Growth: Using Consumer Psychology to Drive More Conversions with Colin Hodge

Speaker A: The environment that your customer has determines their outcomes. So with decision engineering, you can use all of these psychological levers and biases to steer them toward a better path that gets them toward success.

Speaker B: You're listening to the Keep Optimizing podcast to increase your traffic, improve your conversion rates, and grow your profits.

Speaker C: Hello and welcome. I'm Chloe Thomas, the host of this E commerce marketing focused podcast. If you're not familiar with our format, well, we release five episode miniseries that dive deep into one e commerce marketing topic. It could be channels like email or SEO or Facebook ads or a, uh, big topic like acquisition retention or analytics. In each episode, new ones released.

Speaker D: On Wednesdays I get to interview a

Speaker C: different expert to explore the latest advice on making it work for you. And then after each five episode miniseries,

Speaker D: we take a week off to give

Speaker C: you time to take action on what you've learned. At the moment, we're spending five episodes exploring a brand new topic. Well, it's not that new, is it? We talk about growth all the time, but we're dedicating these five episodes to how growth has changed in recent years and how you can continue to hit your growth targets if you pay attention to what our experts are sharing with you in these episodes. This episode is all about customer psychology,

Speaker D: but don't go thinking this is the fluffy one.

Speaker C: Nope. Our guest has leveraged this to grow several startups fast in both the tech and e commerce spaces and has just distilled all he's learned into a book.

Speaker D: So no, this isn't academic dry stuff. This is real world lessons and we are talking about some of my favorite bits of customer psychology. We're also going to be learning some bits I'd never heard of before. And I love customer psychology and lots of bits and pieces about customer research too. It's a really, really cool episode that I know you're all going to get a lot from. Do you make sure you listen right to the end of the episode because at the end my guest is sharing

Speaker C: some great quickfire insider tips and I'll be sharing my take on it all and outlining some other ways we can help you improve your ecommerce growth.

Speaker E: Even more stuck spending more on ads, but growing less. If your spend keeps climbing but growth has flatlined, you are not alone. Many scaling e commerce brands have hit a wall and doing more of the same is not the answer. The performance marketing experts at Launch have built the seven Levers of Growth Diagnostic framework that pinpoints what's holding your business back. Want to find out where you stand against your competitors. Take their free 7 levers scorecard. It takes 5 minutes and you'll get an instant benchmark report across the 7 areas that drive real growth. Head to keepopt.com launch that's L A U n C H and see what's really going on.

Speaker C: In this episode, I'm chatting with E commerce growth expert Colin Hodge. Colin is the author of the brand new book Outrageous startup Uncovering the secrets of user psychology to scale your success. Based on his experience scaling startups to over 100 million users. Hello, Colin.

Speaker A: Hi, Chloe. So nice to be here and to geek out on psychology with you.

Speaker C: It's going to be so cool geeking out on psychology. So thank you so much for being up for being a part of this series. Before we get into the super practical stuff, how did you end up, uh, someone who loves to geek out about customer psychology?

Speaker A: You know, ever since I was a young kid, I loved watching and learning how people interact and the sociology of it. And so watching their behaviors, watching what influenced people really planted that seed. And as I started my first business and then started left Microsoft and started my real first business after having some money behind me, I realized even though I love this stuff, I didn't know enough. So I had to dive deeply and figure out how do consumers think, how do you get them to join your product and then how do you grow it? So that's how I got my start. But it really was that fascination, that passion for it ever since I was a kid.

Speaker D: Isn't it mad how it all starts with what happens offline? Often with someone getting into this is, you see how people are moving like, oh, look, everybody turns left when they go into a shop. How weird is that? You know, and all this other random stuff that we all end up doing

Speaker C: and how we all get influenced by things, but then we get into the E commerce and the digital space and it all becomes tracking the numbers. But we're still trying to do this soft thing of encouraging someone to do something, but yet it's kind of more black and white online. It always feels to me, do you find the same?

Speaker A: I do, yeah. And it's so easy to forget because we're sitting behind screens and we're staring at dashboards that there are real humans behind these behaviors, behind these actions that we're tracking and we're trying to optimize and it's so important for us to grow and have sustainable, healthy businesses that we keep in mind that these humans have a psychology to understand they have the same biases and decisions that they have to make when they're choosing a website, when they're choosing a product, when they're spending money. And so when we have that in mind, it's a complete game changer compared to just blindly chasing the metrics.

Speaker D: So one of the things I found really fascinating about your book is that, uh, although it is all about customer psychology, there's also a section about your own psychology, I suppose would be the way to put it about prefacing it all by creating your own growth mindset. Before you start worrying about the customer mindset, why did you feel it was

Speaker C: so important to put that on upfront in the book?

Speaker A: Yeah, and, and I, I wrestled with this, to be honest, because I set out thinking this should just be about the customer psychology. But as I was writing it, I realized that one without the other is just an incomplete sort of framework. And you really need to have these fundamental understandings and reflection processes to understand your own psychology and to get your mindset right for that growth. So as an example, one of the first principles I have of the mindset for founders is you really need to put yourself out there repeatedly. It's about this idea of, I have to remind myself, even with the book and the framework, failure's okay. You, it's doesn't need to be perfect. You need to just put something out there and see how your customers react to it before you can make progress. And without that, you can have all of the brilliant insights into your customer psychology, but they're never going to see the light of day. They're never going to actually get tested and have a chance to grow. So I realized that that and the nine other principles for the founder's mindset are so crucial to even have the first step to enable you to use this other stuff.

Speaker D: Well, as much as I want to drill into those nine, and I very much do want to drill into those nine, we are going to kind of skip over them into the actual customer psychology stuff. So let's assume everyone listening has got their mind straight, if that's okay with you.

Speaker A: Big assumption.

Speaker D: M. It's a huge assumption which we could probably spend the next three hours picking apart all on its own. Where do you start building the concept, the thought process, the lever that is customer psychology into a business? How do you start that if it's

Speaker C: been something that's completely foreign to you up until now?

Speaker A: That's a great question, because I've had to do this so many times, and that's why I was able to look backward and Say, how did I get into that mindset? What was my first step? And I realized the first thing is empathy. It's forming empathy and a deeper understanding, even feeling what your customers are feeling in their customer journey. So as an example, uh, it's not E commerce, but I basically, I was the CEO and I launched a live streaming app in the US and our live streaming hosts were young women, 18 to 25, generally, who were influencers and wanted to make it big in Hollywood. I am the furthest thing from that. In fact, at the time, I did not even have an active Instagram account. So I realized I needed to form empathy, and quickly with what they're going through, with what their dreams are, with what it's like to use our product and stream for two to three hours without stopping. That is so hard. You know, as a podcast host and creating content, keeping people engaged, just being on is so hard. So I dove in and I started to form empathy by obviously, lots of user interviews, by doing the streaming myself, actually putting walking in their shoes, right? And then I started to do deeper things. I developed one thing which is called psyched Personas. So if you've heard of Personas for your customers, this is going a level deeper into their psychology, into what they're feeling in the moment. What, what are their days like? Uh, and I think it's so powerful because when we do this, then we have a complete picture of not only of that person, but that person in the moment. And that moment might be right when they hit your E commerce site. And maybe they're, you know, a lot of us use our phones on the toilet. Maybe they're in the toilet. You need to know this stuff because then you know what their priorities are, how rushed they feel, what their mood is, all that stuff. And that's why developing this empathy and then building on top of it, that's the first step.

Speaker D: That's such a great explanation of what could have been the one word answer. Research. It's like, actually, this is the research you need to do. And how much time would you spend on that before you dive into taking action? How long does it take for not just you as the leader, but for the team to really get to grips with this before you start risking changing things up in what the customer's actually seeing?

Speaker A: I think the answer to that depends on how much you are already in their shoes and feeling that empathy. I was so far from it, so I needed a long time. Having said that, I'm a big believer in perfection is the enemy of progress. And that even goes with this. So do a best effort, you know, keeping in mind your deadlines and all that stuff, to build that empathy, to understand really what they're going through. And then don't make it a. Set it and forget it. Make it an ongoing project. It's a moving target that you're developing this muscle. You're building it over time. So yes, you start moving, you start executing, but you're always looking for, let's keep the user interviews going, let's do some surveys, let's, you know, go and visit some of them in person and walk through their lives and all that stuff. They keep building it. As you're running your product, as you're trying to, you know, evolve things, then

Speaker D: how deep do you take those learnings within the business? Do you, um, I'm thinking back to

Speaker C: a business I interviewed a long time ago now called Bouc, who are, uh, a flower seller in the US who built their business thinking that their core target market would be men buying for women. Six months down the line, they discover it's women buying for women, and then they pretty much rebuild the entire business from the ground up. Apart from the ops, as you're getting these insights and building this empathy, how deep do you go with how this changes?

Speaker D: Does it change the product?

Speaker C: Does it change the pricing?

Speaker D: Is it just the marketing messages and what's on the Facebook ads? Where do you put, uh, this knowledge as you start to acquire it?

Speaker A: So it should go everywhere. It should go very deep into your business. I love that example of it. It ended up changing the company completely, pivoting into a completely different customer base, probably branding, probably, you know, product. So I think it should go everywhere. Now, that doesn't mean everywhere all at once. Again, you don't need to be perfect when you change this stuff. So test out. Once you learn this stuff, test out what happens when you change the pricing to match them better, when you change the marketing and the branding, positioning a little bit, test those things out. But the important thing is that you make sure the feelers, the, the execution goes to every branch of your company because you do want that consistency as you roll it out. So few weeks, a month or two, okay, that's fine. It doesn't all have to be consistent. But after a period of time, you're going to realize you can get compounded gains when you have that consistency across the board. Because what people really want, whether it's with friends they meet or with companies that they want to like, they want that commitment and consistency from the brand, does it feel like it's authentic? And that's a big part of it. It's consistent across the board. So, yeah, goes everywhere, doesn't have to be all at once. Make sure that you get it there pretty quickly, though.

Speaker D: Do you start from the beginning or the end? You know, like, I can see an argument for starting with improving the things that your VIP see, you know, your most religiously repetitive customers, because they're the ones you've been talking to, you know, so you could start with them, but there's so few of them. And that still means you're potentially recruiting

Speaker C: the wrong people on the front end.

Speaker D: But then if you start at the front end, you're kind of like in this endless race versus the customer to try and get everything fixed before they see the old version. So is it as simple as starting at the beginning or the end, or is it more scattergun?

Speaker A: I generally. So it depends on the phase of the business, but in general, I like to look for the leaky bucket that you have in the funnel, which usually means closer to the beginning of the user's journey, rather than those, you know, super loyal super fans that are our users and have been there for months or years. That leaky funnel can help you because what you're looking for is how do you create more of those VIPs, how do you get more of them so it's not one or the other. I would start with the leaky funnel, the top of the funnel, to see where they're dropping off. And then I would pretty quickly try to understand, uh, better who are our VIPs, what got them to be a VIP in the first place? Like, what was their journey, what appealed to them? And then how can we suss them out from that earlier part of the funnel so we can start growing that

Speaker D: set so it's fix the bucket and then flip into acquisition. I mean, because we're talking growth here. So acquisition is always going to be a big part of it, isn't it? So when you start improving the acquisition activity, I mean, you know, we could talk the four P's of marketing, place promotion, you know, whatever they are. My, my CIM knowledge, which you're American, you don't even know what the CIM is, but it's slightly rusty from my exams many years ago. But how do we make the biggest impact fastest on our acquisition? That's the big question, isn't it?

Speaker A: Biggest impact fastest on our acquisition? Okay, that's a hard question. I would say in general, what I, what I find Most entrepreneurs and marketers are getting wrong here is they are constantly chasing competitors and copying ads and all that stuff without understanding the fundamentals of why those things convert. Well, and that's why I bring in psychology to this understanding. For instance, the contrast effect. When you're up against all the other e commerce brands and you're trying to bring people in, what are you doing to stand out from the crowd in a way that really speaks to your target market? Are you just looking for a new hook that doesn't really align with who your company is? So you're just chasing the best performing in that moment rather than something fundamental about the type of customer you have and you want to go after and you can actually contrast with your competitors. So understanding the fundamentals, why your ads are working, your best ones, why the uh, bad ones are not working, and why your competitors ads are working is super important because then you can start to apply all these different psychological effects like the contrast effect, like, you know, actually liking, um, which is one of the persuasion methods. How do you create this brand in your ads that shines through in your website landing page, all this stuff that people actually like and want to be a part of. They feel like, oh, that's something I, I can get into. Great example of this I'll uh, borrow from the language learning world is if, you know, you've ever used a language learning app, you've probably heard of Duolingo and they have this really cute but annoying bird called Duo the owl. Yeah, so I see you nodding. I think this is such a great example of creating this relationship, this liking persuasion tactic with our customers. Because that damn bird makes you feel guilty, makes you feel motivated, makes you feel happy when you actually have a street going and reacts to everything. And it creates this anchor in our minds of uh, okay, this is something I can remember and I want to come back to. So think about how your brand can do that too. Those are just two of the 65 or more psychological effects that I talk about in my book. But I just love for people to think, you know, when you're working on acquisition, understand the fundamentals of how to make your brand stand out and connect with consumers.

Speaker C: I think those are so important to such important points. You know, as we were moving into this more noisy marketing space where consumers need to recognize us as they're trawling through their email inbox, as they're trawling through Facebook and Instagram and seeing all these ads. So having that clear brand Persona or visual is so critical. And then of Course, if we don't understand why the competitors ads are good, then we risk turning our whole sector into something that looks the same. We really don't want to do that. We want to go, oh, that's an interesting huh hook. Can we use that or can we sense check that with our customers and then use it as we're going through all of this? Colin, what about price? Because we've had uh, an episode in this series about discount strategy and promotional strategy, but we haven't talked about price. And I feel like, I feel like promotion strategy is a massively untapped lever. I feel like psychology is a massively untapped growth lever. And I think price is something that people just slap a number on it and forget. In E commerce in particular, I think other industries aren't as bad. But in E commerce I think we do our maths, calculate our margin and go, yeah, put a 99 on the end of it and we're done. So have you found anything in particular around pricing that we can use to um, improve our growth rates?

Speaker A: Absolutely. So a big part of pricing is understanding why prices work the way they do. And everything is in context. So the context of, you know, did you have an original retail price and then you're having a discount, are you doing a flash sale, do you have other competitors they're comparing you to and do you know how these stack up? So all those things really add up. One major one is using price anchors. So there's a high anchor, there's a low anchor, and then the ones around it could be, you know, compromise option. So that would be your middle option. You put a uh, maybe a uh, overpriced high option and then the compromise is right below it. When you run a sale, don't just slap, as you said, a, ah, 20% off. Try to understand what is the sort of price point that would appear to be a great deal for them based on your competitors pricing based on what they're seeing on your retail price and what you expect the value to be for that user in that moment. So if their mood, let's say it, you know, they just got paid, it's that part of the month, then you want to understand, okay, this sort of discount will feel bigger to them in this moment or they'll feel smaller. Same sort of thing with package deals. So there's so much about pricing that we can think about and add in. And I think the key here is pricing takes an extraordinary amount of experimentation. So even if you don't try all of these effects you can still make a lot of progress by just running constant experiments on your pricing rather than set it, forget it. It's, you know, a flat, you know, margin percentage. That's the path to leaving money on the table.

Speaker D: Nice. I love that advice. Thank you very much for that. And there's something else I have to ask you about because you mentioned it before we hit record and I've never heard of it before. And as, and I a self confessed

Speaker C: geek about consumer psychology, so selfishly, and I suspect it'll be value for the audience as well.

Speaker D: But I need to know about this one. What's the fresh start effect?

Speaker A: Oh, I love the fresh start effect. Yes. So do you use Spotify?

Speaker D: Occasionally, yes, occasionally.

Speaker A: Okay, so Spotify, we all have seen, uh, their social media campaign for Spotify wrapped at the end of the year, summarizes all of your listening habits. Are you the top listener? And for this artist, et cetera, here's how your taste has changed. That is utilizing the time of the year, namely the end of the year and then January coming up to, to basically align with the consumer's mindset of hey, it's a, something is coming to an end, something new is beginning, and this is something you can depend on from our brand, from our product to actually bring you back in and to have a reset. And so that is a great example of the fresh start effect and bait, maybe even the uh, end of the year effect. When they looked at that, what they started adding was this weekly playlist as well that hits on Mondays and that brings people back in. Showed over a, uh, 20% re engagement compared to people who didn't get these emails. Right. And so they started to bring people back in and say, hey, it's Monday. It's Discovery Weekly actually is what they call it. And you can discover new music on Mondays. The reason they do that is because we have these temporal landmarks in our minds. Monday is the start of the week for most of the western world. January is obviously for gym memberships and other self help sort of things. This fresh start effect is when just because of our cultural programming, we are more likely to be open to trying new things, to um, embed ourselves and in general to taking more action rather than when we're feeling worn out, rushed toward the end of the week, or super busy and like plugged in during the middle of the week. So this fresh start effect is seen in all sorts of temporal landmarks. You can also use it for holidays, you can also use it for the seasons. You know, hey, it's spring Now's a great time to, you know, clean things out and to start afresh and all this stuff. So I love the fresh start effect and I recommend it for a lot of e commerce sites and clients that I've had because it gives you these, you know, dozens of opportunities throughout the year to think about how can you start a new tact with these customers, how can you cut through the noise again and have help them get started on a new direction.

Speaker D: So the, it's not quite as simple as going we're always going to do a product launch on a Monday, but it is about, you know, looking at your customer base and um, immediately coming to my mind is the whole back

Speaker C: to school thing in September which if you're, you know, if your customer base of 20 something is probably less relevant, but if they're 30 something, 40 something women who are breathing a massive sigh of relief because they finally got hours back in their day, then that is a big opportunity to you know, for a self care brand or uh, getting the rest of life dumb brand to go out and have a campaign around that isn't it?

Speaker A: That's a great example. So you can do it with your marketing copy, you can do it with, you know, the design and the products you select for that. People are just more open to change aids and new products and new directions during those fresh start moments. And so that's a great time to put the new stuff in front of them to change the tact a little bit and say hey, this fall or this school year, wouldn't it be great to be this type of person? And that is so powerful of an opportunity to try to take advantage of and of course a B test it, you know, do all that stuff. But when you do this most of the time you'll find there's a really good jump in, in conversion rates in new product sales, stuff like that.

Speaker D: And Colin, we could obviously talk for a couple of days on all the different pieces of consumer psychology can be leveraged and everything that's in your book. But is there any one or two last bits that we should share with the audience before we move on to the insider tips round?

Speaker C: Anything you'd really love to share?

Speaker A: Yeah, so the first and I love doing this part because it's so rich. It's this field called decision engineering and the whole idea here, you know, I was an engineer by training originally so I got to bring engineering into it. The whole idea here is the environment that your customer has determines their outcomes. So with decision engineering you can use all of These psychological levers and biases to steer them toward a better path that gets them toward success. So as an example, the framing effects are uh, some of the biggest in behavioral science. And these framing effects are, you know, when we see a product against another one, it completely changes the context and how we view that product if versus if we saw it alone. So understanding the framing effects and testing these out is super important. And there's so many ways we can engineer decisions. The default effect defaults are super strong. We know this. They increase conversions by massive amounts. So having these smart defaults that tie back to what is your customer's mood, who are they, all that stuff. So you set a smart default in that moment is super important to raising conversion rates. So decision engineering is number one. Number two, I call these magic moments. But these are in moments in the user's journey where their mood presents an opportunity for outsized impact. So it might be that, you know, moment of hope or the beginning, or they just found a really good price that they like and there's a moment of, you know, they get that little dopamine hit, there's a little excitement finding those moments to leverage those for greater impact. So it's not just, you know, making the sale or getting them to opt into your marketing newsletter. It's things like, okay, picking those right moments, get them to opt in and hey, here's a good time to get them to refer a friend. Or if they're having even the low points, even the negative emotions that they're having, you can leverage those as well and try to turn those around so they're frustrated by something, you know, the price changed, let's say while they had it, uh, they were waiting on the page. That's a moment of frustration. How do we capitalize on that so the user feels better? We say, hey, we don't want you to miss any price changes again. So we can offer this thing, we'll offer you price alerts or we will perhaps offer you a special one time deal if you do another action to get you the same price. These sorts of moments, I call them magic, um, moments and they're super powerful for bringing users back and creating that loyalty. And of course more profits.

Speaker D: Awesome. And of course anyone who wants more of all that juicy stuff that Colin's got to share, you can get that in his book, which is available now in all the obvious places. And we'll put links to it on the show notes. It's called Outrageous Startup. Uncovering the secrets of user psychology to scale your business. Colin it's been brilliant chatting about all of that. Listeners, remember to stay tuned because you don't want to miss out on Colin's insider tips and my suggestions for other things you can listen to next.

Speaker E: Did your roas used to be great? Do you find that now you're spending more and getting less? Have you squeezed every last drop from the bottom of the funnel? And every time you try to scale, your ROI falls off a cliff. That's the performance plateau, and you won't break through it by doing more of the same. The brands that are growing right now are building demand, not just capturing it, and that changes everything. The experts at launch have built a free tool to help you see exactly where you're stuck. The seven Levers of Growth Scorecard takes five minutes and gives you a clear benchmark to help you unlock growth. Stop guessing, start growing. Take the scorecard@keepopt.com launch that's L A U N C H and see what's really going on.

Speaker D: Okay, Colin, so far we've gone deep into customer psychology. Now you get to wow us with your insider knowledge about the whole of E commerce growth. So for the following questions, your answer can be anything to do with E commerce growth, which of course does include everything we've already been talking about. Colin, are you ready for this?

Speaker A: Let's do it.

Speaker D: Okay, let's start with newbie advice. If we've inspired someone to take their first step, what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?

Speaker A: You need to know that every other e commerce company might look like a huge success, might look like they're killing it and they're amazing, and you might feel like that's very daunting to get to their point. But every company, every founder I've talked to almost universally says it's a shit show on the inside. And I think it's so important to know and to admit to ourselves that everything feels hectic and feels stressful because you, I mean, you're doing something difficult, right? You're creating a business from nothing, from scratch and trying to build it up. And so it's okay to realize that some things won't scale. It's okay to say there are going to be a lot of failures and false steps along the way. And even when things are going well, you're profitable and you're growing, it's still going to feel like, oh, my gosh, there's a crisis sometimes and you have to, uh, you have to tackle it. So just know that you're not alone. In that. And that's part of the journey.

Speaker D: I love that advice. That is so brilliant because we all forget that we only see the shiny of everybody else. And everyone else's business, I think is

Speaker C: to be written on the wall. That one, I reckon.

Speaker D: Now, once you've started, of course you've got to keep optimizing. So what's your favorite way to improve performance?

Speaker A: But when I think of optimizing, my favorite way is I really geek out on first psychology, second being the data. I just love to study and you know, I even make a bit of a game with it with our team and said, hey, here's the hypothesis. Who wants to bet on this? You know, who wants to. Who thinks it's going to be option A? Who thinks it's going to be option B? We have these healthy debates and these make it more of a, uh, game for us because when the data comes back, no matter what, we've learned something. And so that's what I would say is like, you know, a B testing and optimizing is actually a lot of fun because when you turn it into, it's, it's a science, right? You're, you have a hypothesis, you're testing it out and then you're using data to validate it or invalidate it. And that's, that's my favorite part of optimizing. Aside from the psychology, of course.

Speaker C: Nice. If someone listening wants to learn more, is there a cheap or free resource you would recommend?

Speaker A: Yeah. So first I, uh, have big shout out to Nir Eyel. He's a fellow author and obviously bestseller. Uh, he wrote Hooked. He has a new book Beyond Belief and I already got it. But Hooked inspired me and was one of the great things. It really talks a lot about how to change behaviors, how to create better products and the psychology behind it. And he was nice enough to read and endorse my book. So thank you, Nir. So grab his newsletter, grab his newest book, all that stuff. And then of course, you know, if you, um, if you still want to read or want to listen to the audiobook, hopefully it's out, then you can grab my book. And I would love to hear your feedback. I'd, uh, love to hear any ways that it helped you and you can even potentially join one of our groups where you can learn from other marketers, founders, entrepreneurs.

Speaker D: Very cool. So everybody, um, Colin, remind us of the name of the book, please.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's outrageous Startup growth. So just search for that and you'll find it in any bookstore.

Speaker D: Brilliant. Finally it's crystal ball time. What's coming up in the next 6 to 12 months M that we should be getting ready for?

Speaker A: I want to go back to something you said which I, uh, totally align with, which is in this environment that's getting noisier, it does feel harder and harder to stand out. And it feels like, especially with AI getting applied to every different vertical, every different industry and part of our process that is going to just accelerate. And so as we think about AI's impact on things, and in my opinion, we should be leveraging it in smart ways. So we need to understand that without the psychological understanding of our customers, AI is just going to brute force it and be a race to the bottom. And frankly, as you said, no differentiation. It's going to start copying everybody else. It's going to use nonsense hooks and then just test a lot of dumb stuff on our customers so we can leverage a better understanding of how people think, how they feel to make AI a lot more powerful and to avoid some of those blunders that will inevitably happen more and more in this noisy, crowded field that is being created.

Speaker D: Yes, it's going to be fascinating to see how that continues to evolve over the next six to 12 months. I love that you've brought that one up.

Speaker C: Colin.

Speaker D: We are very nearly at the end of the show, so could you please let the listeners know where they can get in contact with you and your business.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So you can find me on the website colinhodge.com and you can also follow me on LinkedIn if you want.

Speaker D: Simple as that, everybody. Colin, thank you so much for being on the Keep Optimizing podcast. It's been brilliant geeking out about customer psychology and giving the audience lots of things to go away and work on and test. So thank you so much for being here.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. Take care.

Speaker D: So much great stuff in that chat with Colin there. Um, the fresh start, as I said, not one I've come across, but such

Speaker C: a clever way of thinking about something

Speaker D: we, we kind of do by habit in retail but don't think through well enough. Um, so I love that one. The decision engineering, the magic moments, all the other bits and pieces we talked about. Lots for you all to unpick. M in there. Um, you can get the links to all the things we discussed, the full transcript of the episode, important notes and more@keepoptimizing.com you can also use or direct to episode short links. That's keepopt.com the episode number and when you get to the website, Please do add yourself to the Chloe Thomas newsletter list because I'd love to be hanging

Speaker C: out in your inbox. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Keep Optimizing Podcast. If you've enjoyed this one, then check out episode 301 with Dan Bond from Rev Lifter, where we're talking about your discounting strategy.

Speaker D: So that's, um.

Speaker C: That's the one I, I referred to during my chat with Colin. And obviously there's a fair amount of subtle psychology in that one too. You can also find our full thread of e commerce growth content by either

Speaker D: scrolling up your feed or use the short link keepopt.com growth please do tell

Speaker C: your fellow marketers about the Keep Optimizing Podcast because we want to help as many marketers as possible to improve the performance of their e commerce marketing. Have a great week and make sure you listen to the next episode so I can help you to keep optimizing your marketing.

Speaker B: Access everything Keep optimizing@keepoptimizing.com that's with an S, not a Z.

Speaker D: Take the seven levers of growth scorecard now at, uh, keepopt.com launch that's L A U N C H and see

Speaker E: what's really going on with your growth.