Tips 17-21: Motivators

Prime your audience to take action before they reach your CTA

#17 Rhetorical questions

Do you use rhetorical questions in your writing? They're very powerful motivators that make people think. It's hard to make writing an interactive experience, but by bouncing questions back to the reader, you encourage them to engage and reflect on your argument from their POV.

Rhetorial questions have been proven to influence attitudes and boost message processing. As a literary device, rhetorical questions subtly persuade the reader and sound conversational, so they work particularly well in blogs.

#18 Serial positioning

No matter how good your writing is, most people will not read every word. And those that do won't remember the majority of what you wrote.

This is why your structure has such a big impact on conversions. For whatever you're writing, you need to place your strongest arguments at the beginning and end of your text.

Experiments in the 1960s found that when participants are presented with a list of words, they only tend to remember the first few and the last few.

The words in the middle are usually forgotten. It was concluded that words early in the list entered the long-term memory (primacy effect) and words at the end entered the short-term memory (recency effect). Displacement forced words in the middle out of the limited short-term memory and they didn’t have enough processing time to enter the long-term memory.

#19 Illusory truth

This effect was introduced in the 70s when it was discovered the same positive feeling is released in the brain when we hear information that we know is true as when we hear information that we’ve heard before.

Because of this, repetition is often confused with validity. This behavioral bias is used in many industries where public opinion is important, but most commonly in politics.

While you shouldn't be repetitive in your word choice, it's important to reinforce the same arguments multiple times.

This is more applicable to long-form content rather than short ad copy, but every time a reader comes across a repeated argument, they're more likely to feel the same way (use this responsibly).

#20 Reciprocity

A universally human trait is our feeling of obligation to give something back when we receive something for free.

Before you even think about asking your readers to do anything, your content should offer plenty of valuable information or resources. Give them the impression that you've helped them reach goals, and they'll be more likely to return the favor when asked.

Dr Robert Cialdini came up with Cialdini's Principles of Influence: Reciprocity, commitment/consistency, consensus/social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity. Using these are linked to increasing conversions.

These principles were put to the test in a study at Cornell University. Individual subjects were told they were going to evaluate art. Some of the subjects were given a bottle of Coke "bought" by an assistant who had slipped out to buy their own bottle. After, all the subjects were asked if they'd like to buy a raffle ticket. It was found that the subjects who received a Coke from the assistant bought two times as many raffle tickets as the ones who received nothing.

#21 Social proof

We’re currently trading in social currency where influence is built on testimonials, reviews, or endorsements from a trusted authorities and influencers.

A study by marketing intelligence agency Mintel found that 7 in 10 Americans will seek out opinions from other people before they make a purchase. These external opinions can have huge impacts on businesses. Harvard Business School found that a one-star increase on Yelp translates to a 5-9% increase in revenue.