The power of motivation in the conversion funnel

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The power of motivation in the conversion funnel

I have been doing some work recently on looking at motivation, and I wanted to talk today about the power of motivation in the conversion funnel and how powerful motivation can be in increasing the likelihood of conversion.

When a user enters a site, they arrive with a certain level of motivation. Different users enter that site with different levels of motivation. Some users will already have decided what they want to buy and have just got to go through the process. Some users have little motivation, so they might just be looking to do some research or they might be early on in their purchase cycle.

As users interact with the website, their level of motivation can either increase or decrease depending on the usability of that website. Usability can be likened to hurdles that the user needs to jump. The more hurdles the user needs to jump, the less motivation they’re going to have, and ultimately, if they have to jump too many hurdles, they’re going to stop and exit the site. Highly-motivated users are more likely to jump more hurdles. I’m sure everyone has bought something from a website that’s been a really poor experience, but you’ve persisted and you’ve gone through with the purchase regardless because you had a lot of motivation to buy the product. Recently I bought some furniture online and it took me about 20 minutes to get through the checkout process, but I pushed on and I did it, because I’d spent about a month before agreeing with my partner what furniture we were going to buy and I didn’t want to have to go through that again!

To expand on this, a company called MEC Labs created an equation to try and predict the likelihood of someone converting. They looked at motivation, value proposition, incentive, friction, and customer anxiety. What it showed is that motivation plays a bigger factor than some of the other elements in the likelihood of conversion. This is backed up by the fact that people will push on through poor usability if they’re motivated enough.

So, how do we increase motivation? There are a couple of categories I have created to categorise some of the factors we can use. We’ve got accomplishment, freedom, connectedness, and growth, and I’ll give some examples of these.

Accomplishment can be power, recognition, success, sense of achievement, or gaining respect. The work that Sport England did with the This Girl Can campaign embodies this. This is a campaign which aims to motivate women to get involved in sport and it did it by sharing the stories and successes of others, inspiring women to go out and achieve success for themselves.

Freedom can be choice, the ability to customise something, or the freedom of time. NIKEiD gives the ability for you to customise your trainers and make them your own. The ability to make decisions and control outcomes empowers the user. Another good example of that is O2 Refresh. Normally a phone contract will tie you in and be very restrictive whereas O2 Refresh allows you to update your phone at any time. It gives the choice back to the user to change their mind if they want to.

Connectedness can be an emotional connection, contextual, involvement, history, or trust. A great example of this is Lego. Much of Lego’s success is due to nostalgia and people wanting to be connected with their own childhood. Parents will buy Lego for their children because they’ve got that nostalgia there.

Lastly, growth could be personal growth or business growth. The CRM Base weaves this in quite nicely to their website by saying it’ll help “boost B2B sales” and to help the sales team “easily focus on the most productive task”. Promising to make the salesperson’s job easier, make them more effective and help the business grow.

These are some factors that you can use to motivate users to increase motivation as they interact with a website, but it doesn’t just have to be on the site. Any interaction with a brand is an opportunity to increase motivation. Whether we are writing titles tags and meta descriptions, paid search ads or content pieces, they’re all opportunities to increase motivation. That’s it for me. Is there any questions? No? Okay.