Persuasion Architecture

Persuadability is the capacity that an online presence has for causing a user to take action and become a subscriber, lead or customer.

The Spanish acronym “persuabilidad” is made up of the terms “usabilidad” (usability) and persuasion. Usability is the discipline which facilitates user access to the content of a website and persuasion is the process through which people can be guided to adopt an idea, attitude or action through rational arguments and emotional factors.

Key elements

7 key elements have been defined for assessing a website’s level of persuadability:

1. Positioning: how a website is positioned and differentiates itself from the competition.
2. Credibility and reliability: what elements a website uses to generate the necessary level of trust in the user so that he believes what it is telling him.
3. The architecture of persuasion: how, through a website’s architecture, each page attempts to achieve an objective.
4. Content and functions: what elements users need to convince themselves that a specific product or service is the one they need.
5. Copy: how to draft a website text so that each word manages to persuade.
6. Calls to action: if each page has an objective, the call to action is the key which should lead to it.
7. Sensation of urgency: how certain marketing techniques are applied to lead to action at that point.

Measurement and persuadability

Persuadability focuses on results: increasing rates of conversion.

Conversion rates indicate the percentage of users who enter the website and finish the process it proposes: whether this is purchasing a product, making a donation, filling in a registration form, etc. As a result, measurement tools are the key to measuring the success of persuadability.

Measurement tools like Google Analytics or Google Website Optimizer – to perform multi-variable tests – help us to learn more about how the users behave on websites. Thanks to these tools, we can glean very useful information on the users of a website: where they come from, what key words they use to reach the site, what links interest them most or where they leave the site.

This data is analyzed to identify the problem and find a solution with one clear objective: increasing conversion rates.