Persuadability

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Persuadability is the capacity that an online presence has for causing a user to take action and become a subscriber, lead or customer.

The Spanish acronym "persuabilidad" is made up of the terms "usabilidad" (usability) and persuasion. Usability understood as the discipline which facilitates user access to the content of a website and persuasion understood as the process through which people can be guided to adopt an idea, attitude or action through rational arguments and emotional factors.

Contents

[edit] Origin

The first reference we have of the term "persuadability" on the Internet comes from an article by David Boronat, published in July 2005 under the title “You haven’t got users”.

The article refers to the need to change the focus of any online presence – when up until then they had been concerned with user satisfaction – to the process of turning users into customers. With persuadability, online presences focus on persuading and selling. For this to happen, more aggressive approaches are needed on websites, guiding the user from one page to the next until we turn him into a customer.

The first time the word Persuadability appearead in a Peer-reviewed conference was in the 2006 European Information Architecture Summit organized by "ASIS&T". In this conference Ariel Guersenzvaig held a presentation on this subject. [1]

[edit] Definition

Persuadability is the capacity an online presence has for causing a user to take action and become a subscriber, lead or customer, based on rational arguments and emotional factors.

It is a discipline which – rather than usability – internalises the surfer’s desires and needs, his momentum, the value proposal of a specific web site and the online marketing strategy into a whole.

This discipline delves deep into the user's psychology – what acts as a brake on him, his motivations, doubts and suspicions - to analyse which elements might condition the tiny decisions he takes during the time he stays on a website.

[edit] Key elements

7 key elements have been defined for assessing a website’s level of persuadability:

  1. Positioning: how a website is positioned and differentiates itself from the competition.
  2. Credibility and reliability: what elements a website uses to generate the necessary level of trust in the user so that he believes what it is telling him.
  3. The architecture of persuasion: how, through a website's architecture, each page attempts to achieve an objective.
  4. Content and functions: what elements users need to convince themselves that a specific product or service is the one they need.
  5. Copy: how to draft a website text so that each word manages to persuade.
  6. Calls to action: if each page has an objective, the call to action is the key which should lead to it.
  7. Sensation of urgency: how certain marketing techniques are applied to lead to action at that point.

[edit] Measurement and persuadability

Persuadability focuses on results: increasing rates of conversion. Conversion rates indicate the percentage of users who enter the website and finish the process it proposes: whether this is purchasing a product, making a donation, filling in a registration form, etc. As a result measurement tools are the key to measuring the success of persuadability.

Measurement tools like Google Analytics or Google Website Optimizer – to perform multi-variable tests – help us to learn more about how the users behave on websites. Thanks to these tools, we can glean very useful information on the users of a website: where they come from, what key words they use to reach the site, what links interest them most or where they leave the site.

Persuadability analyses this data to identify the problem and find a solution with one clear objective: increasing conversion rates.

[edit] Disciplines it includes

Usability, User experience, Persuasive communication, persuasion, Psychology of persuasion, Persuasion architecture, Persuasive technology, Marketing, Neuromarketing, Copywriting, Interface design, Web metrics, Web analysis.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Persuadability EuroIA Program. Archive.org. Retrieved on 2008-02-02.

[edit] Sources

Chawk, A. Submit Now. ISBN 0735711704

Cialdini, R. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasión ISBN 0688128165

Eisenberg, B; Eisenberg, J. Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results. ISBN 1932226397

Eisenberg, B; Eisenberg, J. Persuasive Online Copywriting: How to Take Your Words to the Bank. ISBN 0971476993

Eisenberg, B; Eisenberg, J. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing. ISBN 0785218971

Fogg, B.J. (2003) Persuasive Technology. Using computers to change what we think and do. ISBN 1558606432

Nielsen, J. Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity. ISBN 156205810X

Renvoisé, P; Morin, C. (2006) Neuromarketing: Is There a 'Buy Button' in the Brain? Selling to the Old Brain for Instant Success. ISBN 0974348228

Veloso, M. Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time. ISBN 0814472494

[edit] External links