Design for Conversion started around the idea that some disciplines were more or less in the same business, the business of persuasion. The whole idea was that when you bring those disciplines together beautiful things could happen. I am happy to announce that PersuasionAPI is a first spin-off of our conference. PersuasionAPI, founded by Maurits Kaptein and myself, marks the beginning of a new marketing era. Here’s why. (Disclaimer: this article is written for people that don’t attend DfC)
PersuasionAPI made some fundamental improvements to the old “new marketing era”. What does the tool do? Good question. PersuasionAPI is a learning algorithm that we have enriched with persuasion techniques from established psychology literature. Our API is continuously searching for the most effective offer/message per individual customer. In order to do this the PersuasionAPI has to deploy a lot of smart strategies. Simply put, you can use this API for any website and based on results with other websites your webiste will show an average increase in revenue per customer of over 25%.
AB testing is for pussies
Let me get technical a bit, and you better get used to it, we do not implicitly believe that all of your customers are the same or behave the same over time. Our tool will dynamically adapt product presentations to suit the psychological profile of your customers. The profile is build by monitoring the behavior of customers on your website. Using a classification of product representations allows us to obtain precise estimates of exactly what makes you tick – and buy.*
When an individual isn’t influenced by for example an authority, PersuasionAPI takes note and won’t use this persuasion principle for future presentations. This means your chances of conversion just went up. But from someone with the ambition to win the Fields Medal (Maurits) you might expect more. And more is what you are getting. Because we actually don’t chuck away unsuccessful persuasion principles, very subtly the model keeps trying them out. As said we don’t think customers behave the same over time. I can imagine I lost you with this last effort of our model to maximize conversion. Main take away: it’s not the same as AB testing, pussy.
Static websites are ancient history
Fuck it, I am not even going to try and explain this. It would be like throwing pearls for pigs (or pussies). In September we will go public Beta. Until then you can follow us on twitter. And you have some months to hit them books. For starters you could come to Cologne the 1st of July.
Meet up at the 6th Design for Conversion
At this years’ Cologne DfC conference I will be the special act. Maybe not a “Fields Medal” but I think it’s pretty cool. Everyone has to do what he does best. Maurits is good at figures. I have other qualities. You can’t say some qualities are better than others. Everybody is an unique individual. One thing is for sure, I am also worth loving.
* See the May 2011 Edition of Wired: Welcome to the New Brave World of Persuasion Profiling by Eli Pariser.
We are very happy to introduce the
Changing the world just needs a long breath and a catastrophy
We’re all moved by the events in Japan and so me, too. Hence I wanted to reflect, what we try to achieve with the Design for Conversion conferences and that it maybe really matters. At the Design for Conversion 2010 in Cologne we featured one casestudy by Greenpeace Germany. They wanted ideas, how to convince people to sign an official e-petition for the German parliament. The petition demanded to take back the law that allowed the prolongued operation of old nuclear power plants in Germany.
The petition wasn’t succesful, even with the help and ideas from our fellow participants. Needless to say, that nobody really expected it to be succesful. It was meant as a statement against the nuclear energy politics of the German government. But this petition and many other activities still achieved something: the attention for the topic never died in Germany. Now, we’re at the edge of maybe the biggest nuclear catastrophy of human history – and suddenly all the old nuclear power plants in Germany will shut down and get a security audit and will maybe never get back online.
The story inside is, that every act of conversion can have longterm effects. Maybe the concrete outcome is not the wanted one, but every action will change the opinion and mindset of someone. In this case, the German government felt the urge to act and shut down the old power plants, because they knew that a lot of Germans demanded this and now it became a focus topic. The sleeping giant of the anti-nuclear-opinion-monster just rised in a matter of days. And 2011 is a year full of elections in Germany – that maybe helped, too.
So, finally victory in this important struggle (if you’re on the anti-nuclear front). It’s just sad, that not only changing people’s minds was enough, but that there was still the need for an apocalyptic event. But still, it is a good idea, to try to change the world, because it eventually happens.