How Marketing Psychology + AI Will Boost Your Results Faster and Easier with Bas Wouters, Founder of the Online Influence Institute | Ep. 402

Summary

The Marketing Millennials Podcast, Episode 402
How Marketing Psychology + AI Will Boost Your Results Faster and Easier
with Bas Wouters, Founder, Online Influence Institute
Released: March 20, 2026
Host: Daniel Murray

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Daniel Murray sits down with Bas Wouters, a leading expert in persuasion and behavioral design, to dissect the powerful intersection of marketing psychology and AI. With a background training under luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Robert Cialdini, Bas brings actionable frameworks, research-backed insights, and real-world case studies. Their conversation unpacks how understanding how people actually make decisions—and translating that into digital marketing using behavioral science and AI—can dramatically accelerate results, often without spending more on ads or creative. Bas also shares free tactical resources for listeners.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Why Most Marketers Get Optimization Wrong

Timestamp: 04:22

• Common Pitfall: Marketers react to conversion plateaus by increasing ad spend, changing the creative, or tweaking the audience, but forget the fundamental lever: understanding how decisions are made.
• Quote:
  “What they never optimize is how the brain actually makes decisions. How do you optimize all your messages so more people do what you want them to do? And I think that's at this moment the most common mistake in marketing.”
  — Bas Wouters (04:22)

2. Decision Making: System 1 vs. System 2

Timestamp: 05:39

• Kahneman’s Principle: Explains the two systems:
  • System 1: Fast, intuitive, relies on mental shortcuts (heuristics and biases), makes 95-98% of decisions due to information overload.
  • System 2: Slow, rational, analytical, used sparingly due to mental effort required.
• Marketing Consequence: Most campaigns are designed to persuade System 2 (logic), but System 1 “runs the show.” Marketing needs to “use full brain power to trigger System 1 in the other person's mind.”
• Quote:
  “System 1 runs the show. That's the one you want to move.”
  — Bas Wouters (08:23)

3. Real-World Examples: Emotional vs. Rational Choices

Timestamps: 09:35–12:25

• Even in B2B and big-ticket decisions, final choices are triggered emotionally (System 1), while rational arguments are post-purchase justifications.
• Daniel’s Example: Buying baby utensils due to influencer use, then checking BPA-free status to justify.
• Bas’s Example: Company car decisions come down to gut-feel or status cues, not strictly features or specs.

4. Practical Marketing Framework: The Fogg Behavior Model

Timestamp: 13:18

• B=MAP:
  - Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt - Prompt: Action trigger (e.g., button, ad, notification) - Ability: How easy is the action? - Motivation: How much do they want it?
• Counterintuitive Insight: Ability is the lowest-hanging fruit—make actions as easy as possible for more conversions.
• Quote:
  “Recent research also shows and confirms that if you focus on ability, it's easier for everybody in every stage of the client journey. And it's the most successful approach to let more people do what you want them to do.”
  — Bas Wouters (16:31)

5. Exclusive Free Listener Offer

Timestamp: 18:27

• Listeners can receive a personalized optimization plan at onlineinfluence.com.
• The team will analyze your web page, ad, or funnel using 35 proven psychological principles and provide the top 5 “easy wins” (plus predicted KPI lifts) through a high-touch, tailored review—previously only available to enterprise clients.

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Actionable Tactics and Case Studies

Designing Winning Prompts

Timestamp: 20:24

• SEAT Car Manufacturer (EU):
  • Old Setup: Webpage with multiple CTAs (find a dealer, see offers, customize, etc.), leading to user confusion and low conversions.
  • New Setup: Stripped down to a single prompt—“Download price list”—on each model’s page.
  • Result: Conversion rate jumped from 0.4% to 8% (2,000% increase; millions in revenue).
  • Takeaway: Remove competing prompts. Every page should present a single, clear action.

Quote:
“With a minimum change and a very simple change, we designed a clean page where you had the model of the car...just a single prompt, a button: download price list...They had 2,000% more leads. This equaled millions of revenue.”
— Bas Wouters (21:24)

Increasing Ability: Reducing Mental Effort

Timestamp: 25:57

• Principle: Paradox of choice—too many options paralyzes decisions.

• Case Study:

  • Chinese e-commerce giant selling Tupperware cups.
  • Reduced options from 25 colors to 5.
  • Sales increased 77x (7,700%).
  • Guideline: Ideal is 3 options, no more than 5.

• Jenga Principle:

  • Remove unnecessary words from copy (“condense without collapsing”).
  • Lottiefiles landing page: Reducing header from 3 sentences to 1 lifted conversions 43%.
  • Action: Review landing pages, ads, and social posts; trim every extra word.

Boosting Motivation: The Magic of Social Proof Cues

Timestamp: 30:54

• NYX Makeup Studio Case:
  • Original: Just a "buy" button.
  • Test 1: Added "71 beauties have viewed this product today."
    • Result: +33% sales
  • Test 2: Changed “viewed” to “purchased”
    • Result: +200% (total +300% over base)
  • Formula:
    • Address audience directly (“beauties”).
    • Use the desired action (“purchased” not “viewed”).
    • Use exact numbers (“71” not “100+”) to boost credibility.

Quote:
“Describe what these others did. Nyx didn’t want people to view their product. They want people to purchase their products. So when they change that word that drove the intake because system one thinks, oh, other people like me are doing this behavior, I need to do so as well.”
— Bas Wouters (32:19)

The System 1 Sniff-Test (Why Vague Claims Fail)

Timestamp: 34:05

• Generalities (“100+ customers!”) trigger consumer skepticism—System 1 treats them as a potential threat or lie.
• Exactness (“71 beauties”) signals authenticity, avoiding immediate reflexive distrust.
• Pro Tip: Always be specific with social proof numbers and audience references.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “If you don’t understand how decisions are made, you’re basically optimizing noise.”—Daniel Murray (05:05)
• “System 1 runs the show. That’s the one you want to move.”—Bas Wouters (08:23)
• “It took time to come to a decision doesn’t automatically qualify that as a very rational decision.”—Bas Wouters (11:39)
• “You offer so many things, people start several behaviors, but they don’t do what you want them to do.”—Bas Wouters (24:52)
• “Say the same thing with lesser words. Reduce mental effort and increase your conversions.”—Bas Wouters (28:48)

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Practical Takeaways

• Audit your website & funnels: Stick to one prompt per page. Remove distractions.
• Reduce options: No more than 3-5 choices per product or signup flow.
• Cut the copy: Shorter, clearer sentences perform better.
• Exact, relevant social proof: Specific testimonials/statistics, relevant to your customer, drive trust and conversions.
• Use system two (full rationality) only to set up solutions that trigger system one (instinct, emotion) in your audience.

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Free Resource: Personalized Optimization Plan

Timestamp: 18:27, 35:41, 37:04
Bas offers a free, personalized digital asset review (usually reserved for major brands like Disney and Booking.com) for listeners at onlineinfluence.com.

• Includes:
  • Custom diagnosis
  • Two guided calls
  • Priority roadmap, copywriting and UX recommendations
  • Top 5 fixes to quickly lift KPIs

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Final Insights & Next Steps

• Don’t default to spending more. First, optimize for the way the brain actually makes decisions.
• AI supercharges scale. Behavioral science enables effectiveness, AI accelerates it.
• Foundational layer: Behavioral science is the “foundation for your marketing house.”
  “If you don’t build on it, everything else risks falling down.”—Daniel Murray (37:57)

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Connect with the Show

• Join The Marketing Millennials on LinkedIn and Instagram.
• Subscribe to the newsletter: workweek.com/brand/the-marketing-millennials

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This episode is a must-listen for any marketer sick of guesswork and ready to leverage proven science (and AI) for real, scalable growth. If you want to stop optimizing noise and start driving decisions, these frameworks deliver—fast.

Transcript

[Customer IO Host]

Today's episode is brought to you by Customer IO. You have customer data, but turning it into personalized marketing at scale, that's the hard part. Customer IO connects the dots. Feed it your data. Start sending messages that actually feel personal. Learn more at Customer IO tmm.

[Daniel Murray]

We are back with another episode of Market Millennials. And today we have Bass Walters on the podcast. He's a globally recognized expert in the field of persuasion and behavior design. As the award winning and international bestselling author of Online Influence, he founded Online Influence Institute. He personally trained by the top behavioral scientists in the world. Think Daniel Kahneman, Robert Cialdini, BJ Fogg and companies like Disney Alliance, Booking.com call upon Bob B's expertise. And he has trained and coached thousands of professionals worldwide to increase their online success with small changes that lead to big outcomes. Now he designed a highly trained persuasive AI agents and he is more on track to achieve his mission to help all people and companies to boost their results by helping them apply a hundred plus years of behavioral and marketing psychology faster and easier. Please welcome Baz Walters to the podcast.

[Marketing Millennials Host]

Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast.

[Daniel Murray]

I'm Daniel Murray and join me for

[Marketing Millennials Host]

unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the

[Daniel Murray]

we are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. I am here with Boz. We're going to talk about one of the most interesting topics going on in marketing right now, which is actually two of the most interesting topics of marketing right now. But they intersect together which is psychology, which everybody knows is one of the fundamentals of marketing. And then the intersection of what's trending right now, which is going to be something that's table stakes and a few years is AI. So we're going to talk about the intersection of psychology and AI. Baz is leading, leading the charge on doing this with his institute and we're going to talk about all that stuff today. But I give Baz a little, let him do a little intro of like what he's up to right now and then we'll get into the podcast.

[Bas Wouters]

Well, thanks Daniel. Always amazing to be here with you. First of all, yeah, my name Bas Wouters and I'm the founder of Online Influence Institute, also author of the book Online Influence where we describe a proven system based on behavioral psychology how you can boost your conversion. So to get more leads, more sales, more newsletter, opt ins, more email Open rates and more results in the end. And nowadays, like you just said, AI is not only a trending topic in my mind is a must use because if your competitor can go hundred times faster as you, eventually you will lose to them and that's not what you want. So what we are doing is how can we train AI on a really high standard level that they can apply, analyze and apply behavioral psychology to bring those results.

[Daniel Murray]

And that's amazing because I think I talk about this all the time on this podcast, but behavioral science is, and I said this at the beginning, is foundationally one of the most. If you use it, it works. It's proven to work. You've done that with online influence. You've done that working with Cialdini and using his principles. But I want to go into the podcast today and I know what's on a lot of people's mind is they're trying to increase conversions, but a lot of marketers aren't able to increase spend right now. So what is the biggest mistake marketers make when trying to improve in performance?

[Bas Wouters]

Well, I love that question. And in my mind it's as follows. Most marketers, if they need more results, let's take I want more leads. The instinctual action is increase your ad spend or we going to optimize something. But then they optimize the campaign or they optimize the creative or maybe even the ICP or the target audience. But what they never optimize is how the brain actually makes decisions. How do you optimize all your messages so more people do what you want them to do? And I think that's at this moment the most common mistake in marketing.

[Daniel Murray]

And then, I mean, say that simply for everybody too, is like if you don't understand how decisions are made, you're basically optimizing noise. So that is something that you should take into mind. And I love that. I think everybody's doing those, those three things when they think about a campaign and they're not thinking about behavioral science as much. But what does the research show about how people actually make decisions? Because I know you, you do this a lot with your online influence institute.

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah, definitely, I dive into that. And what we're also going to give listeners not only theoretical stuff today, I will also bring proven case studies with where simple changes made a big difference. So I'm also going to show them the proof of what we're doing. Now back to your question. What does research shows? How the brain actually makes decisions. And probably some of the listeners heard about him. I Want to talk about Daniel Kahneman? Daniel Kahneman is a behavioral scientist. He won the Medal of Freedom award, or he got the Medal of Freedom award, but he also won the Nobel Prize. And he won that in 2002. And that's already interesting because he's a behavioral psychologist scientist. So you would say he won the Nobel Prize on psychology, right? That Nobel Prize doesn't exist. So he couldn't want it. He won the Nobel Prize for economics. So what could a behavioral scientist prove that had such a huge impact on economy that they gave him the Nobel Prize? And that's exactly the answer is exactly your question. How do people actually make decisions? And his findings were in our brain, when it comes to decision making are actually two brains. He called them System one and System two. System one, you could see, is a fast computer. It's built for everyday decisions and it works on what they call in psychology heuristics and biases. But let's call them shortcuts. For example, if something is more expensive, it must be better. If everybody doing so, it must be a good idea to do so as well. And therefore it can handle a lot of decisions. The thing is, it's error prone because most of the time these shortcuts are right. Most of the time when something is more expensive, it is better. Most of the time when everybody is doing so or tell you to do it is a good idea to do so. But not always. Luckily for us, we have System two. It's a slow computer. It's basically our rational brain. And the thing is, it cost us effort. And human beings don't like to put a lot of effort in their thinking and decision making. But system 002 is able to compare all the options and then pick the best one for us. So it's a reliable system. Now, old economics always said the human being is a rational creature. So you would argue in that case, if it really comes to it, we would make decisions with system two. Daniel Kahneman proved them wrong. In 2002, about 90% of all our decisions were made with system one. Nowadays research already shows it's 95 and it's even an uptaking trend what is already seen to 98. Because of all the information overload we have, we cannot simply use our slow computer. We have to rely on that fast computer based on shortcuts. What is the biggest lesson now? When we are designing campaigns, we intend to use our full brain power, System two. But System two intends to come up with messages or solutions that will trigger System 2 in the other person's. Mind. That's why we see so many rational arguments and rational factual messages to persuade people. But as Daniel Kahneman himself says, System 1 runs the show. That's the one you want to move. So we need a system, we need a way of thinking with system two our full brain power. But through that way of thinking we come up with ideas and solutions that will trigger system one in the other person's mind and therefore we get much more yeses.

[Daniel Murray]

And I think also what you're saying too is with system one you have to have that but everybody's going to end up just even with bigger decision justify with logic. But if you, but most of the time people start with that emotional hook of like you said, price high or I want to be like my friend or I liking or this person's an influencer, I trust in them. Um, and then they're, then they start saying okay, but what does the research. Then they say what does the research say? For me, for example, with a baby, I make a decision say oh my baby needs to the same utensils to eat his food. My rational brain says oh, an influencer is using it, I want to buy that. But my system1 says an influencer is using it. I want to buy that because an influencer, my system two would be, let me go check if it's BPA free, is it blah blah blah. But if it ends up being both, then I'm going to make that decision because the influencer initially influenced me on that.

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah, I love what you say. You say some interesting things. First of all, and I hear this well, when it comes to a big decision or a decision where we think about a lot of time we use system two. And then I'm mainly here if they make the equation B2C versus B2B. Well in B2B the world works completely different because we really make big decisions and therefore we use system two. I would argue against that in system two we make well thought decisions or in other words it has a longer cycle to make the decision. So indeed we collect facts with system two. But as it comes to the moment of decision making, let's say you need to lease thousand new cars and you can choose, let's call some brands BMW, Audi and Mercedes. There are high end cars you need to leave for your entire big team, your executive team. Now you collect all the facts. They're almost always almost similar. Then the decision trigger the moment at the decision is well I like that guy at the BMW dealer or my CEO tells me he likes BMW at that moment, the actual moment of decision making, System one takes over and eventually one of these shortcuts drives the decision. So that it took time to come to a decision doesn't automatically qualify that as a very rational decision. At the moment you make a decision.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I totally. Or the biggest one with cars is you. You know, rationally that a Honda or a Toyota is a financially smart decision, but that everybody in my neighborhood is driving a BMW Audi. And so. And I wanted, I don't want to be the odd one out and drive a Honda, so I want to keep up with the Joneses and buy a BMW. Even though that's not the most rational decision for me to make, it's the most emotional decision because I want to, I'm programmed to make that decision, but I want to go deeper into the marketing side of it. So if system one runs the brain emotional behavioral system, how do we actually design marketing that triggers it attention?

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah, great question. And indeed now you come to a more systematic approach because for some people it sounds like some magician show, but actually it's hardcore science. And then I like to quote BJ Falk, Brian Jeffrey Falk. He's a Stanford University professor, founder of the behavioral lab at Stanford University, but he was also the coach of the founders of Instagram. One of the two guys was a student of him. At first they built a different app which wasn't really successful. Then BJ started to work with them and well, you could call it a success if you sell it a year later for a billion dollars to back then Facebook. So what BJ Fogg built is the Fog behavioral model. And that explains how behavior occurs. And it shows we need three factors. The first one, if I ask you to do something, first factor is motivation. You wonder how much do I like to do that? The second one is ability. How easy for you is to do it. And then he draws an action line. And then comes the third and very critical component, a prompt. Nowadays the word prompt we always use in connection to AI. But a prompt is something that asks for behavior. This glass of water prompts me to drink from it. That's in BJ's world, even thoughts are prompts. Just a quick sidestep online a form prompts you to fill it in. An ad prompts you to click on it. Your batch app symbol on your phone on an app prompts you to open the app. So there's something that asks for the desired behavior. Now what is interesting, if I prompt you or I ask you to do something and you don't really want to. Your motivation is low. It's also hard to do. You won't do it. But in all other cases you will. For example, if it's hard, but you are super motivated, your favorite band comes to town and you really want tickets, you go to the website, it's frozen all the time because everybody want to buy tickets. You keep on going until you have your tickets. That's right away the biggest mistake people make in marketing. Using this model, we have a motivational bias because motivation for the same thing will come and go during the same thing. Let me say, let me give an example. If I wake you up in the morning and say, daniel, let's go out for a big meal in the sunshine, have some drinks, whatever, you're probably not so motivated to say yes. But maybe after a hard week of work and I ask the same request, you might say yes to that. So it's the same request on the same day, different answer. Now look at the second one. We don't really want to, but it's so easy to do, we also do it. And I always give this example. When I went to university, I had to travel by train. And I'm an old man. So back then, people were shoving a free newspaper almost in your hand. Their goal was read the newspaper. As a student, I have to admit, I was not so motivated to read the news. I rather slept in the train. But every morning it was easier to take the newspaper than to refuse it. They almost shoved it in my hand. So it happened every morning. I was having a newspaper in the train, started reading the news. Not because I wanted so much, but they made it so easy for me. So recent research also shows and confirms that if you focus on ability, it's easier for everybody in every stage of the client journey. And it's the most successful approach to let more people do what you want them to do. So three components we need the winning BJ Fox says B is map, behavior is motivation, ability, and a prompt at the same moment. If you do problem solving, you go backwards. You look, is there a prompt? If nothing asks for the behavior, nothing will occur. No button in the screen, nobody will click on it. Then make things easier for your visitors to do and then boost motivation at the right moment. And that's what we're going to dive into today.

[Daniel Murray]

One thing I asked Baz for before we go into the next topic is I told him that if he comes on this podcast, he has to give something free away to our audience so they can apply what we're talking about today and we like tactical things in this podcast and I know you have something that's free that they could go today and use for themselves. What is something that they could go right now and see if they can start applying something today in their marketing.

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. If every listener goes to online influence.com, they not I wanted to give something special. They not just going to get something just for free downloadable. They get personal attention with a free optimization plan. We look at web page, ad funnel, whatever they want to give us. We analyze it with 35 of the best performing principles that I also wrote in my book Online Influence and we give them the top five low hanging fruit, easiest to upgrade wins plus KPI predictions.

[Customer IO Host]

You're sitting on a gold mine of customer data and it's doing nothing for you. That's not a data problem, that's a tools problem. Customer IO connects your data to every channel you ready Use sms, email, push and app. Then it uses AI to build workflows that used to take weeks. Every message feels like it's written for that customer, not blasted at them. 8,000 plus brands already made the switch. Learn more at customer AO TMN.

[Daniel Murray]

I mean there's a no brainer for people to go use that today. So go use it. I mean any everybody's marketing has something to improve and we're talking about that too. And we just talked about at the beginning of this podcast how the low hanging fruit of a lot of our marketing is not like optimizing conversion. It's not creative. Is the behavioral science part of it and optimizing for the mind. So go check that out. But I want to go back into what we're talking about. Is there some concrete examples that people could start applying immediately? Maybe you could start with an example of designing a winning prompt for the marketers listening.

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah, great. And to add on the optimization plan, previously we did those plans for Disney, Booking.com, coca Cola, Big companies and we'll come to that later. But now because AI can speed things up makes us much more efficient. We are not restricted to Fortune 500 budgets anymore. So please bring them on. Like I said for big companies, but also for seat the car manufacturer. I don't know if that's a very famous car manufacturer in the US but it's huge in Europe. Built a billion dollar company, it's a French company and what they did and now talking about designing a winning prompt, you came to their web page and what they really wanted was that you downloaded the price list because they had quite a good conversion of price list downloads to test drives and from test drives to selling cars. But when you came to their webpage, they prompt you with all kinds of things. Look at every model, find a dealer. Look at our special offers. Design your car yourself. So what we call. There were a lot of competing prompts. And I like to compare system one with a child of seven and what happens in your brain. Imagine you go to a birthday party and you're a little bit late. It's quite a big party. About hundred people go there and you're one of the last guests. You come in, you walk through the door and hundred people right away start talking to you. Well, what would happen? At minimum, you won't understand a word. At worst, you run away back home because they drive you nuts. But online, we do this all the time. We prompt people on a single page with so many different prompts, the people don't know what to do and they run away. As in the birthday metaphor. That's exactly what Seiya did. So with a minimum change and a very simple change, we designed a clean sheet clean page where you had the model of the car they were looking for. On that page was just a single prompt, a button download price list. The conversion before was 0.4%. Now the conversion was 8%. And to go from 0.4 to 8 is not an improvement of 7.6. They had 2000% more leads. This equaled millions of revenue because the conversion from priceless to test drive to selling cars remained almost the same. So what is the tip here that everybody can learn from Seat look at your web pages and see where are you asking for multiple different things. Decide what do you want your visitors to do on this page? Remove all the competing prompts and prompt only one thing. I promise your conversions will go up.

[Daniel Murray]

And I think we're, we're going to put the visuals of this in the show notes so people could see how this happened. But also I know that everybody probably listening wants the results of some sort of boost. I don't know if you're going to get 2000%, but I know a lot of people have on their website now multiple prompts where they have subscribe to this. Click here to see my pricing. I want to. Here's a chat and you're asking someone 15 things when they're getting into a store, when you want to direct, the goal on the website is to direct them to where you want them to ultimately go. And if you have too many prompts, like we're calling them which are things asking them to do stuff. They're going to get, have decision paradox probably and go like me when I'm at a restaurant and think about 80 different choices I have to make or, or run into a store and I. I don't know where to go. People are asking me so many questions. I just want to leave because my brain is overloaded. So. But I know people want these new

[Bas Wouters]

client journeys basically with all these prompts and you don't finish anyone, especially not the one that you want them to do. Indeed. So that's, that's really the tricky part. You offer so many things. People start several behaviors, but they don't though don't do what you want them to do. And that's interesting because if people go to onlineinfluence.com and ask for this free optimization plan, like I said, it's not a PDF, we'll have two to three calls included for them to really help them, we believe you have to show your value first and then people want to do business with you mostly for the rest of their lives because they see the uptake, you can realize. But we help them to say what is the desired behavior on this particular page and then design it with all this behavioral psychology and marketing psychology to let people do exactly that.

[Daniel Murray]

So I want to go into also, do you have any example of increasing ability?

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah, definitely one or two. Let's see how much time we have. First one ability. What's it all about? BJ Fork describes an ability chain. What we want to do online is we want to reduce mental effort. So if you reduce mental effort, you increase conversions. And you just mentioned it. Paradox of choice. And that's one of the principles we use, reduce options. And it might sound similar to competing prompts. Difference is competing prompts can start different behaviors. An option is just something you choose from, like time slots for a webinar, different genes you buy in the web shop. Now what we did here for a web shop, a huge one in China, one of the biggest. And they were selling Tupperware cups. And previously we think as human beings that's the paradox of choice. We want choice, we want options. But our system, one brain cannot handle all these options. So indeed, if we, if people have too many to. If people have too many choices, they don't know what to choose. They choose not to choose. That's what the paradox of choice is. We think we want all these options, but in the end we choose not to choose. So when they removed from these Tupperware Drinking cups, they went down from 25 different colors to five. You cannot, almost cannot imagine the amount of sales. 77 times more sales. This is 7700% increase in sales by just reducing the amount of colors you showed for this cup. So that's the first example I like to give for the listeners is see where you give people more than five options. Reduce it. The ideal amount of options for human beings are three. Can we do one more quick example which I always really love to give and it's also such an easy one to use. It's what we call the Jenga principle and we gave it a name. According to the game Jenga, where you have to remove wooden blocks from the tower without the tower to collapse. We want to do that with sentences. We want to remove words without the sentence to collapse or in other words, say the same thing with lesser words. It cost a human being approximately 100 to 200 milliseconds to read and understand one word. So that means if you can remove 100 words from your landing page, you save a visitor 15 seconds, which is ages online. An example here. It was an example from lottiefiles. They had a perfectly clean, nice designed landing page header, clear message, three short sentences button, call to action. Now when they three sentences, rationally you would say, well, when you like this product, what they offer, you can read three short sentences. When they changed that back to one sentence conversion went up with 43%. So my take to the listener is look at your pages, landing pages, ads, social posts, and see can you say the same thing with lesser words? We also have an AI agent that can do it for you. Even say the same thing with lesser words. Reduce mental effort and increase your conversions.

[Daniel Murray]

It's funny, you, I mean, you finally said that. I mean the decision paradox is real because my wife right now is. I've been asking her for probably like three weeks, like, what do you want for your birthday present? And like she, she has all these choices, but she can't decide because she doesn't want to make the wrong choice. So instead she hasn't given me an idea for two for now, like three weeks and her birthday is going to be in the next couple weeks. And, and I'm. I don't want to get the wrong thing on my side because that's the wrong thing choice. But if she doesn't, she has this decision paradox that she doesn't want to make the wrong decision and now she's not making any decision because she doesn't want to make the wrong decision. But I think I need to do what you said is maybe give her two choices now reduce the choices to two choices and then. Yeah, exactly.

[Bas Wouters]

Yes, exactly. Try it out. I'm curious about the answer. You have a works.

[Daniel Murray]

But I also wanted to go into. I'm very curious of the example about boosting motivation right now. I know you have a case study where just one word was increasing sales over 300%.

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah, that's a very interesting one. It's Myx Makeup Studio. What the original was, they had a product page with a buy button, no sentence. Then tested a small sentence underneath the buy button. And the sentence was like this. 71 beauties have viewed this product today. Conversion went up. Sales went up with 33%. Now it comes. Now we changed one word in that particular sentence. Conversion went up 200%. So going from plus 33 to plus 100, it's a 300% increase. Now. What was that change from 71 beauties that have viewed this product today? It went to 71 beauties have purchased this product today. And this is magic, because that's my next tip for all the listeners. How can you create these powerful sentences? And there are basically three criteria. You have to talk to your audience. So to similar others. What Nyx, it's a makeup web shop. So they said beauties, you want to feel beautiful, of course. So that was a perfect thing. Then what changed and up. What drove the uptake of 300% was the next criteria. Describe what these others did. Describe your desired behavior. Nyx didn't want people to view their product. They want people to purchase their products. So when they change that word that drove the intake because system one thinks, oh, other people like me are doing this behavior, I need to do so as well. So always describe your desired behavior. And third criteria is exact numbers boost trust. They didn't set 70 beauties. They said 71 beauties. 70. It sounds like. Well, you could make that up. System one could think 71. System one things. That's super credible because it's an exact number and it moves forward much quicker.

[Daniel Murray]

Also, what's crazy about. I think the specific example, and I love that specific cell. But it's also crazy that system one is also very. Not in the best way, not in the most logical way, but it's very good at sniffing danger, because that's what it was used for in. Back in the day. So, yeah, danger to them is saying, is people trying to. Is people lying to me? Is people trying to screw me over? And like, if you put a hundred plus they in the. It's not a logical thing to think because they know you're not trying to screw them over but you're just saying a hundred. It's not specific enough to them. So they, they're like this smells fishy. You, you're putting a hundred. You could have rounded up. You could have, you could have been telling a lie here. And then it's like the, the logic for brain won't even kick in to justify it because they already made the decision that that's danger and I'm going to leave.

[Bas Wouters]

Exactly.

[Daniel Murray]

It's just crazy.

[Marketing Millennials Host]

Right?

[Daniel Murray]

Because that's logically that to me 100 wouldn't make a change because, because it's not, it's not the worst thing to put. It's not very dangerous. But I know now that a lot of marketers do that and I've seen it all the time. So my, my emotional brain is going to be like yep, they're lying to me. No, no way. 100 people. It's probably three people that purchase.

[Bas Wouters]

You start filling in even what the actual reality is. And that's, that's often not positive for the other side.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, yeah. So I think that's, that's key is like in your marketing, don't let system one, like don't let system one screw you before you even get to the, the logic to help them sell. And a lot of people put so much logic that system one is going to screw them even though like a hundred people, we have a hundred plus customers, blah blah blah. And it's like in their head with no social proof. Nobody's putting there's no social proof and you don't put on and people are just saying wait, they're lying to me. I'm bouncing. I'm going to find someone who has more examples than them that are behavioral sciencey. But I want to. I also know as you mentioned earlier, I'm 100% sure listeners want these results as well because I know but I know in my, because I love behavioral science. I try it on all my marketing. I try these tips all the time. So if someone wants to start right away and get results quickly, what is the first thing they should do?

[Bas Wouters]

Well, I think the fast easy way now for all your listeners to get the result is request the online influence optimization plan completely free like I said. So they only go to the webpage, fill in the details and we boost their results. More opt ins, more leads, more sales, whatever they like to achieve. So I think that's the best step they can take now and then we start guiding them how to apply marketing psychology for their to boost their results.

[Daniel Murray]

And I know, I know it's, it's crazy because you, I know you and your institute have been doing this for like some huge customers and you've been paying, they paid you a lot of money and you basically and I, I told bas like he needs to nobody wants to go right now and pay right now to to get these results. So could you please do something that could give them results today that you just put in information. So what is this huge value that they will get for free if I went into to to do this today? Because I, I mean I, I'm, I'm a sucker for getting things at a discount or for free. So what, what's something that they could do today to get this for free?

[Bas Wouters]

Yeah. So once they fill in they will get a complete what I call first diagnose. It's like bringing your asset digital asset to the doctor. So we look at it and we come with recommendations. We will have a first call then how do you feel about our first findings? Then based on the feedback we optimize the plan, have a second call with them and we will present a lead map. So where is your money? And conversions where they escape. Then we have a fix list. So your top five fixes based on impact and feasibility. We have a priority roadmap which what we suggest fix this first we give some copy rewrite suggestions on that and UX improvements. So it's a very comprehensive plan what we will give them.

[Daniel Murray]

And I mean we go I'm going back to exactly what we said before I the takeaway from this podcast which I want everybody to get is that you don't have to increase ad spend. Before you do, there's a we gave you three checkboxes that a lot of people usually do which they try to optimize funnel. They try to improve creative which I do suggest you do that too. But start with improving the optimizing the mind. And then you could, once you learn that you could do that in all parts of your funnel. You could do it in your creative, you could do it in your flow, you could do it and but if you don't know the initial I would say that's like the fundamental layer of a house. Like building a house with a foundation is behavioral science. So go check it out. And Baz, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate coming on this podcast and sharing and giving something for free, which I know everybody loves something that they can get results right away with. So thank you for coming on.

[Bas Wouters]

Thank you. Always lovely to be here and look forward to the next time.

[Daniel Murray]

Thank you.

[Marketing Millennials Host]

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.