Boost your Conversion with Proven Behavioral Science Techniques

introduction, I would like to share a little video with you. So let’s have a look.

 

Video speaker: 

In a hyper competitive online world with short attention spans, you’ve got microseconds to capture the attention of your prospects. The competitor who grabs their attention and drives results, wins. They win with their customers, employees, peers, and themselves. So, how to do this in our hyper competitive online world? Well, there is a scientific proven process for maximizing your online results.

It is not easy to come by, and it is not easy to use. However, once you master it, you will create results that you never even knew existed. Bas is an expert in the field of persuasion and behavior design. As the award winning and best selling author of online influence, he founded the Online Influence Institute. He coached and trained thousands of professionals worldwide to increase their online success with small changes and big outcomes. For example, in his own company, he boosted turnover by an astonishing € 3.1 million just by showing reviews in a different way.

He is the only one in the world who can call himself a Cialdini Method Certified Trainer and a BJ Fogg certified Tiny Habits Coach. His mission is to help people and companies to a better level of performance by teaching them to apply the principles of persuasion and behavior design. Are you ready to learn the scientific proven process for maximizing your online results? Please welcome Bas Wouters with online influence. How to apply behavioral science to boost your online results?

 

Jan: 

There he is. Hello, Bas. How are you?

 

Bas Wouters: 

Hello, Jan. Nice to see you.

 

Jan: 

Very good to see you. I’m really happy that you made it. And I’m really curious about what’s gonna happen today. So before we go get started, just one little last remark from my end. People in the audience, you have a unique chance here.

You can ask questions. And I can tell you it’s worth it because the answers come straight to the point. So, Bas, the stage is all yours, looking forward to it.

 

Bas: 

Thanks, Jan, and welcome, everybody. Great, you are all here. Today, we’re going to talk about behavioral science and how you can boost your online results. And before I spoke with Jan, we both liked interaction from every attendee.

So I will ask you questions which you can answer in the chat. But if you have a question, please put it in the chat, and Jan can interrupt me, and we will definitely give you great answers. So here we go. I like to open with a question, and actually, I like to ask you what you think. So in the world, there are a lot of webshops. And what do you think is the average conversion rate of a webshop?

 

So if you have 100 visitors, how many people will actually buy something? Is it 20%? What do you think? 5%? Or is it 1%? Can you launch the poll, please, Jan?

 

Jan: 

Okay. There we go.

 

Bas: 

Hope everybody is answering. So what do you think? Is it 20%, 5% or 1%? What’s the answer you see?

 

Jan: 

Well, I see a lot of answers, and it’s really interesting. I thought we would have seen a different picture. Okay. Yeah. I think it has stabilized. So I don’t know, Bas. Can you see the results or do you want me to share?

 

Bas:

I’m very curious.

 

Jan: 

Here it is. Okay. Boom. Actually, there is a 3% who was expecting the conversion rate to be 20%. Yeah, I wish it would be like this. There’s still… (indistinct)

 

Bas: 

It would be great. Yeah.

 

Jan: 

That would be great. And then 42% of our audience is expecting this to be around 5% and 55% is expecting this to be around 1%. Now, Bas, tell us what’s the truth?

 

Bas: 

The correct answer is indeed 1%. So if you think about this, if you run a sales team, and they have 100 meetings, and they come back to the office, and they say, wow, I’m super happy. I got one new client. Probably the sales manager isn’t that happy, but online, we quite accept it. Although we try to approve it, and of course, you have VWO is an amazing tool to do this.

We set up A/B tests. A/B tests for people who don’t know what this is. Quick explanation: So you see here A – control version or your current website or landing page or app. And then we change something.

In this example, a blue button versus the green button, and we measure which will have the highest conversion. And actually, this is a billion-dollar industry. Think about Amazon or Netflix or Facebook. They gather a lot of data and they test everything. But what do you think? So we have this billion-dollar industry. A lot of time, energy, and money are involved. How many A/B tests actually show an increase in conversion rates?

So, we spent all this effort and how many times are you successful? Is that 50%, 30% or 10%? Can you launch the poll again, Jan? I’m very curious what our audience thinks

 

Jan: 

Here it goes. We make our audience work. It’s coming in.

 

Bas: 

Yes. We love participation, like we speak, Jan. Right?

 

Jan: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. I like that. Okay. We still have some answers coming in, but here we end.

So it’s kind of stabilized already. So, let me share the results with you.

 

Bas: 

Yeah. Fantastic.

 

Jan: 

46%… So 14% think it’s 50%. It should be 50%. 40% of our audience thinks it is 30% and 46% is actually thinking that 10% of A/B tests show an increase in conversion rates. So Bas, tell me, what’s your experience?

 

Bas: 

Indeed 10%. So 90% of all this money, energy and your marketing efforts is actually not successful. Well, we like to change that. So if you know, the benchmark is 10%. We know with our scientifically proven method, we have an average of 60% success rate. So we outperformed the market by 600%. That’s what we’re going to talk about. Imagine you will have a scientifically proven process to be more successful to boost your conversions and boost your online results. That’s what I’m going to give you all today.

Now, we’ll do this based on examples, real life cases. For example, I will show you how SIMCITY boosted their sales with 43%. Bol.com, that’s the Dutch Amazon, they have an average revenue of 8 billion, and they increase the amount of reviews by 400%. And SEAT, the car manufacturer, how they even increased that amount of leads with 2000%. And all with small changes, but big outcomes. We call those small breaks.

That’s what we are looking for, and that’s what I want you to walk away with after this webinar so that you can create these small breaks for yourself. Let’s dive into it. But before we do, we have actually a surprise for everybody. If you stay to the end, we will announce a winner at the end of this webinar who can follow our 6 week Online Influence Program. And in this program, we teach you how to use online influence in the most effective, efficient, and ethical way.

So we will teach you to create better A/B tests in a lesser amount of time and in an ethical way. So you not only succeed in the short term, but also in the long term. At the end of this webinar, we will announce the winner and this one gets a year free access to our online academy, 6 times 2 hours coaching sessions to work on your own case, you get access to our A/B test database for inspiration, and great examples on how to launch your next marketing campaign. And every month, we will organize live sessions. So if you think “I need to know this”, please stay to the end, and we will announce the winner together with Jan. 

Before we dive into the practical side, I like to give some foundations of online influence and human behavior.

My first example is this study done in California. What was the case? Which message do you think would motivate you to start saving energy? What is that message? Message 1: It helps the environment.

Message 2: It helps future generations, so it’s good for your children, your grandchildren. Is it number 3? Save money, or is it number 4? Are your neighbors already saving energy?

What do you think people answered that they were thinking that would motivate themselves? So what the people actually were thinking was that it would motivate them to start saving energy. Do we have a poll for this question, Jan?

 

Jan: 

I believe we have. Just give me one second. And it is coming up.

 

Bas: 

Actually, yeah, it might be that we don’t have a poll. But if people can just say 1, 2, 3, or 4 in the chat, that would be great. So we continue to work together with our audience to make this a great webinar. I don’t know if you see some answers in the chat already, Jan.

 

Jan: 

I’m looking into it. I would say from a brief overview, I see a lot of 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4, 1, 3 4. So I would say without statistical significance, I would say it’s a close call between 3 and 4.

 

Bas: 

Fantastic. So, yeah, money is, of course, often a driver that we think of ourselves. I’m probably a big part, part of our audience knows the Cialdini principles, and that’s connected to answer 4, of course. But what were people actually answering? People said the environment would motivate me to start saving energy, and we all know this message. Perhaps it’s been a long time since you were in a hotel because of COVID, but you always have a message. Please reuse your towels and help the environment.

This was done by studies from hotel marketeers. So this was the answer people gave themselves. When they actually did the test, this was the most successful message. Number 4, your neighbors are already saving energy. What’s my point?

People typically don’t know what influences their behaviors and decisions. That’s what science tells us, but we often ask those people what we need to do, and then we have the risk of getting the wrong answers. So that’s one thing we need to understand. And the second foundation of online influence, I go back to 1930, And then we have this man. It’s a friend’s social audit sociologist named LaPierre.

And LaPierre wanted to travel to America with 2 Chinese friends. Unfortunately, at that time, there was a lot of racism, and Chinese people, Asian people were seen as only good enough to work. So they were not welcome in a lot of bars, hotels, restaurants. LaPierre was a smart man, and what he did, he wrote to 2151 establishments, and he said, “I want to visit you with my Chinese friends. Am I welcome?”

From this 251, 128 gave an answer. And 92% said no, you are not welcome with your Chinese friend. Mr. LaPierre, you can come to a hotel, bar, restaurant, but your friends are not welcome. What actually happened was, LaPierre already visited all those 251 establishments.

He was there with his Chinese friends before he wrote to them. How many times do you think he was rejected? Actually, only one time. That’s interesting. What science shows us as well is we not always act in line with our values.

So people can say when they are on the spot, well, I would always do this, or I stand for this particular thing. And now when it comes to making the choice, they choose something different: another important foundation we need to understand about human behavior. The last foundation I want to share with you, it’s a recent example again from Houston Airport. I don’t know if anybody was there, but it’s a huge airport. I was there twice, two times, and Houston Airport had a problem.

They got complaints from their clients, and they say from the customers, they were saying to use an airport. It takes too long before we can take our luggage. When we left the plane, we had to wait too long before we could claim our luggage. So they took this very seriously. And like a good company, they started to invest a lot of money in the process. And they did a fantastic job because what they realized was within 8 minutes the plane landed. Within 8 minutes, luggage was on the luggage belt. That’s way faster than London Heathrow. JFK in New York, also great big airports.

So they were thinking, well, we did an amazing job. The complaints will disappear. That was not the case. So what should they do? Then a behavioral scientist came to look at the situation, and he found a solution.

And I like the audience to think with me what the solution could be. Did he advise just park the plane further away? Just let the people complain, we did everything we could, or put some extra entertainment at the luggage belt. I think we have a poll here. So if you can launch it, Jan.

 

Jan: 

Let me see.

 

Bas: 

So the complaints kept on going. What was, at the end, the solution that worked? One, the plane is further away or people are complaining.

 

Jan: 

I’m not sure if I can see the poll here. I’m sorry, Bas. I don’t think it’s in the system.

 

Bas: 

No worries, If everybody likes to do an A, B, or C in the chat, we will get there as well. We don’t need a super statistical analysis of these answers. If we get a direction over people’s thinking, that will be great.

 

Jan: 

Okay. So A, B, C is coming in. A,A,C,A,C,A,C. B doesn’t have a lot of friends. A,C,A,C,C,A,C,C,A.

 

Bas: 

I’m happy that not many people choose B because that’s not the wisest decision to make. The right answer, what the real solution was in this case, was parking the plan further away from the gates. What was the case here? These were domestic flights. When the plane landed, they were really close to the luggage belt.

So it was a 1 minute walk and a 7 minute wait. When it parked the plane further away, it became a 7 minute walk and a 1 minute wait. There were no more complaints ever. This is interesting because they invested a lot of money, time, and effort again, to optimize this process. It was a great job, but it didn’t solve the problem and such an easy change solved the problem based on behavioral science.

What’s my point here? People typically don’t know what they want. Henry Ford had an interesting saying about this topic. He said if I had to create what people wanted, I shouldn’t have invented the car. I should breed a faster horse.

So this is why people typically don’t know what they want. These are important foundations to understand because if you realize this, then you suddenly cannot trust anymore what they are telling you, not trust it 100%, but we need a process, a scientifically proven process, how a human being makes choices. And that’s what I’m going to teach the audience today, and therefore, I like to start with a thought experiment. 

Imagine, maybe you are an otherwise-imagined parent of an eleven- or twelve-year-old child. In the morning, you wake up together. Everything is nice, and then you realize you don’t have milk in your refrigerator. You know, your child, when he or she is walking back from school that he passed by the supermarket.

So in the morning, you say, dear child, can you bring milk home for me after you come back from school? The child said, yes, mommy or daddy. I can do that. You give him $5 or €5, whatever is your currency, and the child goes to school and comes home.

What do you think? Rest, we all know it. No milk. What do you think? And just think for yourself, why didn’t the child bring milk home?

And now think for yourself, what do you think? What pops up as the first reason why the child didn’t bring milk? So in the morning, you asked for it and you gave the money to buy the milk. The child took it, went to school, and didn’t come home with milk. Probably everybody has a first reason now. And now I like to ask if we have a poll here, Jan, and what kind of… (indistinct)

 

Jan: 

Yeah. We have it on the screen.

 

Bas: 

Perfect. Great. So what kind of reason were you thinking of? The child was not motivated, so it was not interested, bought some candy, forgot to do it. Or, the child could not bring milk home. For instance, the child had no request to bring milk.

 

Jan: 

The results are coming in. We see a quite clear answer. 78% of the audience thinks that the child was not motivated to bring milk. Only 5% think that the child could not bring milk and 15% think that the child had no request to bring milk.

 

Bas: 

Fantastic. You are a great audience. The best ever because that answer really helps my presentation. Indeed, most people think of answer A, but, actually, it could be all three reasons. I will show you more about this. What’s my point here?

People have a motivational bias. If people don’t do what we want them to do, they don’t move in our direction. We think we always need to boost our motivation. And now we’re going to talk about this man, BJ Fogg, because he showed us something else.

Who is BJ Fogg? BJ Fogg is a university professor at Stanford University. He’s the founder of the term ‘Behavioral Design’ and the founder of the Behavioral Lab at Stanford University. He was also the coach for the founders of Instagram. 

First, they created another app that wasn’t that successful, and they were students of his and based on the Fogg Behavioral Model—what I’m going to explain to you in a minute—they changed the app and called it Instagram. As we know, it was quite a small success because in a year, they sold it for a billion dollars to Facebook. What’s the model that BJ Fogg proved?

He proved how behavior actually comes to life and how we show behavior. There are 3 components to it: one is motivation – how motivated am I to do something? The other component is ability – how easy is the behavior that you asked me to do? Then you’ll get an action line, and we need a prompt. A prompt is something that asks us to do a certain behavior. 

Fogg claims that people don’t do anything out of themselves because even a thought is a prompt to start doing something. So, to give you a few examples: If something is very difficult to do, and I have absolutely no interest in doing it, and you ask me to do it (prompt me to do it), then probably the prompt will fail.

What we have now is super interesting. The situation where motivation is high and ability is low, we understand. For example, I want to buy tickets to my favorite band, but everybody wants to have these tickets.

So, the website is blocked all the time, and I cannot come through to buy my tickets. I keep on going because I want to have these tickets; motivation is really high. It’s hard to do. But what we never think of is when I’m not so motivated, but it’s super easy to do, we also show the desired behavior. 

I was giving you an example when I was a student and had to go to university. I had to go by train here in Holland, and then they were always handing out free newspapers. It’s called the Meadaro.

And I have to admit, as a student, I’d rather sleep in the train than read the newspaper, but they almost shove it every morning into my hand. So, I was not motivated to have the newspaper, but it was so easy to take it. Actually, it was easy to take it and to reject it. So I ended up every morning with a newspaper at the end. And because I had the newspaper, I started reading it.

So we need to focus on designing a winning prompt, making the ability higher, and then we start focusing on motivation. Because motivation comes and goes. We call this motivational waves in psychology. To give you an example, I could wake up in the morning, watch myself in the mirror, and I think, well, Bas, your belly, well, it could be a little bit tiny, and I’m super motivated to start exercising and eat healthy food. 

And then in the afternoon, the sun is shining and I am sitting somewhere on a terrace with my friends. Suddenly, I’m motivated to eat a nice meal and have a nice drink. So there, my motivation is already gone for healthy food and exercising. So you have to understand motivation, comes and goes, but if something is easy, the ability is high, it will stay easy. We’re going to talk about how you can do this.

What we need to understand from Fogg is his formula is B=MAP. Behavior is motivation, ability, and a prompt at the same moment. In our book, Online Influence, we describe 37 principles. So, how to boost motivation, which principles can help you to increase the ability and how you can improve or design the winning prompt. And we’re going to speak today about a few of these principles.

So our audience can walk away with ideas that they can implement tomorrow or maybe this afternoon. First question, I advise everybody that you need to ask yourself: What do I want my visitors to do? The most difficult thing about influence is knowing exactly what you want to influence and which behavior you want to see. So this is always the starting question of online influence and behavior design.

Let’s think about this. Perhaps we can do this exercise to get it, Jan. So we see here an average landing page, and what do you think is the desired behavior on this landing page. And it’s super easy when I ask questions. The answer is the most logical one, what pops up first in your mind, probably. What does this website want you to do?

 

Jan: 

You want my data. You want me to download the eBook.

 

Bas: 

Exactly. They want you to download the eBook.

 

Jan: 

That was not too difficult, Bas. Give me something more difficult.

 

Bas: 

I didn’t want to put you on the spot. My apologies, Jan. But I was thinking this question is quite suitable for everybody. So indeed, download the eBook, and now we’re going to deep dive in behavior because now, actually, before you can download an eBook, you probably have to show several other behaviors, and that’s what we call a chain of micro behaviors. So probably somebody has to click on an ad somewhere. Then they have to read the promotional text on the landing page.

Then they have to fill out the form. Then they have to give consent with the privacy policy. And then they have to submit the form or press the button, and download the eBook. So, actually, there are 5 micro behaviors to do something simple like download an eBook. Per micro behavior, we are able to work on the prompt, the ability, and the motivation, and then more people go from step 1 to step 2 to 3 to 4, and then we can boost the end result with big percentages.

So before we dive into how you can design a winning prompt, increase your ability, and boost your motivation, I want to talk a little bit for the winner and perhaps other people are also interested in this program. We don’t want to give you our ordinary program. We build it for individuals, but we also make custom offers in company training. So if you are interested, feel free to contact us. But what we are doing is actually using behavioral science to develop skills and online influence. 

Just a quick sidestep. From a training perspective, science shows us something interesting. A human being has a forgetting curve. So often what we do is follow training and then expect to become really good at something. But if we don’t follow-up, science shows us within 7 days we lose 90% of the knowledge. That’s not an effective method to gain skills.

So we have to follow another rhythm, and this is what we do. So what we always say, you can’t reach a transformation outcome based on an informational investment. So if you want to really boost your conversion, start working with VWO and celebrate successes every week. That’s a transformational outcome. We need to have another process.

Let me quickly tell you what science shows us how this process looks like. So actually, there are 4 stages of transformation. First, you need information. So something you don’t know today, but you need to know to become really good, for example, in online influence, we use our Online academy to do this. That’s in our program and actually your preparation for your coaching lessons. 

Stage 2: there’s a gap once we follow, once we learn new knowledge, that has a gap of how to apply it in practice on our own cases. We want to see examples. We will use our AB test example for you to do this. The third step we need to do is confirmation. Then you’re going to work on your own case, but then you doubt whether to make the right choices.

So you need coaching. Therefore, we give you live coaching sessions, and then you need consultation. You need an ongoing talk with your peers and with experts. So we do monthly expert sessions. And within our online learning academy, you also have a community part where you can reach out a message to each other to stay to let it top of mind.

So that’s our program. Again, we will announce a winner at the end if you think after this presentation, ‘I need to know more about this’, of course, we are always happy if you contact us. And now we dive into the most important part of this presentation.

You, what can you do tomorrow? And we start with how can you design a winning prompt? First of all, what are prompts actually? Action but BJ Fogg defines a prompt as words, sounds, word objects, sounds, and thoughts that we can perceive. And ask us to show a certain behavior, or remind us to show a certain behavior.

Probably a familiar problem for everybody is the alarm clock. It prompts me every day to wake up. Well, sometimes I wake up before the alarm clock, but I definitely set it every night. So this prompts me. 

What are prompts in the online world? We have a lot of prompts. For example, ads, they prompt us to click on them. Buttons, they prompt us to click on them, or to do a certain behavior, like already buying something. Subject lines from emails, they prompt us to open the email.

Forms—they prompt us to fill them in. Headlines—they prompt us to start screening a block or an article, and the subheadlines prompt us to actually start reading it. Badge app symbols are a really common prompt, and most people get really nervous when we see them on a phone, and then we need to open the app because this badge app symbol has to disappear. Well, those are prompts, and now you see that the topic of online influence and behavior design, you can stretch it. A lot of people are associated with more leads, more sales, but it’s also about more downloads of your app.

More subscribers to your newsletter, gaining more reviews—everything that you want your visitors to do is a form of behavior, and we can design it, and we can influence them to show that behavior more often. Back to prompts. Before we dive into this, we need to do some basic psychology, and we see two people here. One is Obama, and perhaps some of you know the other person. It’s not a poll question, but if you know this other person, write it in chat. Perhaps it helps you become the winner. Give you a few seconds. Do you see some names in the chat, Jan?

 

Jan: 

Yeah. I do. I do.

 

Bas: 

Which one do you see?

 

Jan: 

I see Kahneman.

 

Bas: 

Yes. Kahneman. Yes. That’s fantastic. This is Daniel Kahneman. And in this picture…

 

Jan: 

I can have a couple of alternatives. Dutch king, Greenspan. Yeah. But I think it’s Kahneman.

 

Bas: 

Yes. Exactly. Daniel Kahneman, in this picture, receives the Medal of Freedom award from then-President Barack Obama. The Medal of Freedom Award is the highest recognition you can get as a civilian in the United States, and Daniel Kahneman is a behavioral scientist. In 2002, he won a Nobel Prize. What do you think?

Probably, when you win a Nobel Prize, you have to have a significant contribution to your field of work. But you would say, yes okay, then he won the Nobel Prize for Psychology. Well, he didn’t because, actually, that Nobel Prize doesn’t exist.

So that was probably the first reason. The second reason was that he won for economics. He won a Nobel Prize for economics. What he proved was so fundamental for how people actually make choices. Let’s take a look. Some people probably know his work, but this is crucial to understand if you talk about influence and about designing the winning prompts.

So he actually showed us that in our brain, there are actually 2 brains. He called them, luckily for me, System 1 and System 2, so I can remember it, not too complicated names. System 1 is our fast, unconscious brain. It’s made for daily automatic decisions. For example, if I walk towards somebody in the supermarket, I don’t do all the math, what’s the best angle to pass this person, I just pass. System 1 makes that decision. System 2 is our rational brain. It’s thorough. It’s conscious. It takes effort.

I’m sorry, but we don’t like as human beings to make a lot of effort to make decisions, but it’s for complex decisions, and it’s reliable. System 1 is based on what we call in the psychology of heuristics and biases, and system 2 on logical rational explanation. Old economics always claimed that a human being is a rational creature. So then you would say, if they may, if the human being needs to make an important choice, it uses System 2.

Actually, Kanam (2002) showed that 90% of all those choices are made with System 1. Today, new research shows it’s already 95%, and there is actually already research that suggests we are up to 98% now. Why is that? Scientists don’t fully agree, but we have to make somewhere around 30,000 choices a day. If you need to do this with System 2, we cannot function as human beings.

So, in influencing and moving people in your direction, a common mistake is targeting them with rational arguments, which trigger System 2. Kahneman says System 1 runs the show, and that’s the one you want to move. Therefore, we need principles that trigger System 1.

Another difficulty is when we design our marketing campaigns, we are using System 2. We are fully focused, all brains are working, and System 2 intends to think for the other person to trigger their System 2. Hence, we also need a thinking process that helps us think with System 2 to trigger System 1 for our audience.

And that’s what I’m going to help you with; it’s an important part of designing winning prompts. System 1 is often compared to the reptile brain or the croc brain, and we like to liken it to a child of 7. There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, System 1 is smarter than the average crocodile because it understands that 2+2 is 4. I’ve never seen a crocodile calculate that math or do that math. Secondly, it’s probably easier for you to imagine how to speak to a child of 7 than how to communicate with an average crocodile.

So, when you’re designing a winning prompt, remember that you are communicating with System 1, which is scanning the online environment. System 1 will decide, ‘Will I continue and show the first step of the desired behavior?’

Well, then I’d like to do some quizzes again. If we know we are talking to system 1, what do you think?

Which email subject line was more opened? These are real cases and we only animated them. So was it the answer A? And if we have a poll, if you can launch it, Jan, that will be great.

To answer A: Profishop – $100 straight into your bank account, or Profishop – benefit from our $100 cashback promotion. What do we think? We are speaking to a child of 7.

 

Jan: 

Pretty clear. I can already say that. Pretty stable coming in at approximately 90% is opting for image A and 10% is opting for image B more or less.

 

Bas: 

Fantastic! Great audience. So, the correct answer is indeed answer A, and the reason is they’re using more simplified language. Benefit from our cashback promotion – the average 7-year-old thinks that’s difficult language. Now, another question: Which ad got more clicks? To help our audience, I’ll mention it’s in the image of the woman. There’s a difference, as I assume not everybody reads Chinese. So, which image of the woman that got more clicks.

 

Jan: 

That’s really interesting.

 

Bas: 

Yes. This one is often a little bit…

 

Jan: 

You know, that is the real life of AB testing. We have a 45% for image A, and we have 55% for image B.

 

Bas: 

Lovely. So this is interesting. So I’m going to tell the correct answer, and the correct answer was answer B, and also explain why. Because the image shows strong emotions. System 1 is attracted to stronger emotions.

And think about it, for example, on a birthday, and there is a small child of 7, and everybody starts laughing. The small child probably starts laughing as well, but it doesn’t have any clue why but it’s attracted to these kinds of emotions. So strong emotions attract System 1.

To design the winning prompt, my first tip to the audience today is to use simple language. Use as few words as possible on ads, 5 to 7 words max. Make it visual. And make it important, exciting, dangerous, or use emotion. But then we need something else. We need stopping power. What does stopping power mean?

It’s actually quite simple. It acts exactly as it says. People need to stop doing what they are doing and start doing what we want them to do. For example, I’m scrolling through my Facebook page. I need to stop it. I have to click on the app.

I need to continue in the funnel we build. That’s stopping power. In our book, we mention 4 strategies to do this. The first is curiosity—make people curious. Give them an exceptional benefit. Use a simple question. Suggest an unfinished journey. Today, I can inspire the audience with a simple question from the strategy.

And I used an example from the Dutch Amazon in a minute, but what is a simple question? It’s actually exactly that. Again, like I said, we are not teaching rocket science. Once you know it, everybody can learn that. That’s the great thing about science.

If something is a science, you can teach it. And if you can teach something, you can learn it. You don’t have to have natural-born skills to start knowing how to start applying this. Every child in the world is raised like this. If an adult asks you a question, what should you do? Answer the adult. And that’s so deep in our system, so if we see a simple question, we directly move forward to want to answer this question.

What did my co-author Joris Groen do in the past with bol.com? So they wanted to collect more reviews.

People who know the Cialdini principles, and we are going to talk about it, know social proof. So we want to show the world what our clients are saying about us. So bol wanted to do this. Imagine, again, not imagine this is real, $8 billion revenue a year. So this is a huge company.

And what they did on the left, you see the real email, but it’s Dutch. So we illustrate the English version next to it. They just asked, you bought a product. Thank you. Do you want to write a review?

If you clicked on it, you came into a questionnaire. The redesign was quite simple, actually, but it used the simple question technique. What do you think of our product? It’s better than expected, as expected, or not as expected. Interesting thing happened.

The amount of clicks to the questionnaire doubled. But people felt like they already answered the first question in the second case. So the amount of reviews quadrupled. So 400 percent more reviews by just making a slight change in the email how the questionnaire was asked.

You can use the simple question technique, actually almost everywhere, Only I give you a tip, everybody. If you use the simple question technique, not only ask the question, Give the answers. Like here, like we presented, System 1 has to be able to answer the question right away. Should provide people with answers, and the best tip about the simple question technique, often you need the ‘’I don’t know the answer’’ possibility. For example, if you ask somebody, what’s your favorite color?

IPhone, you can suggest black, white, silver, and ‘’I don’t know’’. Because I don’t know is always an answer that System 1 can give, and you prompt them to move further in your funnel. So a simple question. You can reframe a lot of prompts to a simple question, always give the answer options, and think about that “I don’t know the answer” option. Then last thing for prompts, and I actually love this.

It’s about competing prompts. Often, marketers, web designers, and those involved in marketing strategy think, “Well, we have all these visitors here. The best thing to do is show them everything we’ve got because perhaps one visitor wants this and another visitor wants that.” Unfortunately, that’s a mistake because, first of all, we get choice-stress, and we are not focused on the desired behavior. Let’s take a look at SEAT.

SEAT wanted people to download a price list, but they had a lot of competing prompts. They had a very busy navigation menu, and the navigation itself was a prompt to go to another page. On the top, they had three cars with all kinds of prompts about deals. On the right, there’s “Find a Dealer,” adding more prompts. Compare this to the simplified picture.

Imagine you’re at a large birthday party. You arrive late, and there are already eighty people there. As soon as you open the door, all eighty people start talking to you. What would you do? At the very least, you probably wouldn’t understand or hear a word. Some might even run away and never come back. Surprisingly, this is what we do online. We start bombarding visitors with 80 different voices on a single page—competing prompts, just like what Saia did.

The conversion rate to download the price list was only 0.4. However, when we redesigned it with a simple, single prompt strategy (as we call it), and the red button was solely for 

downloading the price list, the conversion rate skyrocketed to 8%. If you do statistical analysis, it’s not just a 7.6% increase in conversion. If we do it now, it’s 2000% better. The number of leads for sales increased by 2000% by removing offers instead of putting everything on a single page. So again, if you know the desired behavior, focus on it because a human being finds it very hard to get multiple offers simultaneously.

Again, back to the child of 7. If you ask a child of 7, ‘Brush your teeth, go to bed, finish your day,’ and all that’s in one moment, I can promise you not everything will happen. So you need to drive the direction and use as many single prompts as you can. That’s about prompts.

If you see some question, Jan, about prompts or System 1?

 

Jan: 

I have two questions. Actually, I was about to interrupt you. The first question is quite interesting, one from Dotson. It’s about working in the infrastructure business and winning tenders. So thinking about motivation, etcetera, in such a B2B environment, with a goal in mind to win tenders, are the same principles to be used in such an environment to get a better hit rate?

 

Bas: 

Yes. Definitely. It’s a really interesting question. Thank you, Dautzen. We often get the question.

Does this work in B2B as well? As a general question. I come back to the tender part. And I always ask a question back, and I say, are human beings still deciding at that business or are robots deciding? And, luckily, the answer for me is often, yes, still human beings, then these principles apply. A lot of research has been done.

So it doesn’t matter if it’s a B2C approach or a B2B. For the tender part, to give you proper advice, I need to understand a little bit more. So perhaps you can write an answer to my question, and we can come back to it, Dalton. Is the pitch to the tender a physical pitch or a video goal page, or is it only through a website or another online presentation where you cannot right away reply to your audience because there’s a difference in my advice. So let’s pause this question and come back to it, Jan.

 

Jan:

Yep. Yeah. There is a second question that was just coming in. It’s about simplifying languages, reducing things and so on, and it’s quite familiar. So what about if your target group is expecting a lot of technical details and fancy stuff and so on?

So, the question is, does the principle of using simple language always apply, or can there be exceptions when the audience is actually expecting a lot of technical specifications?

 

Bas:

Again, a great question. Thanks for asking. In the first step of a client journey where you prompt them to stop certain behavior and start at the beginning of your Funnel, your client journey, it always applies because then the other person is not expecting difficult language, actually attracted by the simple language because that human being is still in System 1 focus. Then again, later on the funnel, simpler language will help you to get to the next desired behavior. Although, some people want to have more statistics.

I don’t have the time to explain this in detail, but you also have (indistinct) people and you have these colors. You have blue, green, red, or yellow, and these people have different preferences about processing information or gaining information before making a choice. The prompt: Yes, always use simple questions, but give people the option for more detailed information.

Only to give a full answer will take me 10 to 15 minutes. So I’m happy if this person would seek out on my contact page. I’m happy to schedule a call to give a more detailed answer, but, unfortunately, on time, I have to get a better overview of this answer.

 

Jan:

Okay. Here’s another one for you. So, in regards to the previous one, just one of my 5¢ we have, it’s not only that simplifying your language does not necessarily mean that you get rid of everything else. You just put it into a pyramidal structure and start with a simple message first. And then offer the option to go into a deeper dive of something else, but it’s another decision to do that.

And we have another question coming in from Yosha. How would you suggest using prompts for a website with 2 audiences?

 

Bas:

Direct them to, I need to know the audience, of course, but direct them to what you want the audience to do. And probably if you know where they are coming from audience A and audience B, design different messages. Design different landing pages, of course, connect the message and the prompts to your audience if that’s possible indeed.

 

Jan:

I think that gets us directly into personalization of simple clear messages. And as long as you can understand you have some information where this guy comes from and to which part of which audience he is then, to address the message and not bore him with another one. Then there is another…

 

Bas: 

We often have a lot of data. Sometimes we don’t even realize we have all this data, but that’s also what we help people to run, actually, you already know a lot of things. You know these throws attract mostly this kind of audience, and connect your message and your prompts and also the ability and motivation to that audience, and you will definitely see a boost in your conversion. One more, Jan, and then I will continue to…

 

Jan: 

Yeah. I love the last one. Thank you very much, Jeffrey, for asking that. Because this kind of relates to our technology world where we also live, the question is how to use System 1 in a very technical environment. Would you use, keep it simple, or specialist jargon?

 

Bas:

Again, a little bit the same answer as we said before. So, yes, at the beginning, definitely, System 1 because it makes a choice, and that’s interesting. And I will not give you just an idea but what I’m familiar with in the pharmaceutical world. We did research, and there are many doctors. They studied for many years at universities to become that.

They need to have real, practical experience to kind of call them a medical specialist. And then they say, I’m not, I always use System 1. I’m this rational person. Of course, we were involved in actual research, which shows even this doctor who thinks he doesn’t make decisions with System 1 is still just a human being and makes most of the decisions with it, even what kind of medicine they prescribe to their patients. So based on this, we can fairly say, at the moment of making a choice, yes target System 1. 

But you have to have rational information. And perhaps I can give this example: people who buy a house nowadays, the market in Holland is quite tense. So what happens? We start on a certain website to compare houses, where we want to live, how many bedrooms we want, whether we want an apartment or a house with a garden.

These are all System 2 thinking, rational decisions. Then we go look for that certain house, and then you get the cliched case: “Wow. It was actually a little bit too expensive, but I had to buy it because I totally fell in love with the house.” Our System 1 made the choice, and that’s what the reason shows. So it’s about choice making, not about orientation.

So the desired behavior, if you know your customer journey, you know a part of your audience needs this rational orientation. The desired behavior is to read an article, to watch a video, or to download a brochure. That’s your early stage, perhaps, which also involves designing prompts, increasing ability. But at one moment, you continue to the end stage. It’s just the one who makes a choice. That’s what science really tells us.

Only it’s sometimes difficult to argue for it because we like to believe we are these rational creatures, and science tells us we are not. So there’s a conflict in our brain, but that’s the answer.

Let me continue, Jan, because we are going a little bit more. I hope everybody can stay, and I will give you fantastic examples on how to increase ability and motivation.

Frank describes 5 factors that influence the ability. And he says, “Do I have the time for it? Money, can I pay for it? Physical effort. Can I physically do it?”

For example, if you ask me to walk the tree up long today with you, I probably have to say no because my physical endurance won’t be enough. Mental effort, how much thinking power does it cost routine? Did I do it before? So it feels easier. We focus on mental effort by reducing the mental effort, we can increase our conversions

Let me give you a principle we developed ourselves, and we called it the Jenga technique. And for people who don’t know the jenga game, it’s a wooden block, and you have to take out one without a tower to collapse. So we have to take out a block before the tower collapses.

And we like to do this with sentences. We like to take out the worst and not make the sentence collapse. So can we make it shorter? Saying the same thing makes it shorter. “Do you want more conversion on your website?”

Can we make it shorter? Definitely. “Want more conversion?” Yes. Still standing structure.

“More conversion” – still works. “Want more” – towers to collapse. So let’s talk more about conversion. But what we actually have done now is reducing about 70% of the words. Rule of thumb is you can always reduce sentences by 50%.

Your first draft, you can reduce 50% of the words and say the same. Why is this important? Now we have a poll again. What does the audience think, Jan? How much time does it take to read and understand one word?

And I hope everybody can stay because we are going to announce the winner. I’m sorry if we are a little bit over time.

 

Jan:

Okay. We see answers are coming in. Alright. Pretty interesting. So 39% is going for the 1st option, 10 to 20 milliseconds, 49% now is opting for between 102-100 milliseconds, and there is 13% of our audience that believes that’s more in the range of 1000 to 2000 milliseconds.

 

Bas:

Fantastic. The real answer is 100 to 200 milliseconds. And why is this important? If it takes 100 to 200 milliseconds for an average person to read and understand one word, if we remove 100 words from, let’s say, a landing page, we save 15 seconds. That’s a huge amount of time in the online world.

Let’s take a look at an example. From LottieFiles, this looks like a quite okay design. Landing page, header, some sublines, and then a Call-to-action button. When they removed those 3 sentences, the only one that’s the only change saying the same, but in lesser words, conversion went up 45%. So tomorrow, you can start looking in your emails, in your web pages.

Can I say the same with fewer words and so increase my ability? Everybody can do this. Another one is to remove distraction. It’s connected to competing prompts, but prompt is actually starting new behavior, and distraction is a message that does not help me to show the desired behavior. And this was fun, something from SIMCITY.

Those marketeers came together, and they said, well, we’re going to make something a super great offer for our audience. And what we do is when you buy a new game, you get absolutely nothing. But if you come back the second time, well, then we give you a $20 discount. That doesn’t really sound like a great offer, and people didn’t think it was a great offer. So, actually, it became a distraction.

So when they removed it, what you see on the left, just removing the distraction, sales went up with 43%. Well, imagine SIMCITY, this was a multimillion dollar case by removing a message. So also screen your online elements and say, “does this message really help to get the desired behavior?” So jenga, we moved this to be easy to do and easy to set up with VWO to set up an A/B testing and make it a truth, make it with data, and say, “yes, this really worked.”

 

Jan:

It’s one of my favorite parts. I’m sorry to interrupt you there. It’s one of our favorite categories of tests. It’s easy. It’s fast. You can simply reduce things and the results are absolutely confirming what you say. It always works, almost always. And gives a strong lift.

 

Bas:

Fantastic. And it helps also to connect it to the Fogg Behavioral Model. Once you make it easier, it stays easier forever. We don’t have to depend on motivation. So I love these tests as well. Because it has a long term effect and we don’t have any problem with these motivational waves.

Although boosting motivation exactly in the moment, before people make a choice, that’s probably the hardest thing to do in online influence. But once you master it, of course, you can also make outstanding results. And boosting motivation, I can refer it to my friend, Robert Cialdini, like you saw in my introduction. I’m one of his twelve certified trainers in the world, personally trained by him. And one of his principles, which he says, that’s probably the strongest principle in an online world, is social proof.

And this for my previous company, which I sold, And what I did, I realized a long time ago, I need to collect reviews. I need to show social proof of what my clients are telling about me. And we had a lot of reviews, more than 10,000 reviews. We hid them professionally behind the review tab in this design. When I got a little bit smarter, and talked again about social proof.

I realized that’s a mistake, Bas. I need to bring it to the surface. I need to bring it to my clients. So that’s what I did. On the homepage, I showed the reviews, and our call to action kept some free advice. That was the orange button, above our call to action, western world still reads or screens left to right top to bottom.

So above our call-to-action, I showed my review score. What is this? Was a 34% increase in conversions! And because our conversion leads to real appointment to sales stat is saying this was a boost of €3.1 million in turnover. I already had these reviews. I just didn’t show them in the right way.

So here is where you show it. Where do you show your social proof? Do you have it? If the answer is no. I suggest collecting it.

If you have it, look where this can help you. And I’m going to give you one other tip about social proof in a minute, how you can make the most powerful sentences with social proof. First, I like to do a quick… Let’s leave this poll because we are a little bit overtime. I want everybody to stay to the end so we can really announce the winner.

A fun thing here: if we summarize a review, you can say everybody answers A: “Give me a 5-star rating.” And B: “9 out of 10 reviewers gave me a 5-star rating” or C: “89%.” Rationally, the best answer is A if everybody tells me I’m great, and that’s fantastic. Actually, the summary that is most persuasive is actually answer C. Why? We think 100% is not trustworthy, is not believable, not credible. 9 out of 10, oh, that sounds like guessing. And 89%, that sounds like you did your homework, and now System 1 trusts you and says, “Oh, you are a great one.”

Another recent study shows what’s the best review score on a 5-point scale. Actually, it’s between 4.2-4.7. Higher than 4.7, we think, again, it’s not credible. Nobody does everything right. And lower than a 4.2, we think that’s just not good enough. So perhaps a tip for everybody.

Now, on the last piece of this presentation, and then we’re going to announce the winner. How can you create the most powerful sentences with social proof?

I will do this based on an example of NYX Makeup. In a control setting, they didn’t have any sentence below the buy button. Then they changed it to “71 beauties have viewed the product today.” What is the desired behavior? Probably not viewing products, but the right one is “71 beauties have purchased the product today.” Control sentence with “have viewed.” Transactions went up 33%. If we change one word to “have purchased,” transactions went up to 100 % extra transactions. A double number of transactions compared to the control group. 

How can you make these sentences tomorrow or today? First, there are 3 criteria. First, you have to use people like me. So if you say I have 12,000 followers, it should be if we target business managers, 12,000 business managers are following up.

These are the 71 beauties in our last example. The 2nd criteria named the desired behavior literally. So 12,000 business managers shipped tried to our channel; in a previous example, 71 beauties have purchased this product today. And last criteria, exact numbers boost trust. So don’t say 12,000, say 1234.

We don’t see 70 beauties. We see 71 beauties. But three criteria: people like me, like your audience, Name the desired behavior, literally, and use exact numbers. So next steps: If you want a transformational outcome and we know we can do it with an informational investment, although if you want to take a first step, our book is available in English. In Dutch, you see on the left side.

And in Russian, at the moment, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, German and Spanish are coming up, but I don’t have a launch date yet. So that’s the first step. The second step is to contact us for our program, or you can even subscribe, or maybe you like in-company training. Feel free to contact us at any time, of course. And now it’s time, Jan. No. Sorry. I have a great offer. My team said again, if you want individual training for 1 week, I can give you a maximum of 20 seats. Normally, our program is $1499.

For all attendees from Visual Website Optimizer, I will give it for $999. So it’s the end of March. Let’s say 30 March, then this offer is offline. Go to onlineinfluence.com/vwo. They will see the price, and you can subscribe to our program. It’s in English and available in Dutch for $999, and you get everything I talked about before. And now…

 

Jan:

Amazing. So I asked in the back who is winning and how do we do this? And, a really big thank you to our tech team who were ramping up random selection of all the remaining attendees here. And I just got a name, and the winner is Ceith Sync.

And please reach out to us after the show. We will also reach out to you, and congratulations. Hope you will enjoy that.

Bas, thank you very much. I think I can see that people really stayed up to the point that most of them could make it.

The others will, hopefully, enjoy the rest that they couldn’t see in the video. Many, many thanks. It was really interesting. It was really insightful. And there were a number of things that we were that I will pass on to our marketing department to have a look at our website.

So, it will certainly have, I like the concept of reduction. Many thanks to all the people in the audience. Thank you for staying with us. And, thank you for your interest. We will keep in touch, and I hope that many of you will make use of this great offer and reach out to the Online Influence Institute. I think it’s a really extraordinary program.

I don’t think I know because we’ve seen this already. How it can help to boost your conversion rate optimization program and to really make the best out of it. Thank you very much, Bas. I hope we can repeat this soon.

 

Bas:

Yeah.

 

Jan:

Great. And see each other soon again. Thank you, everybody.

 

Bas:

Thanks. Thanks, everybody.

 

Jan:

Have a good Tuesday. Thank you.