and we've uncovered robots, why they're not combating and why they're coming to the website, and once we've done customer surveys and we've uncovered the true, real value that your product actually delivers, and we've done customer interviews and we've listened in different groups on Reddit, on Facebook and Quora all over the web to what people are talking about, what they're saying, then.

We can come to the website and say, here's what you're going for right now. And it's going to be real. We're going to identify with them. We're going to say you'll working 10 hours a day in front of a computer. And you're in terrible back pain, or you've noticed in some of your photos lately that you're slouched, we will mention the things I really care about, and then we'll be able to also offer solutions that they can afford and want.

So that's a bit about the discovery and how we do it. And then we basically apply messaging and design to it and test it. Does that make sense?

Kausambi: Totally, totally. In fact, it's very interesting. Uh, you know, something that stood out to me. Why, what was happening in your world the day that you actually look for that, uh, you know, um, uh, solution or you started searching for something, something out there.

Right. So do you think it makes me curious, is it positive or negative emotions? Like, do you see a difference between utilizing either?

Talia: Yeah, I mean, ultimately we want to know that before. And we want to know the desired after the, before isn't about diet, right? We're not talking about like now you're big.

You could be, you know, Finn, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the before challenges, pains, concerns, things that are keeping them up at night. We want to know that because we want to make sure that the product that we're actually offering. It's solving those problems because a lot of the times we'll find that we're talking about things that our customers just don't care about.

So the pain really matters, but it's not about just saying this is terrible. This is terrible, but just reflecting it back to them so we can build trust, but also building a story. And saying, this is how you could feel, this is where you could be. This is where you could feed. This is what you could feel about yourself.

See about yourself. This is where this is. We're painting a picture of what really could be. And not, that is the whole story. It's not part of it. It's not, what do I think people want as a brand? Or what do I, you know, why did I create the product? It makes it about them. So the pain on the result, the before and after really do matter.

And everything that you do.

Kausambi: Yeah. Yeah. So, so what I'm hearing is that it's actually the story of the pain moving to, uh, kind of like an AHA moment or a success or a positivity versus just one or the other, right. Yeah, exactly.

So, uh, audience, if you have any questions you can start typing in. I already got a few questions, so I'm going to quickly dive into that.

And then I have another question that I want to ask. Uh, Talia, I'm not, I'm not letting her go so quick today. So, uh, James actually sent me a question in advance and his question was :

Handling biases affecting shopper decision

Question: Any biases that you have seen that actually effect shopper decision making really a big, and is there some way to kind of circumvent that?

Talia: Oh, my God. She said, well, hundreds. Um, there are hundreds of cognitive biases that our brains, you know, that exists in all Brian's and they're basically short. That all brains take in order to make decisions quickly, because we are rational people that we love to think of ourselves as a rational we're rational people.

We cannot make decisions based on data and rational alone. We base all of our decisions in life, on experience, on our emotions, on feelings, on what we have in front of us and our brains take shortcuts. And. What you can do about it. So there's two things. Number one is be aware of the different cognitive biases that are out there.

Um, a while ago we created a. A PDF of like stuff GSM that impact marketing and e-commerce. And the whole idea is that it's like, okay, here's something that a cognitive bias that could be affecting this person. And here's how to deal with it. Because once you know what the bias is, it's easier for you to deal with it.

Now, what I want to say is that some cognitive biases, there's nothing you can do about it. Some you can avoid and some you can address. Point blank, for example, um, I mean, this is just so many, um, but if you're thinking about anchoring or if you're thinking about loss of version, there's. There's just so many cognitive biases.

So it's a bit of a hard question to answer, but all I can say is 100% there are biases. We can't avoid them. We can't avoid them in CRO either, but we do our best to inform ourselves of them and either avoid them or tackle them in our messaging and our design. Um, and so on.

Kausambi: Yeah. So which means that James and Talia, we are due for a longer episode at some point in time when we dig down into public and biases and how to kind of work around that in CRO.

So that's going to come in June.

Question: I love the next question, because it kind of ties into PDP and emotions. How do we think differently about emotions and messaging on something like a marketplace where I just have list of pages in my control and versus my own store right of first that, and then there's another.

Talia: Yes. So, uh, we recently worked with a brilliant market place called Wiser, wiser are, um, basically an amazing, amazing product for teachers and educators that want to create digital worksheets.

Um, so if you're a teacher and you want to create an interactive worksheet for your students, you will basically create this watching. Um, make it into like an interactive worksheet and people can, all your students can answer it and that's super cool. Um, however, they also have an actual marketplace where you can create your own worksheets and then deliver it to people.

And anyone who wants to actually download a worksheet can do it themselves and use it themselves and translate it into their own learnings. We still used emotional. Because what we wanted to do is really speak to our customers and say, this is why. Platform is right for you as a teacher. And this is how it's going to help you as a teacher, because the reason the coming to your marketplace, uh, you, the reasons are usually pretty much the same.

They have the same pains, and now they're looking for someone else to help them. And they're trying to use templates or they're tying, trying to buy something. From someone else as a marketplace, emotions still exists in the way that you present stuff. And also in the way that they do, you call them control, that works, that work and how they do it.

But you can control the actual things that you say. About it, how you highlight certain things in your marketplace, your headline, your CTA, and so on. So emotion ties in directly. We've had amazing results with wiser and I'm sure we'd have very good results of any other marketplace because it is emotional.

Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Messaging based on audience segment

Question: And the second part of the question that Barada is asking that is do you see behavioral messaging and emotional messaging kind of changed between segments of customers, boomers, millennials, Gen Z.

Talia: I don't. That's not how we look at it. Uh, customers. So I think this is a very big difference between the emotional targeting methodology I developed and the behavioral one, which exists for everyone. In the behavioral world, your encouraged to segment people according to their device that they're using the age, that geographical location, their agenda. Um, and maybe also, you know, what generation they're from in the emotional targeting methodology, you know, Uh, 70 year old and a 12-year-old could have the same emotional triggers because it's about the different pains that they're experiencing, that a leading them.

It's less about a profile, which is why I'm not really big on personas and profiling and more about the top pains that are the problems and the jobs that people are trying to get done. It's more about. They're paying someone who's gen Z or gen, whatever may have the same, you know, they may have the same problems, the same pains.

I'm sure if we dissected it even more, then maybe we would see a trend, but that's just not how we go about it. We look at the problems, the pains, the challenges versus desired outcomes. And that's how we see.

More case studies

Kausambi: So just to dig into that, it's very interesting, even for me, is for example, in the case of Upright which is to straighten your back, how would you consider, a set of problems for all kinds of segments.

Talia: Amazing. Great question. So I think in the past, the way it was segmented as is by age, gender, geographical location, um, and like a very wide, um, blanket saying, hello. It's about your health, the way, the way we actually ended up segmenting it is two, three types of pains. Um, the first one are sedentary, people who sit in front of the computers all day and their pains are very specific.

They're uncomfortable. They're starting to feel neck pain. They're starting to build back pain, knee pain, though. Tired they're overworked or they're straining themselves. And what happens is also one of their problems is they forget, they may start the day thinking, God I'd have to work on my posture.

Remember to sit straight, but as the day walks and we all do this, we start slouching. Um, and it's not something we control. It's just something that happens. So that's one group. Um, the other group of people that really do have. Issues with that box. So these are conscious health seekers. The people that really want to fix a specific problem that they've had for a very long time with their back.

These are the people that have usually tried like the braces and all the different, horrible technologies that hurt you. The third type of people are more of the, I'd say. People and the health conscious who all about fixing a problem, preventing it. These are the people who have seen a photo of themselves slouching, or that their mother keeps telling them they're slouching.

These are the people who, um, have a Fitbit and they have a heart rate and they have. You know, every single wearable device, because they care about their health. They want to maintain it. They want to make sure it's good. They'd go on. You know, these are more, these are people that are, they may not have even a problem right now, but they're thinking about it for the future.

Um, and the three different types of people, but they may be from different ages. They could be doing different work. They are probably from all over the world and we don't categorize. According to those behavioral metrics with categorizing them, according to the pain, that's leading them to the website.

Do they, are there, you know, are they conscious about the way they look? Are they conscious about, you know, the fact that they're sitting down all day and in pain or are they actually trying to solve a chronic pain, three different things.

Kausambi: Yeah, no, that's very true because it might so happen that different age groups also fit into the same.

It's not necessarily that chronic pain is just for my mom. Right?

Talia: Exactly.

Reading emotions and user reviews

Kausambi: Yeah. I love that. Uh, I there's one more question. And first of all, he, thanks. You said he thanks you for your insights. And this question is about how do we pick up emotions from user reviews and use it within the product page to help folks buy better.

Talia: Great question. So, um, one of the things that we love to do is actually download all the product reviews, everything, it could be thousands. Even we put them in a spreadsheet and we start looking for Femes. Yes, this is done manually. You can use tools. I know you can, but you only start to see the nuance and the real themes when you're doing it yourself, don't download a thousand, download 150.

Looking at the different themes. We like to categorize them as positive negative. And then when we're looking at the positive, what is the underlying thing that people are mentioning? We do the same with negative to understand the pains and things we need to fix, but once we've done that, Immediate research where we understand, understand, okay, here are the three pains that we know that a leading people.

So if we have different products for different types of pains, or if we have one product that will work for all three of them, we didn't include testimonials. From people who mentioned those specific things. So if you go to the Upright website, you will see that we're now using quotes to show that 750,000 people are using this product, which is incredible.

But also you'll see quotes of someone who has chronic pain, someone who cared about what they learned. Then, you know, there, I think it's, their wife said, I mean, I dunno why I remember this, but their wife said she noticed a difference within two days. Um, or someone that said, you know, I used to have so much pain walking and now it's gone and there's hundreds and hundreds of those, but we keep surfacing the ones that people care about because in reviews and that's like what I was saying before about social proof, we keep just saying social proof works.

But if you have a quote on a product page that just says, this is the best product. Okay, that's cool. But if you had a quote that's a little bit longer and actually told a story, like I did this, and then I did that and I tried this, nothing worked. And then I tried this. People can relate to it. People love that and connect with it.

And that has a direct impact on conversions. And we've seen that on so many, um, websites, especially ecommerce. So reviews are so important and should be used wisely.

Leveraging emotions for customer retention

Kausambi: Yeah. Yeah, not that I want to round up. We just, uh, already eight minutes out, but we will take two more minutes of your time. I'd been question that's from my side.

Uh, you know, you use, Review Mine and be kind of do user research. We do qualitative and quantitative. Got our product pages handy, and become of customers. Now, now they want to get loyal customers back in. We want to retain them. How do I use emotions to do that?

Talia: Well, email marketing is huge.

Right. One of the things that we do with a lot of our e-commerce clients is we think about the emails that we're sending and we start segmenting and sending emails, according to the different pains that people are feeling. Now, it depends on the type of product that you're selling. If you're selling one product, if you have 2000 product, if you have all grades for your product, but the idea ultimately is to think about it.

A making sure that your customer actually got the result that they wanted from their first purchase and then emailing them about the next step in that journey on that journey, the more you focus on their outcomes, their values, their pain, the better, the emails, the customers that sorry that brands are sending out with 50% off today.

Only today. And I'm not saying they don't work, but if you're not connecting it to the actual pain that someone's feeling or the emotion. You know, there's only so much that scarcity can work. You could probably do a lot better if you were to mention, and here's why you actually need, this is the value you're going to get from this.

You know, this is why you actually want to purchase this too, or you want to upgrade to the next experience and. It really, it really matters. And I see so many brands, either sending an email once every few months because they're scared of spamming people and then they're missing out and they're not building that relationship.

All they're sending emails every single day about sales that I don't care about. So you need to do a good job at segmenting. I think that one of the best things that you can do is after someone purchases for the first time on your thank you page, have a survey to not miss out on this for anyone who's listening.

That's a gold mine. Just asking that question that I just said to you before, like what was going on in your life today that made you search for this solution? Hmm, amazing. Or what is the best possible outcome you're hoping for with this product? And you can change it to whatever you're selling, but you gain so much data from it that helps you segment these people in your email list so that you can send better emails because email is, you know.

Kausambi: So. Yeah, but, but the difference that I hear is that we tend to do email more as offers. Most of the time are just like, okay, you used it and I would just use it. Right. But here I'm hearing so much more, I think, deeper understanding of the context of the user and the success that they're expecting to get.

And then what could be the next steps for them in the, in showing how to get that for sure. Showing them how to get there.

Thank you so much, Talia! This was so, as I said, uh, super exciting for me, but hopefully this is not, it will have your back for that deep dive into biases and how to kind of optimize for that and CRO, but today was great.

I learned a lot and I'm pretty sure our audience. Thank you so much and hope you have your back soon again! Β 

Talia: Thank you guys. Thank you.