← Insights Unlocked
Insights Unlocked
Every (buying) decision is emotional with Talia Wolf
00:30:22
Learn how Talia Wolf uses emotional targeting to boost conversion rate optimization by connecting with customer emotions that drive decisions.
Loading summary
Transcript33 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, I'm joined by Talia Wolf, founder of Get Uplift and author of Emotional Targeting. We dive into why emotions, not just tactics, are the real drivers of customer decisions, how to break free from the CRO hamster wheel, and ways to create digital experiences that truly connect. It's packed with insights you can put to work right away. Enjoy the show.
- [00:29]
B
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
- [00:49]
A
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal content marketing manager at User Testing, and our guest today is Talia Wolf. Talia is the founder of GetUplift and a recognized expert in conversion optimization. She's known for her work helping teams better understand what really drives their customers by focusing on emotional connection over tactics. She's the author of the recently published book Emotional Targeting. Welcome to the show, Talia.
- [01:16]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [01:18]
A
Thank you.
- [01:19]
C
I get excited whenever someone says an anofa. I'm like, oh, my God, I actually did it.
- [01:24]
A
That is. That is. I. And, you know, I'm a former journalist, and every former journalist thinks that they can write a book. And, you know, 20 years later, I'm still thinking, I could write a book. So anybody who writes a book, you know, big, small, you know, bestseller or not, I. It's an accomplishment and something that, you know, like, you move on, a hundred years from now, they will still say you were the author of this book.
- [01:54]
C
So, wow. Hopefully people will still be talking about that.
- [01:57]
A
Yeah, well, in some contexts, some, you know, there'll be like some hipster at some shop in the space age will be like, hey, man, I found this copy of this book at this use. This is what they used to read from. Or something like that paper. Yeah, look at this. We can use it for Fire Starter. Anyway, you've spent a lot of time helping companies move beyond tactics to understand the real motivations behind why people buy. Can you take us back to how you first became interested in this emotional side of conversion optimization?
- [02:33]
C
Yes, absolutely. Thank you. So I would probably say that it was back when I was working in a social media marketing agency, and my role was essentially driving traffic. Traffic in terms of just likes engagements on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, back then. And one of the things that I was really curious about was, okay, great, we're getting all these likes, we're getting comments and stuff, but what exactly you Know what exactly is our impact on a business? And most companies, most of our clients had no idea. So I kind of went on this journey of trying to figure out what that looks like and kind of implementing Google Analytics for them, trying to figure out what's going on. Oh, we have no impact. And then trying to just play around with stuff. I wonder if I change the call of a call to action button, if I change this image, if I move this element, if I reduce a form field, what will happen? And that's kind of how I got to know conversion rate optimization. I had no idea it was even a thing until I started kind of diving into it. So back then there were really almost you know, no one was doing it. There was like one or two agencies in the world and it was, it was incredible. I mean, just getting to figure that, oh, okay, I can actually have a real impact and help these businesses. Um, yeah, just generate more sales and also help them grow. Um, and as I created my own framework for optimization, it meant even more to me because it wasn't just about, okay, how do I get more people to buy. It was how do I help people who are on the Internet trying to solve some problems, actually find the problems, the solvers to their problems. Um, yeah, so that, that was a big piece for me.
- [04:48]
A
It's like the most important part of everything, closing the deal. You've spoken a lot about the difference between tactical tweaks and strategic customer focused optimization. What tends to hold teams back from making that shift and where should they begin if they want to change their approach?
- [05:06]
C
Well, I think we need to understand that most of us are kind of stuck on a hamster wheel. Right. I like to call it the deadly hamster wheel of optimization. We are, are, you know, we gotta deliver, we gotta get these results. And we go into Google Analytics and we discover that our product page isn't converting, that our homepage, that our landing page isn't working. And we get stuck in tactics, which means we're googling for best practices. We're reverse engineering what some person said on LinkedIn. We're copying off competitors because we think that they know what they're doing. And we're really just all sounding the same and doing the same. And the reason we're kind of stuck in tactics is because we don't have a good strategy. We don't really know what changes we need to make in order to increase conversions. How do I know when looking at a page why this is happening? Google Analytics tells you where the problem is, but it doesn't tell you what led to this problem, what's preventing people from actually converting. And it makes it really hard. Um, and I would say that building a strategy, knowing how to deploy a strategy is much harder than just using tactics. So I think that that is where we all start in just trying to quickly kind of put a band aid on stuff and do some quick fixes. A. Because it takes much less time than now doing some deep, deep research. And don't forget that most of us aren't living in our own bubble. We also have people around us. So our colleagues, our managers, everyone's expecting to deliver, to give us results, to, you know, go, go, go, go, go. So suddenly having to say, hey, by the way, Nathan, I'm just going to take a breather here. I'm not going to run some tests for a while, and I'm going to really dive into building a strategy out, and then it will be worth it. A lot of people just, you know, it's too risky and it feels like something you can't do.
- [07:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, that's true of, like, all the strategies. Right. Taking the time to, you know, slow down, to speed up, but not sure you're taking the right approach. And I think that kind of leads us to the next question, really, about. Because you don't know you're creating a strategy, you don't have a framework. And let's get into the question here, which is your emotional targeting framework highlights something we don't always talk about in digital experiences, which is how people feel. Why do you think emotion has been overlooked in Croatia? And what's the risk of ignoring it?
- [07:43]
C
Okay, so the risk, I think, is kind of obvious. The risk is if you're not actually applying this part into your CRO process, your conversion optimization process, you're actually never going to get the results that you want. And now I'll back up and I'll explain why. When we're trying to figure out how to optimize a page, we jump to tactics. And we've just mentioned all the different things we could be doing that are putting it us on a hamster wheel. But when I started out in conversion optimization, one of the biggest things that I understood is that if I want to impact the customer journey and I want to drive more sales, I actually need to understand how people make decisions. Because at the end of the day, a conversion is a decision that someone made. Every time someone buys from you, you're calling it a conversion. They've made a huge decision, and it doesn't Matter if, you know, they're buying a watch or they're buying email marketing software. It's all a decision that they had to make. So for me, the biggest part of figuring out a good conversion optimization process, because I actually made all these mistakes, I was tactical. I only thought about, like button colors, red versus blue. But once I dove into, okay, how do people actually make decisions? What motivates people? And I uncovered. And this isn't me making something up. So this is not like I discovered this new thing. No, this has been like, everyone knows this for hundreds of years. Every single decision that we make in life is based on emotion. Emotions drive our decisions, whether we want to admit it or not. It was Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist researcher, that said we're not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think. So without emotion, we actually lack the ability to make emotion, any kind of decision in life. And if you want to create a customer experience that gets people to say yes, you have to understand their emotions. And those emotions mean, how are they feeling right now? What are their pains? What are their challenges? What's waking them up in the middle of the night? And also, how do they want to feel after finding a solution about themselves? How do they want other people to think about them? There's all sorts of emotions at play. And it's only when they, when you do that work and you uncover those emotional triggers is when you can look at a page and clearly see, oh my gosh, we're using the wrong language. We are, you know, using the wrong testimonials. We're telling stories no one cares about because then it's so much easier to like to really see the problem. So if you're not using emotion, you're actually missing a huge component to increasing conversions, and you're always going to be on that hamster wheel.
- [10:40]
A
Can you think of a company or an example where they've, they've kind of where that clicked, where they hit, that they understood the emotional triggers of their buyers. And it just like did wonders from, you know, before and after.
- [10:56]
C
Well, I mean, obviously we've been doing this for many, many, many years. So we have countless examples of clients from e Commerce to B2B, SaaS, publishers. We've really worked on everything. I would say that when you think about it, the biggest brands in the world think Adidas, Nike, Lego, Coca Cola. They, you know, it's easy to say, well, they're big brands, they have a lot of money, they have deep pockets, but honestly, they didn't wait to have deep pockets to start using emotion. It was natural to them from the first thing for us, almost every client we've worked with, even let's say as an example, just because I love using quote unquote, like, if you're listening and not watching, I'm doing the air quotes like boring products. Because people are like, well, of course when you buy a watch, it's emotional. So one of my favorite examples is a Q and A software. So it's basically software that helps QA engineers do QA analysis. Right? Super kind of boring, you would say. No emotion involved. The company engaged us. I get Uplift to help them increase conversions with their entire customer journey. And they had some decent traffic and they had some decent conversions, but it wasn't getting where they wanted to go. And one of the most amazing insights that we uncovered working with this company was that QA analyzers or analysts actually find, how would I say this? They basically felt redundant in the company. They felt that they were a nuisance. Everyone we spoke to would say something along the lines of like, I do super important work. I prevent huge bugs, huge complaints from company, you know, from, from cl. And yet every time I do something, everyone rolls their eyes, everyone's annoyed with me. I'm stopping them from that huge core launch they're all waiting for. I'm a nuisance to most people. And that's a huge, you know, revelation of like, okay, yes, of course they, they care about pricing and of course they care about technology and the features and that it's powered by AI. But after they've done that check and they've seen that our client and its competitor have the same feature or less, same pricing bracket, how do they make that decision? How do they choose whether they're going to go with my clients or they're going to go with the competitor? And the way they did that is by connecting on an emotional level. We started actually highlighting the fact that when you start using this product, people are going to notice you. People are going to understand what the work that you do, people are going to appreciate the work that you do. And that's that emotional connection. And that changed everything for this company. So it's just a cool way of showing that it's, you know, it's not a flashy headline. It's weaving emotion throughout the pages, throughout the emails, throughout ads calling out that thing that we know you're struggling with, which in this case was everyone thinks you're a nuisance and you're bothering people or at Least that's how they felt. So using language that says, look, everyone's going to finally understand what the heck it is that you're doing and appreciate it is what got more conversions.
- [14:33]
A
I like that. The when, when you're peeling back that onion, when you're trying to discover what these emotional triggers are. When you're auditing a digital experience, how do you recommend teams go beyond the checklist and use, you know, that firsthand user insights to identify disconnects in their messaging or in their ux?
- [14:55]
C
I love this question because when you think about a conversion optimization audit, I think almost always our go to is something along the lines of, okay, do a heuristic analysis, look at the heat maps, look at recordings. Do you have two buttons? Do you have one button? Do you have a carousel? Do you not? That's kind of like the go to. When we do an emotional targeting audit. One of the first things that we do after we've done the research and we've kind of started to see the patterns of the different emotions, we ask ourselves some very specific basic questions, like, are they making it about themselves or the customer? So if you're reading for a page, how many times do you mention yourself? Are you focused on how you know the solution works and its features, or are they highlighting the outcomes that prospects really care about? Right. So we ask ourselves a set of strategic questions like, can prospects clearly see their pains reflected in every stage of the customer journey? Can. Are your. Are there images and the visuals and the colors all amplifying the emotional message? Can people clearly see what the emotional outcome is? What's in it for them? These are, you know, typical questions that we'll ask ourselves that aren't the, you know, how many form fields do they have? Is there a bug? Because we all know, we already know, everyone knows you need to do this stuff, but it's the strategic pieces that matter. So asking yourself those questions on whether you know, who's the focus on, what are you highlighting? What are the outcomes that you're promising? Does everything work together as a whole? Because it's not just copy. It's the colors, it's the visuals, it's everything all together. It's your menu on the website. So I would say that those are important questions to ask.
- [17:00]
A
When there's, when it feels like everything's needs to be optimized, you know, from your web pages to the copy to the funnel. How do you recommend teams decide where to focus first, especially when resources are limited?
- [17:16]
C
I think that's a great question. Because A, let's be frank here. Not everyone can test. And I think a lot of the times when we think about conversion optimization, the immediate assumption is, oh, AB testing. But not everyone can a B test. If you don't have at least 300 conversions a month of the same conversion, chances are you probably can't run a statistically significant test. But that doesn't mean that you can't experiment and it doesn't mean that you can't AB test. What it means is that you have to be a lot more intentful about the tests that you're running and you have to be a lot more focused and zero in on problem solving. If I am Amazon or I'm booking.com I can test the shade of an orange color, okay, because I will get results. But if I'm a, I don't know, yoga teacher or a developer, or I'm a psychologist or I run a coaching program or a course, or if I am an E commerce brand, then I don't always have that amount of traffic. Let's be honest, most of us don't. How do you actually have an impact when you're running tests? It's when you go big. Now when I say go big, I don't mean, oh, completely redesign your homepage. I mean, that's hard to get buy in for. But problem solving is a big thing. So what I would encourage you to do is instead of asking what changes, what elements should I change on a page to increase conversions? What I would ask you is what problem can I solve? And that means if you know from Google Analytics that you know your product page isn't working, instead of asking Google best practices for product pages, I would audit the page from a strategic lens, asking myself all the questions we just mentioned and then say, okay, my hypothesis is that when people come to this page, they cannot clearly see the emotional outcome they're looking for. And then you can arrange an entire meaningful AB test or experiment around that hypothesis, which could mean copy. It could mean, it could mean changing an image, it could mean changing ads, it could mean testing ideas in an email. But it's a lot more specific to I'm trying to solve a problem. If I increase conversions, that's wonderful. If I don't, I'm still going to learn from this test. I'm still going to figure out, okay, this was the emotional outcome that my prospects were looking for or this isn't. And that's kind of what you should always be thinking about is how can I learn from this test? Because if you don't have all these resources to run tests all the time. You want to make sure that when you do run a test, when you do make a big change, you can actually take the insights from this test and use it all over your marketing and not just say, oh, I guess I'll change my button to blue. Now.
- [20:28]
A
There's a lot of buzz around AI right now, especially in marketing and optimization. How do you see AI fitting into or even challenging the more human, emotionally driven approach to CRO that you advocate for?
- [20:43]
C
Well, I think, you know, there's two ways you can use AI right now and probably, I guess, I guess it's always going to be like this, right? You can either use it to outsource all of your thinking for you. What a lot of marketers are doing right now is applying it to right content. That's kind of the go to so you can outsource all of your thinking to AI, or you can use AI to brainstorm to find insights, to hone your existing skills and to take yourself to the next level. I mention this because if you go into ChatGPT and you say, I have a product page that needs optimization, my audience is. And you put in all the behavioral data that you have, age, geographical location, gender, device, browser that they're using, maybe you have the role that they play at a company and you say, you know, give me ideas for optimization. You're going to get a lot of garbage recommendations that you're going to get the blanket statements of everything it can comb through on the web. And as a reminder, AI is only as good as what it's seeing online. So everyone's seeing the same garbage and everyone ends up sounding the same, looking the same, and no one can tell the difference between you and your competitor. Or you could do emotional targeting research, you could uncover the real why behind people's decision making process, why they buy from you. And you can go into ChatGPT and say, Hey, I have a product page that needs optimization. My audience is motivated by self image. They're feeling 1, 2 and 3. They want to feel X, Y and Z. We've tried this and this, they've tried this. This is why it hasn't worked. And you pour in all of the meaningful information that you have about your customers and then you say, give me some ideas or I'm thinking about X, Y and Z. That is when AI becomes powerful. That's when AI gives you real, meaningful something that you can work with that isn't generic. So garbage in, garbage out. The more you put into it, the better. And I really do think that, you know, obviously at Get Uplift, we are using AI, but what we're doing it for is plugging in all the research that we're doing for our clients into NotebookLM, into Claude, into Perplexity, into ChatGPT, to the different products in order to pull meaningful insights and brainstorm and think and come up with ideas and also feed everyone in the organization with more knowledge about their customers, which is huge. Right? Think about it. Right now, let's say as marketers, we're just kind of reacting, we're doing some tests, we're feeding ourselves. Great. But imagine if you ran an experiment that literally told you exactly why people buy, or the biggest reason people don't buy for me, what's preventing them? You could actually give that to the sales team, you could give it to the product team, you could help product marketing. Everyone in the organization could have that information and you could do that with AI. So it's just about leveraging AI in the right way, less as a crutch and more as a tool that empowers you.
- [24:16]
A
And you know, AI is definitely a trending sort of tool that we're using right now. But in CRO, we've seen this in the past too, right? We've had, you know, the personalized landing pages and stuff like that, minimalism. And now we're talking about AI. What's, what's something that never goes out of style when it's, when we're talking about creating experiences that convert.
- [24:41]
C
I, I'll say what I say in my book. Technology changes, people don't. So, yeah, I mean, there's always going to be something new. There's always going to be some new shiny object or tool or technology that we need to catch up and to use and to try. And I think the more you follow people on LinkedIn or anywhere, you also feel that like FOMO and maybe you're feeling inadequate and you're feeling like you're not doing your job, but I really want to like say this loud and clear. You can't use these tools unless you have strategy behind it, unless you know your customers problems and their pains and their hesitations and their concerns and their desired outcomes and how they want to feel. All of this is rubbish. You have to use everything, any tool that comes up, not as a crutch, but as a tool to empower your knowledge. Your superpower should be knowing your customers. Once you have that, then you can use any tool and any technology. But imagine, let's go back to like the landing page builders, right? Or the automated landing pages or now AI can build landing pages in one minute, whatever. That's wonderful. But someone still has to tell that landing page builder, that tool, what is going to convert, what messages should go there, what visuals should go there, what the customer journey should look like. If it's just generic stuff, you're just going to get a generic page. And I think, yeah, like strategy, strategy, strategy. So technology changes, people don't.
- [26:21]
A
I really think that's the answer for this following question too. I'll ask it anyway, see if we get a different answer. But maybe I'll just cut it all out, who knows? But for leaders who are trying to build this customer focused culture, especially across product UX or with marketing teams, what's one step that they can take to start making optimization a more human centered practice?
- [26:47]
C
Here's what I would say. We're all full of good intentions and we have great ideas and we all want to be super strategic. But at the end of the day we don't live in a bubble as I mentioned. And a lot of the times there's a lot of politics. You have to get buy in. You have to bring everyone along for the journey. It's not that you're working in a silo. So if you're a leader that needs to get everyone on the same page, I would say here's two steps I would go for step number one, do the research. Don't ask for permission to do the actual research. You don't need permission to do emotional targeting research to uncover those emotions. Then run an experiment. And when I say run an experiment, I'm not saying redesign your homepage. I'm saying let's say you've uncovered that the top three pains that lead people to your website are X, Y and Z. Send out an email about each pain. One email about X, one email about pain, you know, pain, Y and see how many opens, how many clicks, how many conversions. And then your third step would be hey team, hey manager. Here's what I've uncovered. I did this research to uncover my customers emotional triggers. We uncovered this. Here's what, what we uncovered. Here's what we're saying on our website to test this out. I ran a test on our ads, on our emails on a landing page. Here's what I discovered. That is so such a better way to get buy in than to pitch a full redesign or go up to two people on the team and go, okay, I'm ready to like change everything. We've ever done. So yeah, I would say approach it strategically and step by step. And a lot of this, you don't need budgets and you don't need permission to do the hard work. You just have to do the hard work.
- [28:51]
A
I love it. I love every bit of this. Thank you for so much for being on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation. How does someone learn more about you, the new book, your thought leadership and the work you're doing over at Get Uplift?
- [29:06]
C
Well, obviously you can get the book emotional targeting, win hearts, boost sales, own the market at any store, obviously Amazon and stuff. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or on Instagram and you can find all of my tutorials and workshops and webinars and whatever guides, blah blah blah on getuplift Co. That's my website.
- [29:32]
A
And you also, you have a YouTube channel too, I saw, right?
- [29:35]
C
Is that I do. I have a YouTube channel that we upload all sorts of like just quick shorts with tips.
- [29:45]
A
All right, perfect. Hey, I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
- [29:49]
C
Thank you.
- [29:50]
B
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already, don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play, so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.