Brain Hacking, Part 2: The Ovsiankina Effect

Did You Know? Around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned, but exit-intent pop-ups on shopping cart or checkout pages have an incredible 17.1% conversion rate! (Source)

Happy Monday, Marketers!

On Friday I left you hanging with Part 1 of a two-part mini-series about brain hacking to increase interest and engagement.

Part 1 explored the Zeigarnik Effect, a psychological phenomenon that posits humans remember interrupted tasks better than completed ones. We looked at three examples:

1. A Heinz ad that made us fill in the blanks

2. Buzzfeed headline cliffhangers

3. UX/CX experiences that reward completion

That third example is the bridge that connects the Zeigarnik Effect and today’s primary topic: the Ovsiankina Effect.

What is the Ovsiankina Effect?

The Ovsiankina Effect is the psychological phenomenon powering the human need to complete tasks.

As Wikipedia puts it, “The principle underlying the Ovsiankina effect posits that an interrupted task, even without any explicit reward or incentive, creates a ‘quasi-need’.“

I explicitly quoted that excerpt because I really liked how the Wikipedia entry on the Ovsiankina Effect phrased those two bolded sections about the human need to complete interrupted tasks:

• “…even without any explicit reward or incentive…”

• “…quasi-need”

The final example of the Zeigarnik Effect on Friday looked at “completion trackers” and similar user experiences that combine both brain hacking phenomena.

Consider this profile completion tracker:

Here’s how each phenomenon applies:

Other examples of the Ovsiankina Effect in action

You probably see the Ovsiankina Effect leveraged in marketing more than you realize.

1/ Serialized content

Ever see a Twitter thread where each message is marked with “1/x” or similar notation to indicate its part of a series?

Buffer shared an experiment way back in 2018 that compared the effectiveness of two approaches to promoting content on Twitter:

1. A single tweet with a link

2. A thread of several tweets with a link toward the end of the thread

The thread approach outperformed the single tweet approach with threads receiving 54% more engagement 8% more link clicks, though the author shared in their recap of the experiment that the decreased click rate as a percentage of engagement probably was due to the link being placed in one of the final tweets.

2/ Abandoned cart email sequences

Cart abandonment hovers around 70%. That’s a lot of near-misses from an almost there audience, so why not re-engage them and remind them how close they were to finishing their task?

Study how your customers interact with your brand and your checkout sequences to figure out what roadblocks, technological or psychological, are standing in their way, then eliminate those roadblocks and re-engage.

Abandoned cart sequences convert about 9% of the time, which is a massive number in marketing.

3/ Exit-intent pop-ups

As annoying as pop-ups are, they can be pretty effective when used properly, and exit-intent pop-ups are especially effective because they capitalize on both the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina Effect:

• Zeigarnik Effect: The surprise interruption jars the visitor and requires them to take come kinda of unexpected action.

• Ovsiankina Effect: Being reminded that they haven’t completed something encourages re-engagement.

Cart abandonment exit-intent pop-ups have multiplicative effects on conversions with a whopping 17.1% conversion rate!

4/ Interactive ads

Ever see an ad for a mobile game that simulates gameplay during the ad but makes an obvious mistake or misses an obvious move? It’s common with puzzle games and it leaves the user thinking, “Oh, I would have done this instead.”

The New York Times launched an ad campaign on Instagram aimed at millennials with an image of a crossword puzzle clue that everyone my age instantly knew the answer to.

“Nickelodeon show whose protagonist has a football-shaped head.“

Arnold’s head shape has been seared into the brains of an entire generation.

5/ “Save for later” or “add to favorites” features

When I was designing this newsletter, I had to decide what to do for a logo. I didn’t want to invest in any complex designs, because I’m a big proponent of text-only logos like the one at the top of every edition of Data-Driven Marketing.

To play around with different fonts, colors, and layouts, I used Looka. Their simple logo designer UX incorporates a lot of the brain hacking elements we’ve discussed over the last two days, one of which is the ability to save logos to a list to be edited later.

This simple feature encourages engagement, because I can keep a shortlist of potential logo ideas I want to tweak, which is a big-time unfinished task. It’s very easy to lose way too much time playing around with slightly different fonts, layouts, or colors.

Have you ever used either the Zeigarnik or Ovsiankina Effects in your marketing efforts, either intentionally or unintentionally? Share your favorite examples!

Everyone say, “Hi!” to Robert U 👋

Question: If you could have any superpower, but it had to be completely useless, what would it be?

Robert U’s Answer: “If I could have any superpower but it had to be completely useless, it would be the ability to read people’s minds except I can only see what they did on their 10th birthday but it’s wrong half the time.“

That is...oddly specific.

ChatGPT-Generated Joke of the Day 🤣

How do you organize a space party?

You planet!

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