Learn 7 scientifically-backed marketing tips in 27 minutes

And what I think is the most valuable tip I can give about social proof is the following. That is Bass Walters. He is an expert in the field of persuasion and behavioral design. And today I have asked him to share seven Scientifically backed tips to improve your marketing. To start with, he shared a study involving the beauty brand NYX Cosmetics.

They had a buy button, so they sell makeup, the webshop, and they had a buy button. And then they added one sentence, small sentence, underneath that buy button, which says Seventy one beauties. Have viewed this product today. Why would they say 71 beauties have viewed this product? Well, to leverage social proof. Social proof is the principle that suggests we follow the actions of others.

adding a most popular title to an option on a menu is proven to boost the sales of that item by thirteen to twenty percent. So did NYX increase sales with their seventy one Beauties copy? Well yes. The amount of purchases increased with 33%. But NYX found that they could tweak this social proof to make that line even more persuasive. Now, they changed one word.

And the plus thirty three percent became plus hundred, or in other words, another increase of three hundred percent if you go from plus thirty three to plus hundred. The world they changed was viewed. And the sentence became seventy one beauties have purchased this product today. We follow the actions of others. When we learn that seventy one others have bought the product. we will be far more likely to buy it ourselves.

And now my tip for everybody is how can you create such simple and powerful sentence? We have this data, what people doing on a product page or a landing page, like I said. Often in Google Analytics, and we can even automate it to show it. How do you create those sentences? Three criteria. One. People like me on NYX they named them beauties because if you buy makeup probably you want to be beautiful. Then the second criteria is name the desired behavior literally.

So what NYX wanted was not people viewing their products but purchasing their products. So when they changed that word, they saw a huge increase. And the third criteria is exact numbers boost trust. So they didn't have 70 beauties, but 71. That's something funny in our brain. If we see 70, then we think, well, maybe you made that up. Seventy one and we think wow that cannot be made up. It's completely true. Show your audience what people like them do.

Name the desired behaviour literally and use exact numbers to boost trust. I wanted to test this. Specifically, I wanted to test the people like me part of social proof. NYX referred to their customers as beauties because that's how their customers want to be perceived. but my audience wants to be perceived as great marketers. So, for my experiment, I created two subject lines for my email newsletter. The control read

Why these four ads stick in your mind? And then I created a variant, a variant which leveraged this people like you social proof. This variant said Why the best marketers study these four ads? So one was why these four ads stick in your mind, the other, the variant, was why the best marketers studied these four ads. By saying the best marketers, I hoped to benefit from the people like me tactics.

And I did. Each email went to 1379 marketers, and the second version, inspired by Bass, had a 6.4% higher open rate. You can click the link in the show notes to view the full stats on that study. But that is just one tip. After this break, Bass will cover six more scientifically backed marketing tips that you can use online. Apparently most businesses only use 20% of their data.

That's like reading a book with 80% of the pages torn out. The point is, you will miss a lot. Unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights that are trapped in in emails, in call logs, in transcripts, all that unstructured data can really make a difference to your business because when you know more, you grow more.

You won't learn much reading 20% of a book, so why settle for just 20% of your company's data? Visit hubspot.com today to learn more. Today I'm joined by the fantastic Bass Walters. I am author of the book Online Influence and I'm also the co-founder and CEO of Cialdini Institute. where I partner with the godfather of influence, Doctor Robert Cialdini.

Now let's face it. Many of you have probably heard of that social proof example before. I've shared examples like that plenty of times on the show. So Bass was very quick to give me a tip that he thought some of you could would not have heard of before. For me this is a very interesting principle. That often not so many people are aware. It has to do with dopamine release. And most people know dopamine, it's a neurotransmitter, but it's associated that we are feeling good, feeling happy.

But dopamine does something else. It gives us power to take action. Now there's an interesting study because previously we Scientists assumed that dopamine is released when we have the rewater. But like I said, dopamine is also giving us power and you need power to get the reward. Bass is suggesting that dopamine is released not once a reward has been received, but when we're anticipated. That reward.

Here's a study to prove it. So what a study done and Don't ask me about opinion about animal testing, but this was done with a monkey and the monkey saw images and when a banana showed up, if he pressed the button, the monkey got. Banana juice, which the monkey liked. This is a 2015 study, which as always is cited in the show notes. And then they saw when the dopamine actually was released.

The dopamine was released when he saw the image of the banana, not when he got the banana juice. Actually, then the dopamine was reduced. When we see a future reward Dopamine is released, it makes us feel good and we create power to move forward. This is known in the literature as anticipatory enthusiasm. Our dopamine levels increase when we anticipate a reward.

and they actually decrease when that reward is gained. But the researchers in that 2015 study found a way to double the amount of dopamine the monkey experienced. It wasn't by offering more banana juice or showing more banana images. In fact, It was doing the opposite. But maybe uh uh then a a very interesting thing in that study. Then what they did, the b monkey got only fifty percent of the time it got banana juice. So the reward became uncertain.

Then the amount of dopamine that was released doubled. This also explains why gambling is addictive. It's an uncertain reward, and people keep on pressing buttons or keep on going on because All the time dopamine is actually released on the gambling itself, not on winning the prize. Uncertain rewards are incredibly motivating. I have experienced this myself.

At a cafe. I was sitting in the cafe, I was enjoying my coffee, and I saw a sign on the table. The sign said Do you want to receive a surprise? It went on to say. Here's what you've got to do. One, scan the QR code, two, give us a review, and three Ask the staff for your surprise. Now I I really hardly ever leave reviews, but I just couldn't help myself. The dopamine I experienced just anticipating what this surprise reward could have been, it motivated me to act.

I did, I left my review, I went to the staff and I got an energy bar. As a gift. Now, if the cafe had said, leave a review and we'll give you an energy bar, there is absolutely no way I would have left a review. I don't even like energy bars. But it was the unexpected surprise that drove me to act. So two lessons from Bass here. One is to try and offer uncertain rewards.

And two, make sure customers can visualize those rewards and benefits. I have one example here. It was from a company that sold custom license plates. And they first had a pretty generic image and then they had a Porsche with a cool license plate on it. the amount of conversions Was 210% more. Only changing the image, showing what people actually got. They could visualize.

what they would get if they would buy. It doesn't just work with benefits, it works with punishments as well. The Behavioural Insight team helped redesign the DVLA letter to encourage British drivers To pay their tax on time. Now, many drivers ignore these letters, and in the past it cost the DVLA£40 million in yearly lost revenue. The Behavioral Insights team ran an experiment where some drivers received an image.

of themselves in the vehicle driving the vehicle and that image was added to the letter. The hypothesis was that the image might help drivers to visualize the punishment. You know, you're losing this car, this car you're driving, which we've got a picture of. in the letter if you don't pay your tax.

The trial involved two hundred fifty thousand unlicensed vehicles, and the new letter visualizing the punishment was twenty percent more effective than the original, which, of course, when you're losing forty million pounds a year, is an awful lot.

Alright, let's move on to another tip. This one was used to increase job applications. What the example is, it was a company that wanted to get more people to opt in to acquire the job. The company was a job vacancy platform that allowed people to apply for jobs via video messages. Mas eu tinha... quite a tough flow, so to say, with what we call Hard step, not baby steps, big steps. Applying for these jobs was difficult.

You clicked on an ad, then you were asked to download an app. When you download the app you were asked to record a video. So these are quite big steps for people. An ad. Now I need to download an app, that's not Common what to need to do and then you needed to record a video of yourself. Bass and his team implemented a change that increased video applications by twenty-five percent. Here's what they did. So what happened what we did was click on the ad.

Come to explanation page. No, you got a message. Ah great, you're here. You can go to the next round. To go to the next round, download the app. So one step, one message in between and one step in between. They added a step. They didn't immediately ask the applicant to download the app. They first asked them to do a short written application. Shortly after they finished this application,

The applicant would get a message saying, Congratulations, you're through to the next round. Download the app to complete your next video round application. Then, if people download the app, they will not right away ask, record a video. We add a step there and say, Well, here are some tips how you can present yourself and make the best recording. And then they were asked to record. Well that led to about f twenty five percent more job applications. In his book, Bass writes how big steps

such as downloading a white paper, buying a product, or signing up for a training course, well they can be off-putting. By paving the way with small steps, your visitor's commitment is likely to grow and the chance that they will eventually take a much bigger step increases. That previous example boosted downloads by twenty percent.

But Bass's next example reduced customer cancellation separate. By ninety percent. He did so by using the principle of loss aversion. So in general loss aversion says we are double more motivated to avoid loss than to gain something. The big takeaway there is we shouldn't tell people what it is to win. If they say yes, we should tell them if they say no to us what they stand to lose or what they are missing out on.

and an example of an ad, the message was relieve from b back pain. That's the wind frame, or And this may be a tough one, but this is the the example that they use. Avoid open back surgery. So now the back surgery is a loss, maybe maybe a bit exaggerated, but click through rates was increased by forty six percent. What shows this think if you create a message not what is to win but what's that to lose and then a really funny one was from for Dutch lottery and people unsubscribe so

They want people to not do that. So they tried many messages and they tried also many law version messages. So there was tried you will longer enjoy the benefits of this product. You will not longer support our charities. You will not enjoy new features that are coming. But the winner was, and this is the Shows also irrationality of people. You will lose your loyalty points. On that message, 90% of the customer stake.

But I don't believe a single customer was aware of having royalty points. Who wakes up in the morning and thinks, you know what I have? I have royalty points from this lottery. But that message, losing actually something that Dey Had was a was the big winner. In another experiment by the famous researcher Elliot Aronson,

who I've cited plenty of times on the show, women were shown one of two messages encouraging them to book a breast cancer screening. The first message said, with early detection, survival rate is 100%. Get screened. With early detection, survival rate is 100% get screened. It's a really good message. But they created a second message which focused on potential loss. It was inspired by loss aversion. It read,

Only 15% of women live five years or more with late detection get screened. So that's only 15% of women live five years or more with late detection. That second loss aversion message. led to one hundred and twenty five percent more screening.

The next example Bass had for me is inspired by a 1978 study that some of you may know. It's a very famous, well-known study where people are waiting in line for For a copy machine. And somebody asked, Can I skip the line? And people probably were a bit friendly, but 60% back then, but 60% said yes, you can skip the line. But then they did another pose. Can I skip the line because I'm running late and I really need this cop.

The four percent said yes, they now got a reason. But the most interesting part is yet to come. Now they did the approach. Can I skip the line? Because I need to make copies. What is everybody else needs to do that's waiting in line to make copy for a copy machine? Probably making copies. But 93% said yes. So, what this research shows, and later on, other researchers if we get a reason why we should do something, our motivation.

Heavily increase even if the reason is not really valid. Can I cut in line because I need to make copies? Works ninety-three percent of the time, while just saying can I cut in line only works sixty percent of the time. Giving a reason boosts action. And Bass says we can apply this principle online as well. A way where this is used is for in Belgium at Bpost. They had a service.

When people move houses, I think in every country they have this service. You can go to the government postal office and say, well, if I still get mail on my old address, forward it to my new address. That was this service. And they had a certain type of landing page, then we redesigned it to something very simple. It was redesigned to a header. Three checkboxes with a reason why, a good image with anticipatory enthusiasm, and one single button, one single prompt.

41% more sales. The reason why, combined with the image, simple design and a good prompt, helped increase conversions by 41%. All right, we've covered how Social Proof boosted sales for NYX makeup, how anticipatory enthusiasm increased reviews for the cafe I was sitting in, how smaller steps increased job applicants by twenty five percent.

and how loss aversion messaging increased breast cancer screenings by 125%. But we are not done. After this quick break, Bass will share two more tips, including how one company increased the number of meetings its sales team booked By reducing the choice it offered its customers. All of that coming up.

The podcast I'd like to recommend to you today, after you've finished listening to Nudge, is the Hustle Daily Show. It is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily Show brings you a very healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, and informative takes on business and tech news. If you would like an interesting episode to get you hooked on this podcast,

There's a recent episode called the AI app that makes your dream vacation a digital reality. If you want to listen to that, just go and search for the Hustle Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine you are a salesperson. You are emailing potential customers asking them to book in a meeting with you. They say yes, and you now need to offer them time for a call. Now conventional wisdom suggests that you should offer them as many times as possible. You should say, here are all the times I'm free over the next few weeks. That makes the most sense. It gives the customers the most amount of time to pick and decreases the chances that there'll be a clash. It makes conventional sense.

But perhaps it's not the best message. See, Bass has evidence to suggest that offering less availability can actually increase the number of signups. Here's why. What we think is that we love to have choices, but actually we are not so good in making choices. What actually happens if we get too many choices, we choose not to choose.

What we always say maximum five, more than five people choose not to choose, ideally three. In his book, Bass shares a real world example from the software company Unbound. What happened with Unbound? They had a page to join a free demo. And they gave you four time slots. Well, that sounds rationally. Well then I can Pick four time slots, it's easier to To match what in your calendar. Actually when they reduced it to three time slots

Conversions increased with sixteen percent. Reducing the number of cool slots increased conversions. This same principle can be applied to online sales as well. Now what is interesting this also applies to filters and I think there's a big lesson especially for listeners that have a web show. Let's say you sell shoes and you have all types of shoes. We like to show them all. But maybe you want first a filter to Summer shoes, winter shoes, or maybe sneakers, boots.

And then an X filter and an X. Because much more people will continue the flow and find much quicker what they're looking for. And actually we have such a case. In a webshop that sold boots, and by changing the options in the filter menu, we were able to increase sales with 25%. Simply reducing the number of filters helped increase sales.

But Bass encourages you to remember the rule. Minimum three choices, maximum five. It's always important to offer some choice, because offering no choice at all will backfire as well.

To explain why I'll need Bass to explain the Hobson plus one rule. Thomas Hobson was actually somebody that lived in the UK and he had a postal delivery service in the 1700s. So it was with horses. And because he not always was delivering posts, he also rented out his horses so people could make a ride. But he didn't want that people all the time choose the best and the quickest horse.

Because it would wear him out and he could not easily deliver the meal anymore. So what he did when people came out to rent a horse, he showed you all the around all the stables, and then he said, you can only pick this horse. So you got one choice that became known as the Hobson choice.

Now, online, in this situation, the seventeen hundreds, people traveled to him and they were standing there, so they really wanted the horse and they had no other way than accepting the Hobson choice, the only choice he gave them. Online, we always have another choice. And that choice is somewhere in the right top on our desktop and it's a red cross. Go away. So we always have two choices. Now what we say, the Hobson plus one means Add an additional choice to the

Bass has tested this himself. He worked with a Dutch bank that wanted to increase its survey responses. The email the bank sent out to customers said Dear customer name. Can you help us improve our website? And then they included a button saying, Yes, I want to help. Click that button and you get the survey. Bass knew this would backfire. Only offering one choice causes reactants and it stops people from acting. So he added a second button.

Alongside, yes, I want to help, he added a button that said, Maybe later, offering that second option, that Hobson plus one choice, doubled the number of survey responses that the Dutch bank received. Bass has also tested this with an insurance company. Here's what he did. And they had a call to action uh uh create your insurance package. Then we added

Button create your insurance packets. Tax links, share this on LinkedIn. Who in their right mind wants to share on LinkedIn they are going to create an insurance packet? You would say nobody, but it was also we could test this. The click-through rate to start creating your insurance package was increased by 244.7%.

Only because reducing the option, making the option of doing nothing going away less available. Today we have covered seven tips that you can apply to your online marketing. The first is that you can use social proof that's personalised to your audience. And it works. It improved my email open rate by 6.4%. Second, offer variable rewards.

It helped one cafe generate one thousand two hundred five star reviews. The third breakdown big asks into smaller commitments. It increased job applicants by twenty percent. The fourth, use loss aversion messaging. It can reduce customer cancellations by ninety percent. The fifth, give a reason. Even if it's an invalid one, it can help increase conversions by forty-one percent. The sixth Offer fewer than five choices. It boosted Unbounce's sales meetings by sixteen percent.

And finally, always offer more than one choice. That insurance company increased conversions by two X. With this tip. These seven tips are all backed by reliable behavioral science. Whenever I've referenced a paper or a study, I've cited it in today's show notes. So you can go and check them out there if you'd like to. But before you go. Let me please tell you that nine hundred and seventy six smart marketers like you have left a five star review for Narjon, Spotify or Apple.

Could you leave Niger of you? If you do, you can send me an email to let me know. I'd be more than happy to send you a surprise to say thank you. But of course, if you don't want to, you can always just share the show on LinkedIn instead. That helps as well. So can you leave Nudge a review? Because let's face it, all podcasts need podcast reviews. All right. That is all for this week folks. Thank you so much for listening.

And thank you to the wonderful Bass Wilters for coming back on the show. He was on uh about a year ago now. I really enjoyed that episode. He asked to come back on and I and I really couldn't wait to get him back on. Um he's a fantastic guest. And if you'd like to learn more from Bass and get many, many more tips about how to improve your website, you can sign up to his online influence academy.

on this Academy, which is all hosted online, he has lessons teaching you how to Boost motivation, design a winning prompt, create a fantastic website, increase the ability customers need to take action, all these wonderful things that can

genuinely improve your conversions online. There is a community forum. There's a great weekly QA. I'm part of this community as well. I really enjoy learning from Bass. So if you are interested in signing up, just click the link that I have left in the show notes. To access that offer and sign up. But make sure to click that link in the show notes. All right, that is all from me this week. You might have heard that last week I hiked.

over fifty kilometers to give a talk at a conference. It was a pretty bizarre day and ended up being a pretty bizarre talk. at a conference. If you would like to hear why I did that and what that talk was about, then please do go sign up to the Nudge newsletter. I'm gonna write a newsletter this Friday explaining why I walked fifty two kilometers.

to give a conference talk. So just go to nudgepodcast.com, click newsletter in the menu to sign up there. All right, that's all for this week. Massive thank you to Bass for coming on. I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Cheers.