Applying behavior change in my inbox
Why we struggle to make emails (and other products) that change user behavior
Working in healthcare and finance, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about behavior change. How do we help people lose weight, eat better, or save more? People want to do these things, and we provide products and services to help… why is it so hard to help people do the things they aspire to do?
When you Google “behavior change,” one of the first resources you’ll find is BJ Fogg, a Stanford researcher on the topic. His core conceptual model is simple: a desired behavior will occur when motivation, ability, and a prompt come together at the same moment.
The first few times I read it over, I wasn’t excited.
Sure, when you’re motivated and able to do something, and someone reminds you, you’re likely to do that thing. The framework didn’t seem to help with any of my pertinent product questions:
When should I remind users to do the behavior?
What channel should I use to remind them?
How can we make the behavior easier?
How can we improve user motivation? For a moment? For a longer period of time?
For me, “Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Prompt” prompted questions without offering any solutions. Adding a new prompt (like a new onboarding email) or playing with motivation (with a new marketing message) just seemed like standard experimentation techniques.
Struggling to apply this framework, I looked outward: I’m a user of many products. Where are all of the requests for my behavior? Which are successful?
My inbox was an easy place to start. Every email is a ‘prompt’ — what makes some prompts more effective than others?
These months-old emails that I failed to open did a lot of things right in the digital marketing playbook. There are emojis in the subject lines. They used my first name. They’re communicating exclusivity (“behind the scenes”) and clickable content (“7 brilliant things”). But they still failed to get so much as an open from me (and I’m a fairly dedicated disciple of inbox zero).
When I took a skim through the handful of emails that I did open and take action on, I could see right away how they were different.
Every time I responded to a prompt, it was because the prompt touched on my core goal in using the product, and made it seem urgent. They correctly identified my motivation, and made it easy and urgent to act on a next step (ability) via their email (prompt). I received value right away.
Some of these core goals were obvious (it’s logical to assume that users might come to Stitch Fix for outfit ideas), but some were more subtle — habit-forming products is a niche, consumer-oriented slice of general product management, which is Product Collective’s focus. Without some very careful segmentation (or luck), I never would have clicked.
What I overlooked in the Fogg Behavior Model was the footnote: “at the same moment.” There are many ways to go wrong when trying to encourage a user behavior — it’s finding the right motivation, ability, and prompt for a given person all at the same time that will drive results. A new email or text to your users with an old message is likely to fail. A new campaign to your users through a weak channel is likely to fail. It’s the cumulative effect of a strong channel, a message that resonates with a specific segment of users, and a compelling, convenient action to take that makes a behavior change intervention of this sort really work.
In a world of A/B tests, it’s tempting to keep experiments narrow. We change one element of a campaign at a time in search of incremental lift. But in the context of behavior change, triggering some new and significant kind of action, that isn’t enough. The B = MAP framework is a checklist, not a series of separable levers. If we want to support aspirations — something our users will be working on for years — we have to move beyond tweaks to our marketing templates and prove that we understand the core value we provide.
