As soon as you think about it, it’s obvious that neuroscience and marketing share a lot of ground. Neuroscience tries to understand how the brain functions and how it responds to sensory inputs. Marketing uses text, video and audio content to try and influence behaviour.
And so we worked with professional Neuromarketer Katie Hart to design and run a unique experiment so we could understand the potential power of Neuromarketing.
Isn’t this a bit… unethical?
Deliberately crafting messages in order to poke different bits of the reader’s brain, in ways that they may not consciously register, sounds a little bit Black Mirror, right?
The thing is, your emails, social posts, paid ads etc., are doing this anyway. That’s how brains work! By researching and understanding the process, we are not doing much differently than choosing a button colour that gets a better response.
If anything, this can represent a positive change. There’s a growing movement that rejects “negative marketing”, or marketing which plays on negative emotions like fear. When we know which emotions our content is triggering, we can steer away from the negatives and focus on excitement and positive interest instead.
What were we looking for?
While in theory, you could use Neuromarketing to design the perfect email for each individual recipient, in practice that remains too labour-intensive right now.
Therefore, in the experiment, we recruited our test subjects so we could draw conclusions about broad groups. We looked at Sales people and Marketing people, we looked at male and female participants, and we separated out 4 levels of seniority (Directors, Managers, Executives, and Interns). The first and last of these are ways in which we already segment our data for lead generation purposes, while the male-female split was an interesting new avenue.
What did we find?
You’ll have to read the full report to find out!
In short, though, it takes surprisingly small changes to make a big difference in the brain’s immediate reaction to your emails and landing pages. Something as minor as the gender of the person in your stock image has a profound effect on how exciting, engaging or challenging your message is to your readers.
If your current marketing platform isn’t set up to let you test different versions easily, speak to us!
