Whether chasing after a premium tier in a loyalty program, trying to lose 20 pounds with a weight loss product, or vying for the top spot in the leaderboard of a mobile game, consumers often are doing more than just buying or using your product or service. They are also trying to achieve a small or big goal they have set for themselves. In such situations, it is to your advantage as a marketer to keep consumers on track with their goals and give them little nudges toward the finish line. One standard practice used by businesses is to give customers feedback on their progress. In a loyalty program, this could be in the form of a monthly statement telling them how many points they have in the account and/or how far away they are from making the next reward or tier. Research shows that when and how you offer such progress feedback can make a big difference in motivating consumers. You need to offer dynamic feedback based on where people on on their goal path.
Looking Forward or Looking Back
Imagine you are on a path between two points. You can look ahead and see how far you are from your destination point. As you make progress on the path, you will gradually close that distance to the destination until it becomes zero. Another way to assess your progress is to turn around and see how far you have come from your origination point. The more progress you make, the farther you will be from the origination point until you cover the entire length of the path. In a loyalty program context, a forward-looking progress feedback will be the equivalent of “you are x points/visits away from the next reward”, and a backward-looking progress feedback will look like “you have accumulated x points/visits so far” or “you have x points/visits in your account”. Which one of these is more effective? Research suggests that it depends on where people are along the path. When people are in the early stages of chasing their goals, they are still far away from the destination. At this point, they need reassurance that their actions are making an impact. Looking backwards at their achievement so far is likely to make that impact more visible, as going from 0 point to 100 points seems like a big difference (compared with going from 1000 points away to 900 points away from the goal). But as people move more toward the goal and are at later stages of their goal pursuit, they prefer to look forward to see a bigger impact of their actions. That is, they now want to see how they are closing the gap from being 200 points away to only 100 points away, instead of from 800 points to 900 points. The two researchers behind these findings, Koo and Fishbach, call this the small-area hypothesis, where paying attention to the smaller segment of the goal path motivates people more (see the linked document above if you want to read the original paper).
Fast or Slow?
Another important consideration in progress feedback is whether you should tell people they are going fast or they are going slow. Your intuitive choice may be to tell people that they are going fast so that they will feel encouraged to go further. This is indeed the better option at the beginning of the goal path. Research shows that at the beginning, the burning question in people’s mind is “can I get there?” When they see that they are making fast progress, they feel encouraged by the progress and think that they indeed have a shot at the goal. It is different when one gets close to the goal. At the end of the path, when people are very close to the goal, the question of whether or not they will reach the goal is no longer the focus. Instead, the question is a more practical one of “when will I get there”. Surprisingly, in that situation, telling them that they are making slow progress actually make them try harder. In a field experiment, two researchers from UT-Austin recruited student volunteers for a charitable organization. When the campaign still needed a lot of volunteer hours (early part of goal progress), telling students the campaign was signing up 10 volunteer hours a day (fast) made students more likely to volunteer than when telling them it was signing up 10 volunteer hours per week (slow). The opposite happened when the campaign was further along. Telling students the organization was signing up only 10 volunteer hours a week made students more willing to volunteer instead.
What does all this mean to your business? It means that instead of giving customers one standard progress report, you may want to adapt the report based on where your customers are relative to their goal. When they are less than half way to the reward/goal, you want to show your customers how far they have come, and give them a pat on the back by telling them that they are making fast progress. But when they have gone more than halfway on the goal path, you will want to switch over to show how far away they are from the end goal. As they get really close to the goal where there is little doubt that they will make it, you can provide a little further nudge by telling them that they are progressing a little slowly and that they could go faster. By using such a dynamically adapted progress report, you will be motivating your customers to reach their goals with exactly the message they want or need to hear.
How do you tell your customers about their progress? What did you find work or not work in your situation? Please share your experiences. We can all learn from each other’s successes and failures. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to share it with your colleagues and friends on social media. Sharing is caring! 😉