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“I don’t want to be spammy and give a deadline.” I hear this time and again from potential partners, and.. I totally get that! I don’t want you to be inauthentic or scam your followers either. But, scarcity and urgency in your marketing is crucial.
The KEY here is this: You can do it without being “spammy.” And I can show you how.
In this episode, I’m walking you through the differences between spammy marketing and REAL, intentional, necessary urgency in your online offers (specifically, digital products).
I’m sharing…
- The urgency I use for my own evergreen offers
- Why 50 percent (or more!) of sales happen in the final hour
- How one of our Hirsh Partners made more $$ than ever before.. just by closing the cart!
Tune into this episode for a lesson in psychology, plus a case study from one of our high-profile partners! Then tag @emilyhirsh on social with your takeaways.
Key Points:
[2:52] The difference between spammy marketing + real urgency
[3:33] How does this work with EVERGREEN offers?
[7:53] Case Study: Switching from ‘open all the time!’ to ‘doors are closed.’
[10:32] Scarcity, urgency… and a discount?
[11:33] Is your offer worth it? (i.e. $30 off is not going to motivate anyone)
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Episode Transcripts:
Today we’re going to talk about the importance of scarcity and urgency in your marketing and offers. One thing I hear a lot from people is they say, “I don’t want to be like that scammy marketer, or that spammy marketer who says that the doors are closing, or the price is going up. I just don’t want to be like that. I don’t like that vibe.” I get that, and I’m going to talk about how to not look spammy and scammy with this. But I do want to just say, in marketing, scarcity and urgency is not only super important, it’s crucial with your offers. I want you guys to think about, for a second right now, the last things that you bought that were… not like essentials, because we don’t need scarcity and urgency with our groceries, but… the last thing you bought, maybe a course that convinced you to buy it, and was there ever a time or a feeling where you were like, “I’ve got to buy this right now, because it’s going to disappear”?
That made you actually take action. Or, you had an experience where there was scarcity and urgency, and you bought it when you would have probably waited. Chances are probably yes, because the bottom line with scarcity and urgency is, that’s how the human mind works is, when you feel like you’re going to miss out on something or lose your opportunity to get it, you will take action. Almost everyone does that, because it’s natural for us to be like, “I’ll just get that later. I don’t need it right now, I can go get it in a couple of days” … also have the pain point of like, “I don’t want to spend $100 now, I’ll just.. or $1,000 now. I’ll wait until the middle of next week. That’ll be better. Right?”
But if the urgency is there, and the scarcity is there, you will take action. Now, here is the difference between spammy and scammy marketing versus the good, real scarcity and urgency is that it has to be real. The scarcity and urgency has to be real. Don’t say the doors are closing to your course or that the price is going to go up in two days and then not actually have that happen. That’s where it’s crappy. If it’s real and the doors really do close and the price really does go up, there is nothing spammy and scammy about that. It’s legit. So that means using tools. So if you have an evergreen promotion that’s ongoing, you can’t just change the price every day for the people who viewed it. So for example, I’ll talk about a webinar promotion, because a lot of our clients do that.
They’ll have evergreen webinars, or they’ll do weekly live webinars, where people are joining any time, so they can’t just change the sales page to be a different price, because people are coming into the funnel at all different times and all different days. So this is where it gets overwhelming. But there’s tools, like Deadline Funnel, where you put the timer on the page. It tracks the IP address of the person, and so when they clicked on the page, it triggers. Whatever you set the timer is, so if it’s three days or five days to expire, the door’s close, it will redirect for that person. So it is a real form of scarcity and urgency, and Deadline Funnel does work. It tracks your IP address. So I literally have pages that I can’t go to, because they have Deadline Funnel in them, and it’s blocked me.
So make it real. Don’t have fake urgency. That also means, if you’re selling a course or you’re selling something in this back-end webinar funnel where you are giving someone an opportunity on the webinar to buy and they have three days to save X amount or the doors actually close, then if you have the course on your website, either it needs to be closed to a wait list, if that’s what you’re saying is going to happen in the webinar, or the price needs to be higher. So for example, I have a Facebook ads course. I don’t promote it that much, but I do have it. On my website, the course is $697. In my webinar funnel, and it’s not even live right now, but when I do run it, or if you were to go find it somewhere and go through my webinar funnel, I promote the course for $497. They have three days to take that offer and then it redirects, but on my website, if you just go to “programs,” it’s $697. It’s the real price.
So it’s real that it costs more there, and you have to go into that in the backdoor entry of the webinar to be able to get that deal, and it really is a limited time offer. So that’s how you do scarcity and urgency, because what you don’t want is to say things like, “The doors will never be open for the rest of the year,” and then open it to your whole list. Or, “I will never offer this price again,” and then offer it in three days. Those are the things that people then, they won’t take you seriously. But if you are true with your word and your scarcity and urgency is real, they will take you seriously. So, we work with a really high profile client, and she launches a couple times a year, and they close the doors.
They close the doors on their launch. It closes on whatever day they decide at midnight, and they really do close it. People will email and be like, “Please can you let me in,” and whatever their story is. Probably they go to extremes with stories of whatever happened. They will not let people in. They 100% do not budge, do not let people in. The first time they launched this offer, they had quite a few people that we’re reaching out to try and get in, and they didn’t let one single person in. So the next time they launched, people knew that was the case and that they were serious about it, and they didn’t wait. They didn’t wait to come in. They knew like, when the door’s closed, the doors are closed. That is super effective, because people are like, “Man, I don’t know the next chance I’m going to have to get in, and I need to sign up,” and they’re feeling that.
So that is so important, and that will get people to take action, and that is the reason why sometimes 50% of peoples’ sales happen on the last day that their cart’s closing, right? That’s oftentimes the last day, in the final hours, the final two hours of doors open or the deal being there, is where the most sales happen, because that’s how the human brain works. They procrastinate, they procrastinate, then hurry, hurry, I got to get in, and they will. So when you have a promotion, and especially like webinars or anything where you’re offering something for somebody to buy, if there’s no urgency or scarcity and a reason for them to just take action now and buy it, then they won’t. Your sales will probably be half what they could be, or even less. Seriously, that is how much it matters.
We just managed a launch for an amazing big influencer who had a course that was available to buy any time. It was not her main offer. It was available to buy anytime of the year. It was just available on the site. And they did have a funnel that went into it, and they offered the course through email, but there was no urgency. It was just like, here’s the course, it’s available. I started working with them a year ago, and the sales on it were okay. They weren’t amazing. I would want to see them a lot higher. And it was always like, “Man we’re getting leads..” They would ask me, “We’re getting leads, and how do we get the sales up?” I was like, “Honestly, there’s no urgency. That’s the problem, and until we fix that, the sales aren’t going to go up.”
So what they actually did was… and it took time to get here, but I was the inspiration behind doing this, coming in, working with their team. And this has been years that this has been available. Just like this, like I said, they’re a very successful company, so it wasn’t that they were hurting for sales, but they wanted to improve it. So they actually took the course, they did one more big launch of the course, and then they took it off the market. They’re going to do another launch. Like, they closed the doors, you can’t just go buy it anywhere. We did a launch where we did a live launch of it, and they actually updated the course, and they did a live launch of it. Then the doors were closing, you wouldn’t be able to buy it anymore.
During that live launch, they made more during only just the live launch, like the one-week live launch… They made more, significantly more than they had made on any of the sales to date, of the whole program, because they had scarcity and urgency. They told people, “You better buy now, because the doors are closing and you won’t get access.” Here’s the other thing. The price was like, almost double of what it was before, because they updated the course, and then people still bought, like that many people. We doubled, we actually maybe tripled our goal for the launch, because we didn’t know what to expect. We had never launched it before, so we were very conservative with what was actually possible, and we had just out of the water crazy success because of, the scarcity and the urgency piece was a huge, huge piece of that.
For the first time with that course, people had a reason they needed to buy now and not later. So that is why it is so, so important and why I want you to reflect on what you do when you buy. Urgency motivates people. Otherwise, they’ll procrastinate. The final thing I want to say, besides put scarcity and urgency in every offer that you put out there or it will go so slowly, your sales… You don’t have to have a money discount. Sometimes people really don’t like that. Sometimes that gets complicated, and that’s totally fine. I have a lot of clients where just the scarcity and urgency is just that the product won’t be available, it won’t be available anymore. So it’s not a front-facing thing on your website. It’s where they go through a webinar, they’re offered to buy the course or the product. They have three days to buy it.
This is mostly for digital products. If you’re eCommerce and you’re listening, the urgency is best to be pricing, or maybe they get a bonus thing in there, a bonus product, buy one get one free. I don’t know, any of those for eCommerce work better. But for courses, actually closing the door… courses, mastermind, coaching spots, all those things… actually closing enrollment and closing the doors works just fine as scarcity and urgency that you don’t have to do pricing discounts. The actual final thing I want to say, because I just thought of one more thing is, make the scarcity and urgency actually worth[while] scarcity and urgency. The other mistake I see people make, because I know this, because I just did a strategy call with a new client where we had to change her strategy.
When I asked her, “What is the offer, the urgency on the webinars..” she’s like, “They get $30 off.” And I was like, “I wouldn’t care about $30 off.” That does not motivate me, to save $30 to buy the course. I’d rather just maybe save my money right now and then spend the extra $30 in a couple weeks. Make it worth their time, not only worth their time, but make it such an attractive offer that they need to act on, that it matters. Like doors are closing, save $1,000, save $500. I mean, mine is save $200, which is not even that amazing, but I can’t… I’m going to raise, I’m going to re-do my course and raise the price of it, and then it’s going to be double that, but make it worth it so someone’s like, “I gotta act right now. I gotta act now.”
Then when you’re running the retargeted ads, make sure to emphasize the scarcity and urgency. Don’t just put up a sales ad. But if there’s, “Only a few hours left to buy!” or “Act now to save your $500!” whatever it is, put that in the ad copy, because that’s what’s going to get people to click to go take action. So make sure the messaging is there. If you need help with implementing scarcity and urgency in your offer, or you need marketing help from one of the best marketing agencies out there, go to HelpMyStrategy.com and apply to work with Team Hirsh.