The Cognitive Load Trap May Be Costing You Sales

"You've invested in great copy. Your marketing content is accurate, insightful and beautifully designed. So why aren't more prospects converting? The problem might not be your message. It might be too much cognitive load on your reader's brain. When someone lands on your sales page or opens your email, they're not arriving with unlimited mental resources. They're showing up with a human brain, including its serious limitations, frustrating bottlenecks and a processing capacity that maxes out faster than you think."

"Working memory. New information gets processed here. But working memory is tiny. Psychologist George Miller famously called it the magical number seven, plus or minus two, meaning people can keep five to nine bits of information in mind at once. Later research suggests that for anything complex, it's closer to five. Ask someone to juggle more than that, and you'll overload their system."

"Your reader's mental budget (and why it's already spent) When someone's trying to absorb your content-whether it's a product explainer, case study or landing page-they're working with three brain-related resources: what they already know, working memory and what's right in front of them. What they already know. What they know includes everything sitting in long-term memory: past experiences, concepts they've learned, problems they've faced. This is the good stuff because it takes almost no mental effort to access."

Readers approach marketing content with limited mental resources: long-term knowledge, working memory, and whatever appears on the screen. Long-term knowledge requires little effort and can speed comprehension. Working memory is very small—roughly five to nine items and closer to five for complex material—so presenting too many new elements overloads the brain. On-screen content must be immediately usable; referencing distant elements forces extra effort. If cognitive capacity is exhausted before a call to action, prospects fail to convert. Designing content to reduce working memory demands, rely on existing knowledge, and place necessary information inline improves comprehension and conversion rates.

Read at Forbes