#105 How People Make Choices with Daniel Burstein

What this episode covers

Have you recently asked How people make choices? No matter what you are engaged in, marketing, teaching, consulting, this question applies. How people make choices is exactly what the MECLABS Institute studies. Daniel Burstein is their Senior Director of Content. How People Make Choices - A Master Class for Marketers MECLABS Institute was founded about 20 years ago, by Flint McGlaughlin. He saw an opportunity to understand how people make choices with the growth of the internet. Back in the late 90s, it was pretty embryonic! Flint saw the internet not just as a way to communicate, but as essentially a living laboratory. That's because in real-time you can monitor a customer's decisions. Then see what changes you can make to affect those decisions. Using that knowledge, learn how you can best serve those customers. Who are MECLABS Institute? MECLABS Institute has completed over 20,000 marketing path experiments. They conduct theses experiments with research partners who are Fortune 500 companies and small start-ups who have the traffic to do that. They publish findings into how people make choices in Marketing Sherpa and Marketing Experiments. https://www.marketingsherpa.com https://marketingexperiments.com MECLABS takes a very evidence based approach. To understand how people make choices, you have to battle what Daniel calls "marketer's gut". We all have it. I think this will work. I think that's going to work. As opposed to listening and researching how customers actually make their decisions and choices. Sometimes you'll be surprised at what works. What works best? Newsletter Ad or a Single Call to Action Email? Daniel described an experiment with a publications business who work with MECLABS, between an ad at the bottom of a newsletter and a single purpose email from their Editor (Download our free report). And at the bottom of the newsletter, here is a banner ad that you can click and download the free report. They did the test at the end of 2017. Daniel had a sense that the direct email would pull far more responses. Earlier this month, they reviewed the responses. One of Daniel's analysts pointed out that counter-intuitively, they did a lot better with those ads in the newsletter. Daniel's golden gut was wrong. So the experiment taught them something about how people make choices. It told them that the ad at the foot of the newsletter worked better so they intend to focus on that as the method for promoting their free report. Your gut can put you in the right direction. But look at the data. Experiment to look at what really works, because sometimes it is surprising. Different audiences perform differently. With some audiences, an email in letter style with one single call to action, will work better than a newsletter. Imagine, there's five to seven articles at the top, then the banner ad at the bottom, maybe another ad too. Maybe 10 calls to action in the entire piece, linked to the content from that publication that they are used to. In other situations, a single call to action email performs better, because it is a direct conversation asking for that one thing. In this case, the audience probably is highly engaged with that newsletter and is highly engaged with that information. Moreover, the reader has got to the bottom of the newsletter!! Do you want to understand Marketing Rules of Thumb? Just tell me what to do. Do I do a GREEN button or a BLUE button? Beware dear reader, there are principles don't follow "best practices". "Best practices are just pooled ignorance" Flint McGlaughlin MECLABS cannot tell you what will work in every situation. What you want to do is to learn from YOUR audience in your situation. Come to all this with a mindset of putting the...

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