Posted by: Daniel Levis
October 1, 2008
Issue #514

Buckets of the mind –
how prejudice and preconception
can make you RICH …

Dear Web Business-Builder,

Have you noticed just how jaded and biased you’ve become toward what shows up in your e-mail in-box these days?

Before you even open an e-mail, you’ve already formed an opinion about the sender … the value of the message … and the motive behind it.

And assuming you do open that message and read it, you don’t read it with an open mind, but simply to confirm your suspicions.

I’ve caught myself doing this dozens of times and been completely oblivious to doing so hundreds more.

We generalize, slotting things arbitrarily in what I call “buckets of the mind,” relating them to anchors that have been set by past experience. In essence, we see what we expect to see.

The “from line” sets our expectation. And that expectation colors everything we read from that point forward. We mentally label the sender, and that label actually clouds our critical discrimination and judgment.

And once we imprint that label, it tends to stick. The first impression your prospects form about you as a seller acts as a filter through which everything you do from that point forward must flow. At best it gives you a halo, at worst, horns.

What’s really interesting about all this is that your market’s perception of you is forcefully impacted by what happens just before you make that initial impression. In fact, each experience we have as human beings tends to prime us for the next.

The power of priming …

There is a famous study called the “warm/cold variable” that demonstrates how powerful an influence priming can be. In that study, conducted by Howard H. Kelley at MIT in 1950, a substitute teacher was introduced to two different classes of economics students.

The first class received an introduction containing the phrase “people who know him consider him to be a very warm person, industrious, critical, practical and determined.”

The second group of students heard the phrase “people who know him consider him to be a rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical and determined.”

Otherwise, the introductions were identical, as were the evaluation forms passed out at the end of the class.

Upon reviewing the completed evaluations, Kelley found the class to which the substitute teacher was introduced as being “very warm” loved him.

The students to which he was introduced as being “rather cold” found him arrogant and obnoxious. Two words primed their experience, and made all the difference.

Same guy. Different bucket.

In other experiments, researchers have further analyzed the impact of priming. Dan Ariely in his incredible book, Predictably Irrational, points to a particularly interesting study where the experiment’s subjects thought they were participating in two unrelated studies.

First, they were asked to unscramble sets of words into sentences that dealt with money.

And then in the second, supposedly unrelated experiment, they were observed by the researchers completing various tasks in a group setting.

Compared to a control group who had not been primed to think about money before being asked to complete the tasks, these subjects were much more competitive.

They behaved more selfishly, displayed greater self-reliance, and tended to select tasks that required individual effort rather than teamwork.

In another experiment, one group of Asian-American women were asked questions that elicited answers that focused their attention on their gender. The researchers then asked another group of Asian-American women questions that drew attention to their race.

The study was designed to measure the influence of stereotypes on behavior. So the next phase of the experiment was a math test. And sure enough, the women who had been primed for “race” did much better than those who had been primed for “gender.”

In the same way, researchers influenced people to become aggressive and impatient, passive and polite, even tired and lethargic, all through priming and the power of suggestion.

What’s happening here?

Why people are so wonderfully suggestible …

Both of these phenomena are tied to something called implicit memory.

Implicit memory is the process that allows you to tie your shoes, drive a car, and behave acceptably in social situations.

You don’t have conscious awareness of the hundreds of steps you execute in order to complete these tasks. They are completely automatic.

Listening to someone talk is a great example. ..

You don’t realize it, but when you listen to someone speak, many of the words are actually completely unintelligible. If you were to hear those words in isolation you simply would not know what they were.

You understand them only because you are expecting to hear them as part of a grammatical sentence that’s similar to one you’ve heard before. Until now, you probably had no awareness you were decoding the words in that way. And that’s just one of hundreds of discrete skills that go into that activity.

Implicit memory is active 24/7 and influencing your every behavior. Without your knowing it, your sub-conscious mind is recording, processing, and reacting to everything.

What does this mean to you,
dear e-mail marketer?

From a big picture standpoint, it means you need to be doing everything you can to prime your audience to view you as a trusted advocate.

It means framing your sales messages as valuable content.

And it means communicating your genuine interest in your prospect’s success.

By doing these things, especially with the first few e-mails you send out to a new subscriber, you anchor yourself in a beneficial bucket within your prospect’s minds, typecasting yourself as one of the good guys.

And from a day to day standpoint, as you’re writing copy to send out to your list, it’s important to realize that you’re not just working to motivate your prospects to click through to the next step in your sales funnel. You’re priming them to behave in certain ways once they do!

Too many marketers tend to measure things in isolation. They measure open rates, and they measure click through rates, and they measure conversion rates on the pages they send traffic to, without sufficient respect for how these stats are impacted by one another.

There is a big difference between simply getting someone to click on a link, and priming them optimally to buy on the page you are referring them to. It’s useful to consider open rates and click through rates and all of the rest of it, but you can’t deposit any of these things in your bank account.

Implicit memory and priming have a dramatic impact on conversion. And that impact is not always measurable or even readily apparent until a campaign has fully played out. Sometimes it is impossible to measure.

For example, a person is much more likely to believe a familiar idea than an unfamiliar one, regardless of whether that person has conscious memory of how that idea got into their head. Implanting that idea takes place each time the person comes in contact with your marketing whether an action is taken or not.

Repeated exposure to you and your ideas even where you fail to record stellar conversion numbers can sometimes yield a better bottom line result than less frequent exposure with stellar results.

An anecdotal case study …

As you’re probably aware, I do a lot of teleseminar selling. I have tried a number of different approaches to getting people to sign up for a teleseminar, actually attend that teleseminar, and buy stuff as a result of it. And I’ll share some interesting statistics with you …

My usual approach to promoting a teleseminar is with three different e-mails, each one driving people to a simple, static (text and graphics only) squeeze page. Conversion is usually spectacular. 50% to 75% of visitors sign up for the teleseminar.

But not surprisingly, click through tends to fall off with each successive mailing.  It becomes increasingly difficult to get people to visit the squeeze page. After all three mailings, usually I’ll have around 600 people registered for the teleseminar.

Recently I tried something a little different.

 Again I used three different e-mails, but this time directing people to three different video-based squeeze pages. The video squeeze pages converted poorly, at just 24%. However, as you might guess, it was much easier to get people to click through from the e-mails, since each one led to a different piece of content. The novelty of video probably didn’t hurt either.

All said and done, about twice as many people clicked through as compared to the first approach. And the end result was about 500 people registered.

At that stage I was tempted to say, OK looks like about six of one and a baker’s dozen of the other. But here’s where it got interesting …

On the day of the teleseminar I was shocked to discover a MASSIVE increase in attendance with the second approach.

Of the 600 odd people who signed up for the first teleseminar, only around 100 showed up. That’s about what I expected.

Of the 500 people who signed up for the second teleseminar however, 145 showed up!

Now you can argue that this wasn’t a scientific split test scenario and that any number of variables could have come together to impact the results and you would be right. But I don’t believe that was the case.

I have run dozens of teleseminars and these results were absolutely ABMORMAL.

I’m convinced the differentiating factor was good old fashioned priming, the result of increased exposure to the presenter and the presenter’s ideas prior to the teleseminar.

And the exciting thing about this is that it occurred over a relatively short period of time. You don’t always have to wait for branding to occur.

As direct response Web marketers, I think sometimes we tend have a hit and run mentality. And therefore discount the enormous leverage available to us through branding, simply because it’s difficult to measure in dollars and cents.

This column is a great example. The leads that come in through the link in my byline on their own probably don’t justify the significant time and effort I put into writing this column each week.

My gut feeling though is that I’m compensated incredibly well, because being seen in such wonderful company typecasts me favorably, creates additional selling opportunities, and pushes many sales over the edge that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
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6 Comments »

1. Comment by Sandra Wilson — October 1, 2008 @ 12:13 pm

   Mr. Levis,

   Thank you for giving me something very interesting to think about.  If I understood correctly, it’s a matter of pointing out what belief or stereotype you want someone to focus on.  Then that focusing will lead to a certain reaction based upon what our beliefs are.  Interesting.

2. Comment by Caleb Osborne — October 1, 2008 @ 12:18 pm

   Daniel,

   You’re absolutely right about branding and imprinting.

   I just got back from Perry Marshall’s Autoresponder seminar and this was one of the topics we discussed… question for you:

   What is your process/methodology for imprinting yourself as a trustable, credible figure in your prospects mind?

   ie. What are you trying to accomplish with AR message 1, message 2, message 3… do you have a specific formula you follow?

   Would be interested to hear your take on this…

   Later
   Caleb

3. Comment by Blake — October 1, 2008 @ 12:24 pm

   Hi Daniel,I find your posts fascinating. They’re always full of interesting psychological tidbits. Do you have any favorite publications that you can recommend for more of the same?Thanks for all the articles.

4. Comment by Robert Nomura — October 1, 2008 @ 12:31 pm

   Daniel - good point. I wrote some similar a few days ago on my blog. I like your last two paragraphs… "… The leads that come in through the link in my byline on their own probably don’t justify the significant time and effort I put into writing this column each week….My gut feeling … I’m compensated incredibly well, because being seen in such wonderful company typecasts me favorably, creates additional selling opportunities, and pushes many sales over the edge that wouldn’t have otherwise happened"

   I agree that it does take a lot of time. Not easy to track. But it does push sales over the edge that wouldn’t have happened…

5. Comment by Gerold Bigorajski — October 1, 2008 @ 1:33 pm

   He, he  ;-)

   Using the described methods right away and two comments later being asked about how they were used … — whether that’s irony pure or not, anyway it’s one that comes under the heading ‘Smart & Clever’.

   Funny enough this unconcisous approach governs 95% of at least 80% of all the people you know. The so to say ‘react’ in a very predictable though irrational way to given buttons you only need to push. Theses buttons may be certain words, images or less usually actions.

   Of course everybody has his own ‘unconcious mind’ containing certain incidents, but isn’t it rather interesting that there seem to be certain buttons common to all mankind.

   You aren’t told of them, but be sure they do exist. And they are used for mass control purposes by Marketing & PR, mass media etc. day after day after day and yield absolutely predictable results.

   Everybody else but you, hmm? Don’t be sulky or insulted — even Clayton admitted he caught himself in that trap time after time.

   Put in other and more drastic words: The person in front of you usually is in a kind of hypnotic state. Using the right buttons you can urge them to do virtually anything. B.t.w. that’s the reason why ‘Buy … now!’ campaigns work to some degree. The guys simply are not in present time but somewhere (or better sometimes) else.

   It actually takes a darn good job of rolled up sleeves to get a person to awareness and really recognizing/realizing and understanding what’s going on around him or her.

   However — as e.g. Clayton’s last week’s post showed, we — we all — have been fooled around a bit too often. So maybe a question more worthy to be asked is not ‘Which buttons do I use to utilize that quasi-hypnotic state to increase my sales?’ but ‘How to I shift people up to awareness of what’s really going on around them?’

   Believe me: If you manage to do so people will trust you and come back to you as long as you’re not overtly trying to betray them.

   Gerold

6. Comment by The Rabbi of Response — October 21, 2008 @ 4:23 pm

   Daniel,

   Brilliant article.

   I found a very informative site that allows me to better understand human nature.

   If you can get past some of the terminology that will be unfamiliar to you, you will definitely appreciate the value of this site as a marketing consultant and copywriter.

   The site presents sophisticated concepts and insights to human nature, to a highly sophisticated audience. The beauty of it is that it’s delivered in a very simple and easy to understand format.

   To check it out visit http://www.TheShmuz.com

   Warmly,

   The Rabbi of Response