Motivation Analysis: The Key to Making Splash Pages that Convert

motivationanalysis-1The brain can process an image in 13 milliseconds—a rate of about 75 frames per second. This means from the moment the user hits your page they are forming impressions about your brand, products or service offerings. Today, most blog posts will offer a few universal strategies for creating splash pages that convert; feature real people, use benefit statements, write pithy headlines, keep important elements above the fold.

The problem with treating strategies as universal is that each audience engages with design and content in a unique way. As a result, there’s no such thing as a universal design that will always offer high conversions. The only data-driven way to create a high converting splash page is to understand the variables associated with the desired behavior (e.g. time on page, engagement, click-thru and conversions etc). Motivation Analysis is a new approach that leverages psychology to accurately measure the variables associated with behavior. Marketers can now collect accurate data about what drives an audience to engage and convert when visiting your splash page.

What is Motivation Analysis?

Motivation Analysis is a technique that quantifiably measures the psychological traits, enduring patterns of behavior, of an audience. Generally, this analysis is aimed at determining the motivating factors driving behavior or key interactions on social media and other digital platforms. For example, the motivation analysis of an audience might reveal that customers are unconventional, analytical, coupon prone and power-hungry. Motivation analysis is primarily a tool used to identify innate drivers of behavior in order to create marketing campaigns that align with a particular audience.  It's a way to predict what type of content and campaigns will resonate with your audience.

Improve Conversion Rates

One great example of how motivation analysis can increase performance of a splash page is our experience working with a company to improve their consumer-facing Q&A website built around product reviews.  We gathered, measured, and compared the motivations of both active users and inactive users on the website.  Our analysis found that active users were much more driven by fun, self-indulgent hedonistic motivations than inactive ones. Thereby determining the driving motivation associated with the desired behavior.

With this insight, our research team recommended the company switch from a standard and plain font to a lively and fun font to prime and trigger users’ hedonistic motivations.

This seems like somewhat simple adjustment, right? The results dramatically exceeded expectations. This simple but informed decision, to make a font change, increased conversions by a staggering 8,800%. While most developers think that small changes will have a small impact, this demonstrations shows that small changes can have a big impact if they trigger the right motivations.

Why did this happen?

Every person has a set of motivations that drive their day-to-day behavior. If your splash page is aligned with your target audience’s motivations, you are able to trigger their motivations. This case study emphasizes both the importance of audience measurement and a failure of a universal strategy. Simply changing the font from a boring font to a fun font had a tremendous impact on conversions, but not because fun fonts yield higher conversion rates than boring fonts. Rather, the people hitting the splash page were specifically motivated to engage because they thought it would be fun. After measuring the psychological profile of the audience, the designers were able to maximize the impact of a great design by leveraging insight about their audience.

Creating successful splash pages is not about implementing changes to mimic companies that have been successful. The key to successful splash pages is having a complete understanding of your audience in order to trigger desired behavior (engagement, conversion, sales etc.). This is just one example of an intuitive way that marketers and designers are applying insight derived from motivation analysis to improve campaigns.

MotiveMetrics leverages motivation analysis to provide marketers with a host of powerful metrics that expose hidden insights about who an audience is and why an audience engages.

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