Do you know what drives your customers online? Web psychologist, Liraz Margalit, shares how to use digital body language to earn and keep your audience online.
Liraz Margalit, Ph.D., is a web psychologist and Head of Behavioral Research at Clicktale. She analyzes online consumer behavior from a cognitive behavioral psychological perspective. Her analyses incorporate theory and academic research into a conceptual framework that creates insights into online consumer behavior.
She previously held a post-doctoral internship with the Program of Political Psychology and Decision Making at the Lauder School of Government – IDC (Herzlia). In addition, she worked as a research Fellow with an interdisciplinary military think tank, consulting the most senior levels at IDF GHQ. Dr. Margalit is a lecturer at the Political Psychology and Decision Making program of the Lauder School of Government – IDC (Herzliya), where she did her post-doctoral research.
Icebreaker
“Inside Out,” which portrays how emotions shape a person’s life, is one of my favourite films.
Think Like A Journalist Quote
“Few realize how loud their expressions really are. Be kind with what you wordlessly say.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Success Quote
To quote Einstein – “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – the understanding that the only way to come up with an innovative solution is to hold the perspective of one discipline, Psychology in my case and use it to solve problems in other disciplines, by using a different way of thinking. In my case, I utilize my knowledge about human behavior and cognition to direct Clicktale’s data science team in developing cognitive models that aren’t based on data but on the way, we make decisions. Our models factor in cognitive biases and unconscious processes to predict customer’s behavior.
More often than not, success in business requires taking a leap of faith or following the path less traveled instead of going the same route over and over again and get more of the same. That, however, does not make the decision to do so any easier for entrepreneurs and businesses.
Career Highlight
The highlight of my career was to see that an idea that was inspired by my research, became a disruptive technology. This technology that we’ve developed at Clicktale is the Intent Classifier that can automatically identify website visitors’ mindsets based on their online behavioral patterns. The sense of achievement was even greater because at the beginning, nobody believed that this idea could become a valuable model to businesses. In other words, my team was able to turn theoretical research findings into actionable recommendations.
When It Didn’t Work
What is one mistake you made and how would you do things differently using the knowledge you have today? When you felt like giving up, what kept you going?
The one mistake I made was to wait too long before pursuing an idea that I had. I wanted to be 100% sure that this idea was applicable before investing in it. Eventually, someone else that I consulted with regarding this idea, had decided to implement it. Today this idea is a great business success.
I’ve learned that we need to listen to our gut feelings before listening to other’s opinion, and most importantly – don’t afraid to fail. As Brene Brown said: it’s worse to spend your life on the outside looking in, wondering what if, than it is to try and dare greatly and risk the chance of failure. What keeps me going is to always aim for the moon, if I miss, the worst thing that can happen is, I may hit a star. So not only am I not afraid to fail, when I try, I aim the highest and strive for the most.
Top Tips
How to Use Digital Body Language to Earn and Keep an Audience’s Attention Online
- Visuals are processed much faster.
- When visitors read, they are working harder to understand and interpret your content.
- Understand a visitor’s intent when they visit your website or app and provide what they are looking for or what they would be interested in reading.Listen to your audience’s digital body language and be prepared to respond accordingly.
- Address every mouse move, hover, scroll and exit to interpret behavioral patterns that determine exactly where the experience went wrong, discovering patterns in multiple users.
- Optimise your homepage using these digital body language signals, in order to attract and retain your audience’s attention to explore further.
- By doing so, you can increase conversion rates by adapting online experiences, based on the visitors’ response, ultimately leading to them having a better experience and returning as a loyal reader.
Think Like A Journalist Scenario
You’ve been hired to help an ailing company that’s about to financially collapse. It’s reputation’s shot. You have a month, a $1,000 budget, a smartphone, and a laptop. How do you begin to turn this company around?
I would start by changing the way its customers use its product or solution. Science has taught us that the only way to drive customers to use a product, is to encourage the formation of a new habit that is related to the product.
Companies mapping out their application strategy often tell me their goal is to be thought leaders. But after digging deep into the psychological drivers of the way customers interact with a product, it is clear to me that the conversation needs to be about behavior, not thoughts.
The goal should not be for consumers to know about your product, but rather to integrate it into their daily habits.
We need three things in order to form a new Habit Loop: a trigger, a routine and a reward. I would start by identifying one or two simple patterns of behavior connected to the product and designing cues and rewards around them.
The reward is the most important element in forming new habit, let take the Pepsodent case for example. About a decade after Pepsodent went on sale, competing toothpaste companies launched a massive project to figure out why it was such a success. Eventually, they tripped over something interesting: the Pepsodent recipe.
Unlike other toothpaste of that period, Pepsodent contained citric acid, as well as doses of mint oil and other relatively exotic chemicals. Pepsodent’s inventor had used those ingredients to make his toothpaste taste minty and to make sure the paste wouldn’t become gluey as it sat on shelves.
But those chemicals had another, unanticipated effect as well: They created a tingling sensation in the mouth. The tingling doesn’t make the toothpaste work any better. It just convinces people it’s doing the job.
When they started interviewing customers, they found that people said that if they forgot to use Pepsodent, they realized their mistake because they missed that cool, tingling sensation in their mouths. They expected that slight irritation. Even today, almost all toothpaste contain additives with the sole job of making your mouth tingle after you brush. In the same way, shampoo doesn’t need to foam, and a facial moister doesn’t need to smell good. They’re all part of the ‘Reward Loop’, getting you craving for that foam, the tingle, the scent. Consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working, if it wasn’t there, their mouths didn’t feel clean.
Habit loops are internal feedback loops that your brain encodes deeper the more frequently they’re used.
After several similar loops of repetitive behavior, for example, checking emails first thing in the morning (trigger -sound of notification, behavior – checking mail, reward – the feeling of uncertainty and surprise to know who sent me a mail), a new association is created. Think of your cerebral cortex as your command center. When a trigger is observed, the autopilot system is activated. The rest of the command center continues smoothly, directing precious mental
This behavioral pattern becomes literally etched into our neural pathways, and a new habit is formed. A study by Duke University found that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape some 45 percent of the choices we make every day. You want your product to be in that 45 percent.
What is one piece of technology, video, multimedia equipment, or app that you just can’t live without?
[29:29] cutout her whole dialogue before… Ted Talks
For me it’s the ability that we have these days to process and analyse a large amount of data, what we like to refer to as Big Data; Before the age of big data, we thought of things, we wrote it down and that became knowledge, big data is kind of the opposite, you have a pile of data, nowadays it isn’t knowledge until you shift it in different directions and start to see patterns and make sense of this knowledge.
Big Data is a microscope that allows us to see what we could never see before. The massive gathering and analyzing of data in real time allow us to address some of humanity’s biggest challenges—pollution, world hunger, and illness. The key is to ask the right questions because the story won’t tell itself. Especially, when dealing with behavioural data. The only way to uncover the hidden patterns is to use the theoretical knowledge we have on the human mind and not ‘let the data talk’ for itself.
One book, documentary, blog, podcast, or Internet Channel to watch?
Behave
Waking Up Podcast
Get a free audiobook when you try Audible free for 30 days: www.audibletrial.com/TBJApodcast
OR to get a physical copy of the book…click the book title.
It’s an Amazon affiliate link. It won’t cost you more but it will send me a few coins to keep on building our crazy good content here. ?
It’s no exaggeration to say that Behave by Robert Sapolsky is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
If you don’t feel like reading 800 pages, you can listen to the ‘Waking Up podcast’, and the episode where Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about his book. The book ranges from how neurons and hormones interact to how emotions are an essential part of decision making and in what situations genes have an influence on our behavior and most importantly – the illusion of free will. We see how our worst behaviors are correlated to brain circuits abnormally, a lesion or a tumor and our desired behaviors like trust, parenting and attachment are correlated with the presence of certain hormones in our brain.
The book takes on the inner workings of the mind and demonstrates how we have so little control over our behavior. Every action we execute, every thought that crosses our minds are orchestrated by our brain circuitry.
We know for example that an increased activation in the Amygdala, a brain area that is involved in negative emotions, can predict if a person will punish another person for treating him unfairly in an economic game, or if you increase the level of the Oxytocin in our brain, a hormone that is involved in childbirth and breastfeeding, a person will be more likely to trust another person and lesion in the prefrontal cortex will impair the ability to choose which type of cereal one prefers to eat for breakfast.
The striking thing is that the vast majority of those decisions are done in an unconscious, automated level that run under the hood of conscious awareness. Moreover, our personality, decision-making, and the way we feel about things – all these can change, in very specific ways, when the brain is altered by tumors, strokes, drugs, disease or trauma. If you think about it, although we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who have full control of our decisions, our behavior is mostly governed by unconscious processes to which we have minimal access.
Expert Predictions
The year is 2025. What will the world look like and what is your best advice for businesses to thrive and have a competitive advantage in the marketplace in the future?
In 2025, customer experience is set to be one of the key differentiators for brands and businesses. Businesses must develop a better understanding of their customers in order to improve and deliver better experiences across the board, resulting in better results. No one wants unhappy customers and behavioral science will look to shape these experiences.
The behavioral aspect behind a customer journey will become key to successfully converting people. It is not enough now to drive people to a website or app. Once customers arrive at a brands site, it is important to know their intent and know the mindset they’re in.
Tools such as experience analytics and behavioral science can help to understand a customer’s digital body language.
The key to business success in the future will be to understand the digital body language of a customer in order to make the fundamental changes to digital assets, to improve the overall experience.
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