In real life, nudging is something no one likes but in professional and business landscape especially, this is something that will take you higher up. Typically, people consider nudging as an irritating and even an unsocial type of activity depending on the situation. In fact, this common belief of nudging literally refers to coaxing, which is ideally not the case.
In web design service marketing, nudging is the attempt to move a site visitor to take some direct action via indirect suggestion. The goal is to get users on board by appealing to their interests through the layout, design and other content factors on the web page beyond information.
Nudge or nudging is a concept that involves behavioural science. More so, experts consider this as a political theory and relate it to behavioural economics as well. According to the experts:
Nudging is a process in which indirect suggestions and positive reinforcements are proposed with an intention to impact the behaviour of the people targeted with it.
This finally results in the influencing of their decision making power, whether it is a group or individual.
Taking a cue from others in the industry, a reliable and reputable digital marketing firm will input the nudging concept in their marketing strategy. This enables them to incorporate a small artifice that changes the behaviour of the people for the better.
It also extends their chances to convert a visitor into a prospective customer without limiting the available options.
Nudging actually improves the aim of marketing. One of the most common and significant examples of a nudge is an imprint of an image of a housefly in a men’s urinal.
The effectiveness of nudging
Nudging is a concept that more often than not involves adding friction to any preferable option by the marketer but an unfavourable option for the user. It, therefore, needs a lot of skill to make an unfavourable act look favourable and encouraging to the users.
They should ideally not be annoyed with such acts or a nudge so much so that they leave the site quickly. This will eventually result in a loss of traffic, a prospect and sales volume.
The primary aim of a web developer during including a nudge in their designing concept is to make the people take an action just as desired by the site or the business owner and not the readers.
As for an example consider a situation where the elevator in an office building that comes only after every 60 seconds. This means:
- Users will have to wait for a minute after pressing the button for the elevator to come down.
- If they do not want to wait for that long a time or are in a hurry, they will be more inclined if not forced to take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator.
This is the trick of nudging forcing them to choose a healthier and more preferable option to go up.
Influence friction in product management
If you are keen to know about nudging and its usefulness and want to use it in your future marketing campaigns, you can follow different articles and blogs on the internet or read the book Work Rules by Laszlo Bock.
You will find some very useful information about how brilliantly Google has used nudging in their practices that has forced its employees to take healthier snacks available in the company kitchens.
One of the most significant tricks that they followed was storing candies in opaque containers. This enabled them to stock it in the kitchens yet keep it hidden from the view of the employees.
On the other hand, they stored fresh fruits in glass containers making them clearly visible and appealing to the employees.
This created intentional friction that helped them to change the behaviour of the employees. How they started to consume fresh fruits instead of those sugary candies that resulted in an afternoon sugar crash more often than not.
The nest result of such an intentional nudging came in different forms of benefits such as:
- Employees started to choose healthier snacks
- It reduced the chances of absenteeism due to sickness
- It improved their overall wellbeing
- It increased their productivity and
- It increased the business revenue of Google.
However, in order to be successful and ensure better production management and volume, nudging must keep in mind the benefit of the people you are serving.
Selling with friction
Friction is the most useful thing in business marketing as it is in science. However, there is a little difference in the approaches. In science, it is the friction that you need to overcome in order to move in your desired way but in business marketing, it is the friction that forces you to go the other, often beneficial, way.
Friction is therefore used extensively by growth hackers and marketers to generate leads. Nudging creates the best and most effective frictions.
Two significant frictions or nudges in the business marketing sector are:
- The push notifications that promote upgrade options and
- The newsletter signup popup covering the content itself that the users are willing to read.
If you have a clear idea of your buyer persona, and are operating with them in mind, these types of frictions are very easy to measure the efficacy of such methods. All you have to do is to look at and analyze the conversion rates.
However, at all times you must make sure that this type of nudging or friction does not distract the user from the actual path of conversion or frustrate them so that they leave your site.
This will not serve any of your purposes whether it is to increase traffic to your site or sales.
In order to target the right users, you will need to choose the right amount of friction. This is also very important for the offboarding process as well.
For example, when a user wants to unsubscribe from the newsletter or cancel a membership, asking for extra confirmations will clearly communicating the consequences of the actions they want to take.
This eventually will be helpful for the use but, needless to say, too much cancellation friction will create a dark pattern that needs to be avoided.
Perhaps the best way to nudge your web design so that it reaches the right users is to include user-generated content.
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