[00:00:00] Hey friends, let's chat today about scarcity and urgency. So hopefully you are either working toward or you already have what I would call an evergreen funnel for selling your products through email. Ideally you have a product lead magnet, somebody. request that lead magnet. If they don't immediately buy your product or let's say they only buy your tripwire, then you would go through a series of nurture emails with them and then offer them the product again.
And then if they don't buy after that, and quite frankly, even if they do buy, you put them in your newsletter list. So that's your evergreen funnel. The other thing I recommend, in addition to that, in order to keep selling to your newsletter list, I recommend doing a quarterly campaign to that list.[00:01:00]
Reminding them that you've got this awesome product and taking them through the cycle. Now, of course, you wouldn't do this For the people who have already purchased from you, you're going to keep sending them that weekly newsletter. But this one period of time, every quarter, , for the people who haven't purchased yet, you're going to take them through a campaign.
And so here's the thing. It doesn't matter what kind of campaign you do. If you're just doing, let's say like, it's a Black Friday thing, and you've got a discount, or you want to do, it's our, you know, it's my, company anniversary or it's spring or it's back to school or it's you know, whatever the case may be.
Doesn't matter what kind of campaign you're running. The way to optimize that campaign is by creating a sense of scarcity and or urgency. And that's gonna really entice people, to make that purchase right away. So, a lot of [00:02:00] times people use scarcity and urgency kind of interchangeably, although quite frankly they're really different. Scarcity means there's not very many of them.
Urgency means It's whatever kind of deal I'm giving you is going to be going away soon. But both of these really work and it doesn't matter if you call something scarcity or urgency as long as you actually do it. And the reason it works so well is because of this psychological technique called loss aversion.
Most people know it as FOMO. People are just scared of what they're missing out on if they don't act. And so this is an opportunity to take advantage of that. So what I want to share with you today are some examples of what you might use as part of your scarcity and or urgency campaign. The first one is.
is probably the one that you're most familiar with, and that is just a limited time [00:03:00] sale. So you can say you know, for the next three days or seven days or five days or whatever you want to say these things are available for 10 off or 10 percent off. That's probably the most popular one. The thing is that what makes it great is that it encourages people to buy in a very short window and those people who are on the fence might be more likely to make that purchase with the sale.
The other thing you can do is something that's kind of like a purchase. But it's a, you could do buy one, get one. So you know, usually we have I'm thinking about, for example, this happens all the time to me as I'm purchasing homeschool curriculum. So they'll say we have this unit study on George Washington and then we have this unit study on Abraham Lincoln.
And for the next five days or 24 hours is usually what it is. If you buy George Washington, then you'll get Abraham [00:04:00] Lincoln for free. So it's kind of that buy one, get one. And that works really well if you have products multiple products that let's say work with the same audience. The other thing that's really popular with higher ticket items, but there's no reason why it can't work for you is to offer a limited time .
bonus. So for example you might have a, I'm just, I'm thinking off the cuff here, friends. You might be selling a course. Maybe you've just got, you know, like a three module course where you're teaching people how to raise chickens. But if you, if they buy in a certain amount of time, then you're going to throw in an extra.
Booklet about the best kind of feed for baby chickens, or you're going to throw in an extra video about you know, the best equipment to purchase, something like that. So they wouldn't get [00:05:00] that bonus unless they purchased in that limited amount of time. And the thing to be really careful about here is that you You don't want the bonus to be something that people actually need in order to be successful.
You want to make sure that that's always what you're giving away, but the bonus is just that. It's bonus material to you know, that's related to the topic that helps them to to, to dive a little bit deeper. Most of those are urgency. The thing you can do for scarcity doesn't usually work if what you're offering is digital products because, you know, there's an unlimited supply of digital products.
But what you can do is kind of combine scarcity and urgency and say For example, we're offering a 25 percent discount to the first 25 people who purchase. So there's only a limited number of things that are getting [00:06:00] the discount. So , there's urgency involved, but you're using a scarcity tactic in order to get it.
So you better hurry fast. You have to be one of the, you know, first 25. So you wouldn't say. For, you wouldn't add a date to that. You wouldn't say for the next 10 days, the first 25 people, you would just say. the first 25 people. There's some some of the apps out there. I don't know about Sendow, which is the one that I use for digital products, but I know places like Teachable, for example, they let you set that up so you can say the first 25 people get 25%.
And then what's great is when people look at it, they can see, Oh my God, there's only three left, which I think is pretty cool. The other type of. of urgency slash scarcity factors is more of a scarcity factor is making things available only at certain times of the year. So let's say you're doing a list I'm [00:07:00] thinking like a booklet of Nate, you know, journal for kids about nature walks and that sort of thing.
You can say this is only available for the next five weeks for you to enjoy over the summer. And it won't be available again until next summer. That's really a way to stimulate that, that FOMO. And if you think about it, the world's best example of that is pumpkin spice latte, right? If you want one of those, like you are literally, there's, there's memes about it everywhere, right?
You're waiting for that time for them to come out. It's signals fall. It is, it used to be school starting signal fall, no longer. It is a PSL that signals the start of fall. So you can use that sort of technique. Another way that you can use only available certain times in a kind of a different way is.
By making special invitations for people. [00:08:00] So you have to decide what those invitations are. Are they the people who have been on your newsletter list for over a year? Or the people who visit your page most frequently? It depends on what kind of information you can actually track with your email marketing tool.
For me, for example, like I can see people who've been to the website more than five times in the last 30 days or the last 90 days or whatever. So I might send those people a special invitation and say we're, you know, I have a sale coming up for the for the general public in 24 hours and we're going to be offering, you know, 10 percent off, . But, you know, for the next 24 hours, because you are a loyal viewer of the website, I'm going to offer you 15 percent off after that, you know, it's, it's gone. So it's kind of It's, it is that only available by invitation. You are going to need to offer them something a little bit extra, [00:09:00] but you're making them feel special and you're putting a timeframe on it.
The, another option that is a lit A little bit like scarcity slash urgency is that if you're working on a product and you've got to make sure that you're actually working on it and you're actually going to put it out in a timely manner, but what you might do is have a, like a virtual waiting room.
So people can sign up to find out when it goes live and maybe the people who are who sign up for that, get, you know, an extra 10 percent off, sign up, you know, for our virtual waiting room. We have this amazing product coming for the people who sign up, we'll send you a 10 percent off coupon. And then all the people who told you they were ready to buy with their, with our coupon is the day it goes live.
You send all those people, you know, this, Email saying, okay, now's the time, you know, you have your coupon expires in 24 hours or something like [00:10:00] that. And then I did want to touch on I know not everybody here has digital products. So other ideas, I use can certainly do these for, for non digital products, but other two other ideas you might consider for non digital things is free shipping.
So you're, you know, it's, it's. essentially cost your eating, but it's basically the same thing as offering 10 percent off or 5 percent off or whatever, depends on the price of your product. And then especially if you have a book, what you might do is for people who purchase the book through Amazon or, you know, or Kindle, you offer them some sort of digital something, something to go along with it.
So maybe you've got, you know, questions after each chapter in the book, you can, if they purchase the Amazon book or the Kindle book, then you'll throw in, , a digital [00:11:00] version of that workbook for them for free. So just a few ideas. The other thing that I saw that I thought was really great, and I know not everybody can do this with their email system, you can do this with Drip, which is why I'm mentioning it, that's my favorite email tool on planet Earth, and that is you can offer a discount based on somebody coming to your site repeatedly. And I, I love this idea. I think I might do it, but what you can do is, you know, obviously the first time they come to your site, they sign up for your lead magnet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's say they don't purchase it.
But then the second time they come to your site, Drip will let you know. If you've got their email address, Drip will tell you. And so I can. Basically create a workflow that says, show me all the, or a segment, I guess, show me all the people who have come to one of these pages [00:12:00] that, where I promote my product for a second time, or, you know, two or more times who have come two or more times in the last seven days, and they haven't purchased the product yet.
And so then I get those people who. We're looking, , again, the Georgia state parks product is what I have. So let's say they've been looking at all these Georgia state parks posts. They didn't buy the travel journal and they come back a couple of days later and they're still looking at Georgia state travel part, or I'm sorry, Georgia state park posts.
Well, I want to be like, Hey, hello, buy the product. And so what I can do at that point is automate an email that goes out and say, you know, we noticed you're still looking at., evaluating Georgia State Parks if you purchase the journal in the next 24 hours, you know, you can use this 10 percent off coupon.
And then what I would do is have that, that link that they're using just be a timed link. [00:13:00] So if it's, if it has, if the link hasn't expired, so I can say like this link lasts for 24 hours. If it hasn't expired, then that's, they get that. If it. Does expire, then it just takes him to a page that says , your, your discount has expired, but you can, you know, it's still available for purchase.
That sort of thing. So that's a little bit advanced and it does require a tool like Drip or Klaviyo or ONTRAPORT or something like that where you can actually manage first party cookies. But if you've got that, I think it's really, really worth. doing because people are showing you that they're very into your content specifically around that product.
Okay, folks, that's some ideas for scarcity and urgency. I hope that you can incorporate them into your quarterly plan for your product products. I think they'll go a long way in helping you increase your sales.
