Turning visitors into sales: seduction vs. analytics by Mirko Krivanek.
From the post:
The context here is about increasing conversion rate, from website visitor to active, converting user. Or from passive newsletter subscriber to a lead (a user who opens the newsletter, clicks on the links, and converts). Here we will discuss the newletter conversion problem, although it applies to many different settings.
Of course, to maximize the total number of leads (in any situation), you need to use both seduction and analytics:
sales = f(seduction, analytics, product, price, competition, reputation)
How to assess the weight attached to each factor in the above formula, is beyond the scope of this article. First, even measuring “seduction” or “analytics” is very difficult. But you could use a 0-10 scale, with seduction = 9 representing a company doing significant efforts to seduce prospects, and analytics = 0 representing a company totally ignoring analytics.
I did not add a category for “seduction.” Perhaps if someone writes a topic map on seduction I will. 😉
Mirko’s seduction vs. analytics resonates with Kahneman’s fast versus slow thinking.
“Fast” thinking takes less effort by a reader and “slow” thinking takes more.
Forcing your readers to work harder, for marketing purposes, sounds like a bad plan to me.
“Fast”/seductive thinking should be the goal of your marketing efforts.